Solar System

Extreme heat and long electricity outages affect low-income families, schools, mosques and community facilities across Pakistan. Helping Aid Foundation installs solar-powered systems so that essential services keep running when the grid does not.

Solar is central to our sustainability approach: once installed, a system costs a community almost nothing to run, which makes it one of the most durable forms of support we can offer.

The problem this programme addresses is the combination of extreme summer heat and long, unpredictable power cuts. Both are hardest on the people with the least protection from them: young children, elderly people, patients in clinics, and pupils in classrooms that become unusable by the afternoon.

Solar-powered DC fans are the smallest and most widely distributed part of the programme. A single unit costs between USD $40 and $80, which makes it one of the few interventions that changes a household's daily conditions for the price of a small donation. A community solar fan project, covering multiple homes or a shared building, runs from USD $500 to $5,000.

Solar water coolers and community drinking water stations extend the same idea to public places. A cold-water dispenser at a school, a mosque or a clinic serves everyone who passes through it rather than one household. A solar water cooler costs between USD $500 and $1,500, and a community drinking water station between USD $1,500 and $5,000.

Larger solar energy systems are installed at schools, mosques, community centres and healthcare facilities so that essential services keep running when the grid does not. For a clinic, continuous power is not a comfort. It is the difference between being able to treat someone after dark and not.

Running cost is the reason solar sits at the centre of the Foundation's sustainability approach. A generator has to be fed every month by a community that often cannot afford it, and it stops being used long before it stops working. A solar system installed once costs almost nothing to run, which is what makes the support last.