MITI, Democratic Republic of Congo, April 20 — Sister Alphonsine Ciza spends most of her day in rubber boots, with a white veil under a builder’s hat, manning the micro hydroelectric power station she built to deal with the daily power outages in her town of Miti to overcome in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
She works around the clock with a team of nuns and engineers, lubricating machines and checking the dials of a generator fed from a nearby reservoir that lights a monastery, a church, two schools and a clinic for free.
Without the system, residents would only have electricity for a few hours two to three days a week.
“We sisters…can’t function like that because we have to do a lot of services,” says Ciza, 55, who wears a portable voltage meter around her neck in the city of 300,000 near the border with Rwanda.
Power outages are a daily disruption in Congo, a vast Central African country of around 90 million people that gets most of its electricity from a run-down and poorly managed hydroelectric power system.
The government has been working with foreign partners to boost the capacity of the mineral-rich nation’s struggling power grid. Critics say the new projects are too focused on powering mines and exporting electricity to neighboring countries.
Congolese nun and electrical engineer Alfonsine Ciza attends to the general circuit breaker at her micro hydroelectric power station that powers a monastery, schools and a health center in Miti near Bukavu South Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo April 12, 2022. REUTERS/Djaffar Sabiti
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According to the World Bank, despite millions in donations, only about 20% of the population have access to electricity.
Tired of relying on candlelight and expensive fuel-powered generators, Ciza began raising money to build the hydroelectric power plant in 2015.
She picked up skills as a young nun and fixed electrical faults in the convent, which convinced the superiors to send her to study mechanical engineering.
It took the Monastery of Ciza three years to raise the required $297,000 and build the plant, which generates between 0.05 and 0.1 MW.
Thanks to Ciza’s efforts, students at Miti’s Maendeleo Secondary School can now learn computer skills using screens instead of books.
“Previously, the electricity often only came on at night when the children were no longer at school,” says headmistress Mweze Nsimire Gilberte.
“Having my own turbine was a great relief.”
Reporting by Djaffar Al Katanty; writing by Sofia Christensen; Edited by Hereward Holland and Frank Jack Daniel