Malian weed brings light to mud-hut villages

By Nick Tattersall

SIMIJI, Mali (Reuters) - A row of shiny new streetlights looks out of place in this sand swept village of conical thatched roofs and mud-brick huts.

Like most villagers in rural Mali, the residents of Simiji have been living without mains electricity, waking with the sun to tend their cotton, rice and groundnut fields and retiring with their families when night falls.

But a humble shrub which grows on the side of the main road through the village is revolutionizing their lives.

By crushing the seeds of the hardy jatropha plant, long considered largely useless, the villagers can power a small generator with its oil, enough to run 40 streetlights and give 60 families power by night.

"There is a general satisfaction among the population. The children gather under the lights in the evening and it has limited thefts," said Benben Doumbia, 47, one of the village elders, proudly explaining how the new machine works.

"Now our activities can continue until 11 o'clock in the evening, whereas before everything stopped at 6. People can visit each other. It has become an instrument of social cohesion," he said, speaking the local Bambara language.

Mali hopes eventually to have all its rural villages running on jatropha and other renewable energy sources such as solar power, making them self-sufficient and leaving the farming industry less vulnerable to fluctuations in world oil prices.

Simiji is one of around 700 communities so far to have installed a generator which can run on the plant oil, part of a state-run project to electrify the former French colony's 12,000 villages at a price affordable to their inhabitants.