Triple Helix as a Strategic Tool to Fast-Track Climate Change Adaptation in Rural Kenya: Case Study of Marsabit County

AbstractThe lack of affordable, clean, and reliable energy in Africa's rural areas forces people to resort to poor quality energy source, which is detrimental to the people's health and prevents the economic development of communities. Moreover, access to safe water and food security are concerns closely linked to health issues and children malnourishment. Recent climate change due to global warming has worsened the already critical situation.Electricity is well known to be an enabler of development as it allows the use of modern devices thus enabling the development of not only income-generating activities but also water pumping and food processing and conservation that can promote socioeconomic growth. However, all of this is difficult to achieve due to the lack of investors, local skills, awareness by the community, and often also government regulations.All the above mentioned barriers to the uptake of electricity in rural Kenya could be solved by the coordinated effort of government, private sector, and academia, also referred to as Triple Helix, in which each entity may partially take the other's role. This chapter discretizes the above and shows how a specific county (Marsabit) has benefited from this triple intervention. Existing government policies and actions and programs led by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international agencies are reviewed, highlighting the current interconnection and gaps in promoting integrated actions toward climate change adaptation and energy access

Interannual and spatial variability of solar radiation energy potential in Kenya using Meteosat satellite

Kenya is faced with a rising demand in electricity resulting from a rapidly growing economy and an increasing population. Being a tropical country, lying astride the equator, solar energy is one of the readily available renewable energy resource options to meet this need. Unfortunately, there is still very low adoption of solar systems in the country which could be majorly attributed to lack of adequate solar resource assessment. Besides, past studies" on this area in Kenya only focused on the available amount of solar resource leaving out the issue of variability. To bridge this gap, the temporal and spatial variability of global horizontal irradiance (GHI) and direct normal Irradiance (DNI) is analyzed using 19-year long (1995-2013) Meteosat satellite dataset. GHI interannual variability is low in most parts of the country but DNI has a clearly higher variability except a few locations in the East and Northern desert. Low spatial variability for GHI was recorded for locations within 1225 km(2) while DNI variability was double that of GHI. The results offer readers a quick reference of variability of solar resource at different locations in Kenya which is useful in guiding measurement requirements and consequently in promoting deployment of solar systems. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd