Andrew Takyi-Appiah, the CEO and co-founder of Zeepay, is hopeful that Ghanaians can address the issue of sporadic power outages, or Dumsor, on their own, without the assistance of politicians.
He contends that numerous neighbourhoods include individual homeowners who have underutilised power generators, and that these redundant capacities can be used to address Dumsor on a community level.
“The generator sets can be connected to a community-level grid so that, in the event of a blackout, all of the extra capacity could feed the mini grid to benefit the lower-class homes, which do not have generators,” he explained. For example, if a community has a thousand power generators owned by its residents.
According to Andrew Takyi-Appiah, such a system may also be designed with a community-based strategy in mind, allowing the community to benefit from the money raised and use it to fund community development initiatives.
Speaking at the just concluded 3i Africa Summit’s Mobile Technology for Development (MT4D) session, Andrew Takyi-Appiah urged Ghanaians to overcome their concerns and reach their full potential in addressing issues at the local level.
“I believe that we are afraid to change as a people, and that is what is happening to us… We have the infrastructure and the mentality, so let’s simply evolve and maybe that will take care of the issue,” he said.
He claimed that from a policy perspective, Rwanda had a mini-grid approach that flowed into the national system to guarantee electricity availability around-the-clock, and Ghana could take a cue from that as a means of handling Dumsor.
In order to deal with Dumsor at their level, Andrew Takyi-Appiah emphasized that collaboration between chiefs, community members, and associations is crucial rather than focusing on politicians.
We can solve Dumsor as a people without politicians – Zeepay CEO @puretvgh4045 (youtube.com)
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