Solar Jobs & Energy - Village Minigrids in Lesotho

Hello again everyone!

I am very pleased to be sending this update, as Lesotho transitions out of summer and at the same time we are starting to welcome our "summer interns" from the northern hemisphere.

It's been a very exciting past few months - you've all been following along with us as we are bringing Ha Makebe's pilot minigrid online, and the team has been putting the final whistles and bells on the system as we await final authorization to move the generation infrastructure into place. (You'll see in the attached photos the team at Ha Makebe prepping the PV site and at headquarters testing the electronics for automated backup power and online error reporting.)

At the same time this year we are spinning up an extensive fellowship and internship program - between 5-10 individuals - led by our new Operations Manager Tamer (some of you may remember him from previous reports - he spent more than a year in Lesotho as our Project Manager a few years back). The fellowship program is welcoming international students from three different countries to Lesotho during 2018 to work on projects as varied as measuring development impacts of minigrid installation, outreach to career development programs for women, engineering design, and electrical system modeling, with individuals at every stage of education from undergraduate level to post-PhD. The internship program recruits domestic engineering students for 6-month attachments - often but not always as part of their degree program - to focus on projects like design and deployment of smart meters for studying electricity usage as well as giving interns insights into careers in the energy sector.

In the background we are making steady progress toward permitting and contracting for our larger on-grid and off-grid projects, kicking off a Feasibility study for Minigrid Development in Lesotho in early May with support from the EU's ElectriFI program! I am looking forward to sharing more on that in the next update.

As always I would like to reiterate our gratitude to all of you for your ongoing interest, and in many cases financial support. We couldn't do what we do without so many cheerleaders!

Until next time,

-Matt