million mafuta

The Remote Monitoring (RM) strand of MREAP was incorporated within a Strategic Energy Project in Chikhwawa led by WASHTED. RM was deployed as a measure to bolster technical sustainability of the project and to consider its readiness for scale-up. Distributed energy systems in Malawi, particularly solar PV systems, have historically had poor sustainability performance. During MREAP it was included at 4 separate locations comprised of 21 separate electrical systems to capture key technical performance data. These systems were each standalone Solar PV installations on health facilities and primary schools. The technology utilized Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and open-source models to communicate via mobile phone networks remotely to WASHTED’s office in Blantyre. Data could then be viewed at near real-time, analyzed, and corrective actions could be enacted. The purpose of the RM strand was to demonstrate the technology’s effectiveness towards improving sustainability of off-grid commu...

Off-grid solar photovoltaic systems in Malawi are deployed increasingly as the primary option for rural public infrastructure such as primary schools and health centres. Overall, grid-connected electricity access has remained stagnant at around 9% with only 1% of rural population connected. To improve the technical sustainability of such systems, a novel remote monitoring technology utilising Wireless Sensor Networks was installed and the systems were monitored over roughly one year. This paper has described the technical design, performance, and benefits received from deployment of the technology. Furthermore, it has evaluated the cost implications for a larger scale rollout and potential benefits.

In the recent years there has been an increase in the application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in agriculture, specifically aiding automatic application of water, chemicals and fertilizers to the field. Since WSNs are still under development stage, they are at times unreliable, power hungry, fragile and they easily lose communication. Intrinsically, any irrigation system based on WSNs requires close monitoring to guard against any horrendous mishaps. However, monitoring such an irrigation system which, usually, is located at a rural site can be expensive and time consuming. In this paper we developed an efficient, cost-effective and real-time wireless based remote monitoring mechanism for a WSN based Irrigation system situated in Manja Township within Blantyre city. The system archives data that include the soil moisture potential, link performance, electrical power levels, and valve status and subsequently sends the information as a text message over a cellular network to a r...

Wireless networking is currently being deployed for various applications. However, the application of wireless networking in healthcare remains a challenge mainly because of security and reliability concerns. This paper presents experimental results of performance analysis of a wireless network for healthcare application in the City of Blantyre. The results show that the use of wireless networking in healthcare application will be limited by packet loss, delay and jitter when the number of hops involved in the transmission of information is large. Nevertheless, deployment of wireless networking for healthcare applications is viable when the number of hops a packet has to transverse is small.