HiNation arrives in Dar es Salaam. The journey starts.

This blog has not been updated for a couple of days as the notetaker has been in bed in a mysterious flu. But as Linda Krondahl & Kristina Linhardt arrived today it seemed that it had an influence on my wellbeing.

Looking back at the day I think it is like I told Linda and Kristina before: Don't expect anything to be according to plan, only different and better.

We are in Tanzania.

In the morning we were to get our car for the next three week - the LandRover that is used as public transportation between the Maasai community of Handeni and the town itself. The driver got lost in the district of Kariakoo, but eventually we could get together and go to the airport where Kristina & Linda was already outside.

Our first meeting was with Milou Fuglesang, a Norwegian woman who is a long time resident of Tanzania and founder of Femina HIP - a development platform that through publications and TV shows reaches over 10 million people in Tanzania, mainly at secondary schools.

We learned that 87% of Tanzania's population lives outside the grid and that the need for solar solutions is immense, but that there are many challenges where ways of distribution might be the biggest.

Later today we met with Ernest Mtaya and Regina Mchau. Ernest you have met before here. Regina is a Maasai woman from the Ngorongoro area who has for long lived in Dar es Salaam. She is an entrepreneur, owning a taxi business, a single mother of two children who is also working as an office manager for a law firm and is building her own house outside of Dar es Salaam. In our discussion we realized that the need for light and charging also exists in the city. The instability of the network means that households needs back up light. And when building a new house it can take a long time before you are connected to the power grid.

Both Ernest and Regina had very valuable views on marketing and distribuion. So we agreed that both would be our first testers of HiLight. We handed over the product together with test protocols, and will meet them again in three weeks.

Karibu Sana, Ernest and Regina!