Baccalauréat · Série D · Anglais — 2020

Text — Solar power in the Sahel

For years, the village of Zorgho had no electricity. When the sun went down at six o'clock, work stopped. Children who wanted to study did so under kerosene lamps, breathing smoke, and shopkeepers closed early because nobody walks to a shop in the dark.

Then, in 2017, engineers installed a small solar plant on a piece of land nobody was using. The idea was simple: the Sahel has too much sun, not too little. What had always been a burden — the heat that dries the fields and empties the wells — could become a resource.

The change did not happen overnight. Panels had to be cleaned of dust every week, batteries were expensive, and the first technicians came from the capital, three hours away. But the village decided to train four of its own young people, two of them women, so that a broken connection would no longer mean waiting a week for someone to drive down.

Today the clinic can keep vaccines cold. The mill runs in the afternoon. Awa Sawadogo, seventeen, prepares her final examinations at a desk under an electric bulb, and says she wants to study electrical engineering. « The sun was always here », her father remarks. « We just did not know how to ask it for anything. »