Solar energy could power all health facilities in poorer countries and save lives, experts say
All healthcare facilities in poorer countries could be electrified using solar energy within five years for less than $5 billion, ending the risk to life from power outages, experts will argue at Cop28 this month.
“I would like the international community to commit to a deadline and funding to electrify all healthcare facilities,” said Salvatore Vinci, sustainable energy advisor at the World Health Organization and member of its Cop28 delegation. “We now have solutions that were not available ten years ago – there is no reason why babies today should have to die because there is no electricity to power their incubators.
“It’s low-hanging fruit. Nothing will stop us,” he said.
About 1 billion people around the world do not have access to a healthcare facility with a stable electricity connection, including 433 million people in low-income countries who rely on facilities without electricity, the WHO report said. Energizing Health: Accelerating access to electricity in healthcare institutions report, which was published in January and co-authored by Vinci.
Electricity is the lifeblood of a functioning healthcare facility, not only powering equipment such as ventilators and heart monitors, but also providing basic amenities such as lighting. Without these basic services, even routine conditions can exist be fatal or lead to complications. Healthcare institutions in countries that are vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather conditions will often experience outages due to storms and floods.
“We don’t know how many people die every year due to power outages. “Nobody puts ‘power failure’ as the cause of death on a death certificate,” said Hippolite Amadi, a professor of bioengineering at Imperial College London. “Currently, patients in low- and middle-income countries are dying due to power outages and poor lighting. They die because their life support machines are turned off, or because they are given the wrong medicine by staff who cannot see what they are doing, or because the surgeon working in the dark made a mistake.”
While lack of relief puts maternal and surgical patients at the greatest immediate risk, an unreliable energy source makes long-term treatments, such as kidney dialysis, untenable. As the burden of chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs) increases in the global south, pressure on poorly electrified facilities will increase.
In the Central African Republic – the African country whose citizens are most likely to do this premature death of an NCD – more than 60% of healthcare institutions indicate that they do not have access to electricity.
“The best surgeon in the world can’t do a good job if he can’t see what he’s doing,” said Emmanuel Makasa, an orthopedic surgeon in Zambia, who sometimes had to work with a flashlight or the light of his cell phone. “You would never ask a tailor to work in the dark, why would you expect that from a doctor?”
In Zambia, 60% of the rural population do not have access to a healthcare facility with electricity, according to the government, and even in large hospitals connected to the national grid, electricity supply is erratic, Makasa said.
“Sometimes the lights in the operating room go out without warning, and that means ventilators and life support machines go out too,” he said. He recently purchased a surgical headlamp produced by an international organization, Lifebox. “It means that we go into the operation with fewer worries. There is nothing worse than losing a patient or having a poor surgical outcome due to a power outage.
“In Africa we are always looking for innovations. We wonder how we live in a land of sunlight, a potential source of energy, and we still have these problems,” Makasa said. “We live in a land of plenty, but we are hungry.”
Amadi was already working on the electrification of maternal care centers in the Nigerian state of Niger in 2009. In October, his solar-powered ventilator became a newborn ventilator won a prestigious Nigerian award and received praise from the President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, for “keeping Nigerian children alive”.
“Before we implemented the solar energy system, the mortality rate in (one of our hospitals) was between 35 and 45 per 1,000 deliveries (of babies),” said Mohammed Gana of Niger’s Ministry of Health, a former colleague of Amadi. “Now we fluctuate between 10 and 15.”
Niger State’s Ministry of Health aims to electrify all its healthcare facilities using solar energy within a year. “Over the past decade, the cost of photovoltaic modules has fallen by 90%, and the cost of batteries has fallen by an average of 60%,” Vinci said. “We can deploy a cost-effective and reliable solar energy system at a location within a few days. We don’t have to wait any longer.”