Internet is how Tiko is visible today. But the drought situation in Zambia creates a big issue for the national power grid, which is relying most on hydro power. No water in the rivers and lakes leads to less power. The local power schedules have been changed over and over, but are at up to 24 h outage now. We aim to make use of the solar potential in Zambia and install solar panels + additional batteries, so that Tiko stays online and can keep creating teaching material for our courses.
Tiko has just recently obtained and installed a satellite internet connection. This fulfils different purposes: contacting our friends and working with them online, talking about what Tiko does and attract new volunteers and tourists, who pay for good internet, providing simple teaching material - all this needs power to run the internet and the IT hardware. The drought has made the power grid so unreliable, that even the existing batteries cannot be charged enough anymore from the grid.
Solar energy is cheap and the hardware for these installations has actually become much cheaper over the recent years, including batteries. Tiko has a lot of roof area and Zambia has a lot of solar potential. With your help we would like to make vital parts of the IT infrastructure more autarch from the national gird and keep Tiko online and running.
Our "steps out of poverty" program needs Tiko as a hub for innovation and a learning centre. We create our own teaching material and also train our crew in basic computer skills, so they can run more projects like the "steps program", create content for donation projects, run the lodge, provide online material for marketing and social media + so you can take part and see live, what is happening at Tiko. Having the solar energy kit for the basic IT hardware, will make us more independent.
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