My experience during COVID-19

I am Caroline Mwebaza, Energy Poverty Consultant for Solar Health Uganda. I raise public awareness about energy poverty concerns, educate people about benefits of clean lighting, conduct solar energy needs assessment, distribute solar lights to vulnerable people in the rural off-grid communities in Uganda, follow up and evaluate solar energy impacts among the program beneficiaries, and build the capacity of women solar entrepreneurs.

I also supervise the Safe Birth and Healthy Homes project. It was started in order to reduce maternal and child mortality rates in Uganda, through public health education, solar electrifying health clinics to increase access to electricity and improve health care quality; providing solar lights to new mothers to incentivize clinic-based delivery and reducing health and environmental risks at home.

When the Government of Uganda instituted the COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020, the lives of vulnerable people drastically changed for the worse! Many of our program beneficiaries lost their jobs, they became very poor, they had limited access to food, they could not easily access health services due to restricted movement, the children had been told to stay at home but could not study at night as they lacked light and their parents could not afford to finance household lighting. Some girls ended up becoming pregnant…