Students Bring New Light to Africa Marketplaces

For about 25 cents a day Kenyan vendors can illuminate their market stalls with kerosene lamps. That might sound like mere pocket change, but in Kenya it represents a significant cost to the merchants — in more ways than one. While purchasing kerosene impacts the vendors' bottom line, the particulate matter produced by the kerosene lamps is harmful to the vendors' health, causing respiratory infections, asthma and lung cancer.

The solution? Light emitting diodes or LEDs.

Environmental Resource Engineering Professor Arne Jacobson, a Schatz Energy Research Center Co-Director, traveled to Kenya in summer 2008 with graduate students Kristen Radecsky and Peter Johnstone to conduct research on vendors using the ubiquitous kerosene lamps. Aside from gathering data, the Humboldt State team offered the vendors an alternative. Before traveling to Kenya, Johnstone and Radecsky, along with fellow employees at Schatz, spent hundreds of hours designing and assembling 20 LED lamps. The research team spoke to vendors about using LEDs instead of kerosene lamps and sold a little more than a dozen Schatz-manufactured LED lamps at a market-rate price of $10.

"Our study aimed to provide good information about how people are using both fuel based and LED lights to provide insight on the environmental, economic, and health impacts of lighting technology," Johnstone says. "We found that many LED products are likely better for people than kerosene lighting. They tend to be less expensive in the long run to own and operate, and do not emit dangerous particulate matter."

As a gift to the vendors who participated in their research, Johnstone and Radecsky took photos of the vendors and gave them a copy. Each portrait was labeled with, "Off Grid Lighting Project 2008, Humboldt State University, Asante Sana," which is Swahili for thank you very much.

"With the research results we can make recommendations to manufacturers who design lighting products so that they can deliver better lights to customers living in locations like Kenya," Radecsky says.