How are communal ownership and renewable energy combined to improve access to water?
A community in Locuto, Peru seems to have found the recipe for success.
The province of Locuto is located in the heart of Peru’s dry forest region, an area of Peru that sees precipitation only during a brief rainy period. Agriculture is possible in the area during the few rainy month, but not the rest of the year, limiting access to water and income for the 5,000 people who call the Comunidad San Juan Aposto de Locuto home. Extractive industries, desertification, and exotic plantations are wreaking havoc on the community’s already limited access to water and ability to maintain their ways of life.
Asociación Ecologista Trópico Seco is a volunteer organization that works to conserve and protect the rare and increasingly endangered dry tropical ecosystems of northern Peru by replanting native trees and shrubs, and by hosting educational activities for local communities.
With $5,000 from Global Greengrants Fund, Asociación Ecologista Trópico Seco seeks to increase access to potable water and renewable energy for the people of Comunidad San Juan Aposto de Locuto by conducting research on the viability of using solar and wind energy to collect and purify water.
The project will strengthen an existing community movement toward renewable energy to generate power for productive, educational, and sustainable uses.
Asociación Ecologista Trópico Seco has already conducted pilot research on subterranean water sources in the area and discovered that while available, the water is not potable. The belief is that a wind and solar powered system would enable the community to extract, refine, and transport the water for local use.
A focus of this project is promoting the decentralization of power, and the group is advocating for communal ownership of the project and its outcomes. Asociación Ecologista Trópico Seco will implement an educational campaign focused on the use of renewable energy and its value to the community. The focus on communal ownership and educating the community is hugely important, as engaging the community is a key aspect of successful projects.
There are also plans to install a meteorological station to monitor solar and wind strength in Locuto, which will allow for the collection of meteorological data and continued analysis of the benefits for the region.
What makes it likely that this project will increase access to water for the local community is the fact that the group has a clear vision of the projects’ end goals, and have laid out a clear plan to get there, including research and analysis. We look forward to reporting back on the final results.
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Photo: Pedro Szekely / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0