7000 rural community leaders and youth trained in Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency in Fiji, PNG, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu

Suva, Fiji, 8 December 2022 – The “Capacity Building to Strengthen Sustainable Implementation of Renewable Energy Technologies for Rural Energy Access” project, implemented by the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) and funded by the Korean Government through the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) held its final Regional Workshop in Suva, Fiji on 8 December 2022.

The project, implemented in Fiji, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Solomon Islands and Vanuatu from 2019 to 2022 trained more than 7000 men, women and youth from local government and rural and remote towns and villages in the 4 countries. 34% of all trainees were women and 86% of all participants agreed that their level of knowledge in Green Economy, Renewable Energy, Solar and Pico-Hydro Operation and maintenance and financial management has increased after the trainings.

The project also developed 10 training modules, consisting of trainers handbooks in English, and learners guides in local languages and trained a total of 30 professional community trainer (17 men and 13 women) nationals in the 4 countries to carry out the community trainings.

Participants from all four project countries joined both in-person and virtually in Suva to celebrate the achievements of the project, including presenting on the projects results, sharing and discussing challenges and highlighting success stories. The workshop also saw the handover of the developed training modules to each of the four country representatives, and the project’s online knowledge management platform was also launched. This website contains all project details, as well as allows for easy downloading and sharing of all training modules for future use by other stakeholders for free.

In her opening remarks, Ms. Katerina Syngellakis, Pacific Regional Director for GGGI highlighted that the project and all the implementing partners and trainers are “here to support sustainable rural electrification, to support communities to be empowered and informed to participate fully in improving their energy access and to support communities to fully benefit from new, clean sources of energy”.

The KOICA Fiji deputy director, Ms. Seoyeun Bang stated that while the Pacific region has a lot of untapped renewable energy resources, “mainstreaming renewable energy and energy efficiency into provincial and local level planning has proved to be a challenging task for many countries”. She further added that this is the reason why the capacity building project was implemented “to build the knowledge and skills required to plan for a sustainable and affordable renewable energy-based nation through capacity building of leaders and community groups throughout the Pacific Region”.

The GGGI project manager, Mr. Mohammed Tazil then gave a general overview of the project in all four countries. He highlighted the project has successfully developed 10 training modules in Green Economy and Renewable Energy, complete with Trainer Guides and local language translated Learners workbooks that have also been customized for each of the 4 countries. Local trainers were trained using these modules in each of the 4 countries before they went out to conduct trainings in selected remote rural communities in their countries.

The Director of Energy from Vanuatu, Mr. Antony Garae and the Solomon Islands Director of the Department of Energy, Mr. John Korinihona, as well as by Senior Scientific Officer, Mr. Joji Wata from Fiji Department of Energy, presented on the rural electrification targets, challenges and capacity building needs of their respective countries. Each of the 4 countries then took turns to present on the individual country level project implementation results and achievements.

The workshop ended with breakout sessions that allowed all four countries to share their unique challenges, especially the difficulty of increasing women participation and discussed ways to further use the training modules in more countries and communities.

All the training modules can be downloaded free of charge here: https://greeneducationportal.org/