Our team just got back from our annual overseas charity project, installing solar powered vaccine refrigerators in Ethiopia.

Following the success of last year’s charity project and the severity of the need for more of these refrigerators, a team of three people from Solarsense returned to Ethiopia in conjunction with our 2012 charity partner For-Ethiopia and their sister NGO in Ethiopia, FDAE.

After revisiting the site where the first fridge was installed in 2011, they went on to install three more of these refrigerator units at three extremely remote rural health posts. Each of these serves a population of at least 2,000 people, and took at least an hour’s drive in a 4×4 to reach from the nearest town, Adis Alem.

The team camped out at each site after completing the installation, in order to save on fuel costs for the NGO, and the following day trained a few key local people in the maintenance and safe operation of the fridges.

The fridges are used for vaccines considered essential for primary health care, that protect against diseases such as tuberculosis, polio, tetanus and diphtheria – all of which are potentially fatal but easily preventable by immunisation at a young age.

The installation of the first solar fridge in 2011 has meant that the discard rate of vaccines – which become irreversibly spoilt if their temperature reaches over 8 degrees C – at the Beso clinic has come down from 33% to zero.

For more information please see ourcharity page.