Engineer Rekik Bekele lights up rural households in Ethiopia with her solar systems. An entrepreneur who empowers women, she tells us what ‘energy equality’ looks like to her.
“When I sell a single solar lamp I think it’s one less woman being at risk of what happened to Igan.” My banana has gone brown, I’m so engrossed in Rekik’s motivations to be a solar engineer that i forget to eat it. The fruit floats between us, unbitten, like a toy microphone while she continues her story. Rekik has never met Igan, the woman she’s talking about. She heard about her at a focus group early in her career, when she asked a village elder how solar power could help his rural community. He spoke of the ‘steel-roofed house’ which Igan had built thirty years ago, after her grass-thatched home had burned down.
Thankfully she wasn’t hurt in the fire, having been out looking for a missing goat at the time. But what stains Igan’s story onto the collective consciousness of her community, is that her eight-year-old daughter had been asleep inside during the blaze. “Having lost her child, Igan could change the fabric of her roof, but not the kerosene lamp which caused the fire”, Rekik explains. It’s this tale of a mother without choices which drives Rekik to bring solar energy to rural areas of Ethiopia today. “Kerosene can’t switch a radio on or charge a phone.”
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