Learning from the Ground Up: Community Energy Stories from Malawi

There is a need to engage directly with community energy managers and operators to co-produce knowledge directly relevant to the challenges they face. In this challenge, two operators of community energy in Malawi relate their experiences on the ground, making community energy projects possible. This chapter presents two accounts of the making of community energy in Malawi, as told by the protagonists of those stories. The first experience, written by Arnold Kadziponye, reports the story of the Mulanje Electricity Generation Agency Ltd (MEGA), in the Mulanje Massif in the south of Malawi (65 km from Blantyre). Arnold’s story shows how concerns with conservation foster the development of an electrification project. Now covering over 2000 households and expanding rapidly, the biggest lessons of Arnold’s stories relate to the engagement with the community and the need to moderate unrealistic expectations. The second story presents the Chipopoma Power Project in Manchewe, Livingstonia, in the North of Malawi, and it is reported in the form of an interview with John Sailence, that in 2023 served 120 households. A project assembled with heterogeneous technologies and resources—including learning to build a turbine—demonstrates the potential to harness and develop the knowledge skills within the community.