Can you imagine living your whole life without electricity?

It means your entire socioeconomic life is virtually shut down when darkness falls.

That is the story of Ibrahim Siedu, a 28-year-old Junior High School (JHS) teacher at Katapie in the Ahafo Ano North District of the Ashanti Region.

After the daily Muslim prayers at 6 pm, which he does religiously, he prepares his lesson notes for school the next day.

For three years that has been his daily routine, performed in darkness.

With the aid of torchlight, he struggles through the almost one hour period writing, straining his eyes in the process to get his notes right.

“Preparing my lesson notes and things have not been easy; we use torchlight to find our way around. For the past three years, this is what we have been doing using torchlight to prepare our lesson notes, “ he said.

Photo: Ibrahim Siedu

The consistent labouring and somewhat torture Ibrahim and his colleagues go through in this remote community is, however, thwarted with poor performance from head-strong students.

“When it comes to our kids, it’s a terrible experience. You teach and go to class the next day and it is a completely new thing to them because there is no electricity for them to learn with”, Ibrahim said worriedly.

Students have been advised by their teachers to resort to using torchlight to learn as the teachers do.

The frustrated teacher remarks, “Our kids write the same exam with those in the cities but over there, they have everything to learn with but it is not the case over here.”

Seated in a makeshift classroom made of slabs of wood, these students are cheerfully going through their lessons.

As exciting as academic work seems, the absence of electricity has a toll on both the teacher and students.

Fourteen-year-old student Mohammed Ali tells me at home the torchlight to use is almost always being used by his parents for household chores so it is difficult to learn at home.

Arabic teacher, 23-year-old Abubakar Ibrahim, who currently is teaching under the government youth employment program recounts his own experience in the community when he was a student.

Abubakar explains how he and his colleagues, five years ago, had to endure the absence of electricity when preparing to write the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE).

He managed to continue to the secondary school but for the majority of his friends, they had to drop out and find an apprenticeship job because the grades were very bad which couldn’t guarantee them entry into senior high.

Such has been the lot of residents, not only teachers, of Katapie and surrounding communities in the District.

The situation, however, is set to change soon for the better following completion of a 14 kilowatts solar powered project at the cost of over 200,000 Ghana Cedis.

A private firm, Black Star Energy, is providing solar powered electricity to about 90 households in the community which has over 150 households.

Chief Executive Officer of the company, Nicole Poindexter, says Katapie is the eighth community the company is providing electricity to.

The company provides electricity that is affordable, reliable, sustainable and scalable to any community and or household that needs it.

Member of Parliament for the area, Sanid Suleman, who spearheaded the project explains the donation is timely because electricity from the grid is not in sight anytime soon.

“Looking at the scheme of things, I do not expect rural electrification to be extended to this community within the next three, four, five years that is why I brought them here”.