Solar-grids and safari: Moving IMPACT partners’ first meeting in Kenya

The international team from the new Ayrton-funded ‘Moving IMPACT’ project has met for the first time in Nairobi.

Moving IMPACT is a £3.6million consortium exploring how solar mini-grids integrated with electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure can meet agricultural and community energy needs in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The project is led by Imperial College London in collaboration with partners from across university, industry, policy, and public sectors. These include the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), the University of Energy and Natural Resources of Ghana, the University of Rwanda, the Kigali Centre for Collaborative Research in Rwanda, the University of Strathmore in Kenya and the University of Leeds. It also involves three of Imperial’s clean-tech startups.

A “momentous occasion”

From initial project proposal until just last week, all our communications have been online, so this week-long event, hosted by Strathmore University in Nairobi, was a monumental occasion – the first opportunity for the partners to physically meet to discuss the project and form working relationships.

The meeting started with a day of ice-breaking activities and brainstorming the project identity and conversation topics for the week.

The second day welcomed industrial and public stakeholders and was officially opened by Strathmore’s Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research and Innovation, Professor Izael Pereira Da Silva, and continued with a full agenda of presentations from project work package leaders and invited speakers.

Exploring energy innovations

The rest of the week was filled with site visits near and far.

The Project Team, formed of representatives from each of the partner institutions, was given tours of Octavia carbon capture R&D facilities, Strathmore University’s clean cooking research facilities, the assembly factory of electric motorbike manufacturer Spiro, and the agrivoltaics (above) and biogas facilities at LATIA Agribusiness Solutions (LAS) – a grassroots agriculture training centre.

Supporting women in STEM

The Team also found time to organise and host a Women in Engineering side event that brought together inspiring voices and powerful insights from women across the STEM landscape in Kenya. We see this event as the first in a series that will run alongside the project for the next two and half years.

Influential women engineering panel included representatives from industry, academia and the public sector.

In addition to all the incredibly valuable project conversations and site visits, we were superbly hosted by our Kenyan partners who arranged regular customary coffee breaks with delicious snacks, amazing lunch buffets, spectacular group dinners, and a final day safari drive in the Nairobi City National Park – the 5am wake-up call was worth it to see lions and rhinos! On safari, watching rhinos.

The next in-person meeting is being planned to take place at Imperial next year, and aims to include a capacity building workshop open to students. We hope we will be able to match the wonderful hospitality we received from our partners in Kenya.