First Regional Rural hydropower Civil Engineering Training implemented in West Africa

One of the barriers of developing micro and mini Hydropower plants, up to 500 kW, in West Africa are missing technical skills on civil engineering.

ECREEE responded to this capacity gap by inviting and selecting trainers from 6 ECOWAS countries for participation in a 3 week practical training on mini hydropower civil engineering. This training was developed by the Nigerian Energy Support Program (NESP, funded by GIZ) in cooperation with the Centre for Renewable Energy Technologies (CRET) of the Federal University of Technology in Akure (FUTA) in Nigeria.

The training was prepared by a team consisting of Hannes Bauer, Daniel Paco (both ECREEE), Felix Nitz, Olatunde Isiolaotan (NESP, GIZ) and Prof. Olurinde Ebenezer Lafe from FUTA (the founder of CRET). Mr. Ramasubramanian (www.villageres.com) was invited as experienced expert and mini hydropower trainer from India.

12 participants from training institutions from Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Togo were trained 3 weeks in April/May 2016.

On demand of ECREEE NESP permitted to translate the manual and slides into French in order to use the manual in regular trainings and curricula in francophone countries.

Contact: Mr. Hannes Bauer, ECREEE – ECOWAS Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency: HBauer@ecreee.org