Note well – When you meet with officials interested in hydropower development in their district, you might go directly from a formal meeting to the field! On Monday morning (Aug 13) we met with some Gicumbi District representatives at the office in Byumba, including the Executive Secretary and an EWSA official. After discussing the idea of training locals to develop their own small systems, and talking a bit over how the UC-Davis/NUR-Butare/Gicumbi relationship might look in the future, they decided that we should see some potential sites immediately — so we all piled into a Land Rover and made our way to two sites.
We performed basic head/flow surveys of both sites (Rusumo/Gisiza and Kajero), and met some of the sector officials interested in potentially connecting to power from these sites. Both had significant head for being smaller sites, and are near enough to clusters of homes or town centers for our purposes!
Rusumo/Gisiza: A modest amount of measurable head over several chutes before it falls off a massive cliff into the valley.
Nearby:
- Schools in a nearby sector
- Homes
- Market and homes in valley are close in a different sector.
Kajero: This site had some existing civil works from a previous attempt at hydropower that ended in 1994, and has some beautiful pools on the way up to the top of the series of waterfalls. Small cluster of homes is pretty close to the bottom of the falls.
See the civil works to the right
Kyle & Josh, UC Davis
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