The Ayaviri Project
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The town of Ayaviri, in southern Peru, has a population of about 20,000 and is the capital of the province of Melgar. The average elevation of the town is 3,991 meters (over 13,000 feet) and the climate is cold and dry, resulting in an absence or very low growth of vegetation.
According to a 2007 census conducted by Peru’s Instiuto Nacional de Estandistica e Informatica (INEI), the majority of people (over 56%) living in the Melgar province to agricultural work to support themselves and their families, and a large part of this agricultural work consists of cattle farming. Because of the lack of alternative forms of energy and the minimal amount of vegetation, 74% of the energy used for cooking comes from burning cow manure or biomass. This leads to indoor air pollution with a myriad of negative health effects.
The initial step of the project will be to conduct a needs assessment (NA), which will allow us to rank order the problems in Ayaviri based on their urgency, importance, and the extent to which the skills represented in our team can potentially make a difference over two years. The structured, scientific NA will provide specific data concerning health concerns, domestic concerns, and financial concerns by interviewing about 250 families.
Once the NA is completed, we will have a tool for determining what technologies are appropriate to implement in Ayaviri. The larger project will seek to apply replicable energy justice solutions, based on appropriate sustainable energy technologies (ASETs), within an identified community of 250 homes, over a period of two years.
This project is a joint enterprise between the faculty and students of the Center for Energy and Environmental Security (CEES), the Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Countries, headed by Prof. Bernard Amadei, Caritas (an NGO in Peru), and the Universidad Catolica San Pablo.