Baccalauréat · Série C · Anglais — 2023

Text — Power from the sun

For a long time, engineers described Burkina Faso as a country without energy. It has no oil, no coal and no large river to dam. Electricity had to be imported or produced in diesel plants, which made it expensive and unreliable. In the villages, the sun set and everything stopped.

Yet the country receives more than three thousand hours of sunshine every year. What was long seen as a handicap — a hot, dry climate — has turned out to be a resource. In 2017, a large solar power station opened at Zagtouli, near Ouagadougou. Others have followed, and today solar panels appear on the roofs of health centres, schools and small workshops.

The change is not only technical. A nurse who can keep vaccines cold, a pupil who can revise after dark, a welder who can work in the afternoon: each of them gains hours that did not exist before. Solar equipment also creates jobs for those who install and repair it, and these jobs cannot be moved abroad.

Difficulties remain, of course. Panels are still imported, batteries wear out, and dust reduces the output if nobody cleans the surface. But the direction is clear. A country that was thought to be poor in energy is discovering that it was simply looking for the wrong kind.