blueEnergy International Board Comes to Nicaragua

blueEnergy board and friends in Granada

By Bruce Noda - Eager to see the efforts of blueEnergy Nicaragua, the bE International Board scheduled their first board meeting of 2012 in Granada followed by an onsite visit to blueEnergy’s operations headquartered in Bluefields on the Caribbean Coast. Executive Director Mathias Craig presented an annual report on revenue, expenses, personnel, projects and social impact to the Board. This presentation was followed up with further discussions on fundraising activities as well as a presentation on “The Age of Reason” by Mathias and board member Colette Grinevald. As blueEnergy enters it’s seventh year, blueEnergy is in the maturation phase where we can start to distinguish the possible from the impossible and to appreciate true cost and opportunity cost. The age of reason is about understanding how things really are today, envisioning a better future and determining what it will realistically take to get there.

After the Board meeting, blueEnergy Nicaragua hosted a conference of its partners, including other NGOs, representatives from both the American and French embassies, and Nicaraguan government officials. After a presentation on blueEnergy’s various projects and areas of impact, conference guests were encouraged to discuss their particular experiences working with blueEnergy and invited to give their impressions of the work being done by blueEnergy. It was a highlight of my visit to hear these guests provide such a positive view of the work and impact of bE staff and volunteers in the communities we serve. This was an affirmation of the benefit of blueEnergy’s work by peers and oversight organizations that recognize the needs of our beneficiaries.

blueEnergy board and friends enjoying the three hour
panga journey from Kahka Creek back to Bluefields!

Following the board meeting in Granada, most of the board members along with long-time supporters from France and the US traveled to Bluefields to begin a tour of blueEnergy’s operations on the Caribbean Coast. We had the opportunity to meet with staff members of the water and energy team to learn more about their specific projects as well as met with members of Bluefields’ mayor’s office and government officials of GTRK, the Rama-Kriol Territorial Government. We also had the opportunity to travel to Pearl Lagoon, Kahkabila, Wawashang, and Kahka Creek to see several projects. We also met with blueEnergy staff, volunteers, interns and a group visiting from MIT who were working in conjunction with blueEnergy on several community projects in Bluefields.

This was my second trip to Bluefields. Although I had already visited the area in September of 2009, I continue to be impressed by the work and dedication of our staff. It was great to see that we are committed to employing more local Nicaraguans and that we are able to maintain a strong core of international volunteers and interns. Our management team is strong and effective and continues to reach out to the communities and other organizations with which we share a common goal and vision.

Bruce with the tree he planted in Kahka Creek.

On a personal note, my best memory of the trip was in Kahka Creek. We had an opportunity to help with a reforestation project and I was impressed by the community leader’s devotion and love of the land. He entertained us with songs from his heart of his devotion to the protection of the land and his country of Nicaragua.

Overall, my time in Nicaragua was well spent. I am proud to be part of the diverse blueEnergy team “working for a more equitable, sustainable world.”

Bruce Noda is Chairman of the blueEnergy International Board.

Studies of Renewable Energy in Rural Communities

If you aren't already convinced of the role renewable energy can play in the development of rural communities, check out these studies posted by the Alliance for Rural Education: http://www.ruralelec.org/38.0.html#c1936 

Evolutions in our impact model (Part 1 of 4)

blueEnergy was born out a commitment to a place, the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. This commitment to place implied the need for a flexible model that could adapt to the context. This is a fundamentally different approach than many organizations take where they develop a product or service and then go find the right “market” to implement it in.

By Mathias Craig - So what is the context of this place?  Communities in this region are extremely isolated and poor, but more significantly than that, they tend to lack most basic services like electricity, roads, clean water, communication, financing, etc.  These are the very services that entrepreneurs rely on and leverage to launch their ventures in market based economies and even poor, “edge of the market” or Bottom of the Pyramid communities.  But here, without these services, entrepreneurialism is stifled.  So the question is, how do you get things started in a place like this so that people can help themselves?

To make a long story short, blueEnergy started off as a wind power organization, building and installing energy systems on the Caribbean Coast.  To be sure, we did a lot of training and discussing with communities, but our focus was on the technology.  As our understanding of the context of this place deepened, it became clear that to have a real impact, we would need to broaden into energy services, meaning that in addition to energy production, we needed to get into energy management and end-use of the energy.  Because of the context you couldn’t make the assumption that energy in = productive use out because so many links of the chain are missing.

After a couple more years, we looked around and saw that we had invested so much in relationships, infrastructure and processes in order to reach out to the most remote, marginalized communities.  It didn’t make sense to make this investment and to be positioned as the “last 40 miles” (a la “last mile) service provider to these communities and limit ourselves to just energy.  Better to leverage our up-front investment to create impact in the same communities in other areas such as clean water.  In the end, system change requires a combination of services, not just one alone.

We had evolved into a holistic community development organization, using renewable energy and clean water, along with other services, as a way to stimulate local entrepreneurship.

But employing a holistic model in extremely harsh conditions has implications: for one, your work moves slowly.  Everything is based on relationships and they don’t scale well.  Also, the culture is not used to rapid change, so that limits how fast you can move forward.  Finally, moving forward in these conditions, even slowly, is very resource intensive.

Our impact was growing, but mostly in the depth dimension.  We shunned “community hopping” and focused on creating fundamental, deep change in a modest sized group of people (about 3,000 in 2010).  But it’s hard to measure depth of impact, while it’s easy to measure number of beneficiaries, so our impact is sometimes harder to see.  It’s easy to distribute a container full of solar lights and claim you have “impacted” 10,000 people; it’s a lot harder to work with people to understand their culture, develop joint plans, build infrastructure and work to link this infrastructure to life-changing activities.  The latter approach, the one used by blueEnergy on Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua, produces a good resource / ”depth impact” ratio but a bad resource / “number of people impacted” ratio, which is the one most understood by people.

The need for growth that could easily be understood by people (ie. number of beneficiaries) could be felt everywhere, from the staff to the co-founders to the funders to the general public.  With our commitment to our “depth impact” model on the Caribbean Coast and the fact that the context of this place constrained our “number of beneficiaries” growth to be organic, we asked ourselves how we could scale our impact in other ways.

In our most recent evolution, in 2010, we recognized that we were having impacts outside of the most marginalized communities and that we had a role to play on larger stages where we could grow our impact very cost effectively, primarily through two mechanisms – imitation and movement building.

To be continued in Part 2.

Strategic planning and strengthening partnerships

By Mathias Craig -- After the conclusion of blueEnergy's successful 2nd annual Taste of Nicaragua Gala, the blueEnergy International executive team headed off on a 3-day strategic retreat. The objective was to formally kick off a 2+ month period of working to set blueEnergy's direction for the next 3 years. Teams in Nicaragua, France and the US had met prior to the retreat to give input into the global planning process. Subsequently, the national teams will take the output of the international strategy retreat and continue working to develop national strategies that are in alignment over the next 1-2 months. In this way, it is structured as a bottom-up, top-down process that both includes a broad base of voices and is structured consistently. We were very fortunate to have Jeremy Allan participate as the retreat facilitator. Jerry, as he is known around here, worked with blueEnergy for 6 months in 2009 as has continued on a valued advisor from his home in London. The results of the strategic planning process will be available publicly in December.

After the retreat, the international executive team was fortunate to be invited by founder Joseph Marino to visit DC Power Systems, the US' leading value-added distributor of renewable energy products. DC Power Systems has a leading renewable energy training program and Joseph is passionate about helping nonprofit renewable energy organizations strengthen their capacities. He also shares a passion for Nicaragua and has worked on several solar installations for clinics.

left to right: Mathias Craig, Guillaume Craig, Joseph Marino, Anne-Cecile Mailfert, Jeremy Allan, Lâl Marandin