Triple Bottom-line Impact

Each stage of the production cycle has a unique set of economic, environmental and social costs and benefits. The initial stage, the transportation of metal to the local metal workers, includes the direct cost of emissions emitted from the transportation of the metal. The metal is transported by a company owned car or truck and comes from Dakar. This, however, does provide a social benefit through the part-time employment of one staff member.

These costs and benefits would also apply for the purchase of imported parts. In addition, the environmental cost of the production and emissions from the importation would also have to be included. Any time lag in the delivery of the goods from abroad represents a cost to the enterprise because it means that they cannot proceed with the repairs they need to make. Finally, the imported parts require payment of an import tax, which represents a direct cost to the company and would ultimately be passed on to the end-user.

The majority of the staff is involved in the production of local parts stage. It thus creates a number of social benefits. There are 3 permanent employees and 5 temporary/day laborers. The day laborers all work with welding of the parts and installation. Everyone, except for the head technician, works 5-8hr days and less than 6 days a week. The permanent staff feels that their workplace, salary and safety are good, but half of the temporary are unhappy with their salary and the safety of the workplace. In fact, the only mention of harassment, abuse or inequality at the work place was a dispute about the dissatisfaction of salary. Two of the staff members have received training during their tenure with VEV, which they found helpful. Those that have not received training stated that they would like to receive trainings in welding, solar and wind power, and pump maintenance. The major complaint brought up by the day-laborers was that work is sporadic and that they would prefer to be hired with regular payments.

In addition to the social impacts of job creation and skills transfer, the production of local parts has environmental and economic impacts. The welding involved in the production process is energy intensive and thus uses fossil fuel and emits CO2. On the other hand, local production eliminates the emissions from production and transportation of imported parts. While exact numbers are not available, it is probable that local production of the parts results in less overall emission in the value chain of the part. The only waste produced from the production process is scrap metal which is either reused or sold to scrap metal dealers.

Both the imported and locally made parts go into the inventory, ready for when a repair is needed. This is partly what the AREED money went towards. Its limited size, however, was still listed as one of the limitations of the business. As no number were made available to compare before AREED inventory numbers to post AREED inventory numbers, it is difficult to ascertain if the funds were not effectively used to expand the inventory or if the level of expansion simply was not enough to keep up with the demand.

The installation or repair of the pump both the same impacts. Both involve transportation emissions costs to transport the parts to the communities and the social benefit of job creation. Installations tend to be larger jobs and thus have a greater social impact through increased salary and employment down the value chain.

The end-use of the wind pumps provides the greatest overall benefits. The pumps that VEV has worked on up until 2008, have provided 43,175 people with access to water. They have pumped a combined total of 1,859,259,750 liters of water. The communities have used this water for home use, gardens, livestock, and masonry. The pump size depends on the size of the community, reservoir capacity, and wind availability. They range between 950 liters pumped an hour to 9000 liters pumped an hour from a depth of between 5 and 80 meters in the ground. The main benefits cited by the end users were time saved for the women, lightening of the women's workload, and increased income generation opportunities. On average the woman saved 2-3 hours as compared to the usual time to travel to the neighboring well and collect enough water for the day. This extra time has been spent on income generating activities, education or leisure. It is difficult to quantify the true value of this time saved based on the information gathered in this study.

In addition to these main benefits, additional benefits were identified. These include education, health, increased quality of life, money saved, environmental awareness, and gender equality. This is the only enterprise evaluated where gender equality was stressed, even though the other products were used mainly by women. This may have something to do with the strong role of an NGO in the process, stressing this issue.

The end-users cited a number of issues with the pumps, but across the board everyone wanted more water either through more faucets, a pump with a higher capacity, a hybrid system with a diesel generator for when there is no wind, or a larger reservoir. Desire for gardens was often cited as the reason. One community even discussed how they had originally used the water for domestic use and gardening, but now there was not enough water to meet the gardening needs because domestic demand has grown. After the quantity of water, the most common complaint was about the frequent need for repairs. A number of the end-users requested that spare parts be made available to the communities; this would most likely be addressed to LVIA. Some of the systems were over 10 years old and dilapidated equipment was cited as a major issue. A few users wanted to develop a metered water conveyance system that would provide water directly to houses, schools, and health centers.

At this point, VEV primarily repairs existing wind pumps and the wind pumps it does install are generally replacing the use of far away well water. Thus, there are limited environmental benefits as the wind pumps are not replacing fossil fuel run pumps. In the future, this benefit could increase.

While not cited as an issue, the water usage could be draining the water tables and not be sustainable in the long-term, especially as climate change creates even drier conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa. Additionally, there is no discussion about the distribution of the pumped water or the price scheme. This system may exclude the poorest or discriminate against a certain ethnic group. It is difficult to tell if the water is being equitably distributed.

For the end-use of the product, there is minimal impact. Some of the pumps have been in use since 1981. When repairs are made, some of the old parts will be removed and the metal will either be used later or be sold to scrap dealers.