SOCIAL JUSTICE · SOLAR INITIATIVE
There is a kind of darkness that has nothing to do with the absence of light bulbs. It is the darkness of being told, generation after generation, that your village is too remote, your grid too expensive, your people too few to matter. That darkness is what Ubuntu Village went to Uganda to address — not just with solar panels, but with something older and more necessary: the belief that every community deserves to determine its own future.
Our Solar Power Initiative in Uganda is bringing clean, reliable energy to families through our partnership with BrightLife Uganda. Our first commitment was 70 families; our revised goal is 100 families, and 32 families’ homes are lit with solar so far. But if you think this story is about kilowatts, you are reading the wrong headline. This is a story about what happens to a community when it finally gets to say: we lit this ourselves.
Light, it turns out, is medicine. And we have the receipts.
What Changes When the Light Comes On
Ask the families who now have solar. The first thing they will tell you — before economics, before anything measurable — is that they feel seen.
Children study after dark. Clinics can store vaccines properly and operate past sunset. Women and girls move through their communities with greater safety once streets and pathways are lit. Small business owners extend their hours. Elders who once went to bed at dusk now sit together in the evening, talking, remembering, passing down what they know.
Research from the International Energy Agency confirms what Ubuntu Village witnesses on the ground: reliable energy access is one of the single greatest determinants of improved health outcomes, educational attainment, and economic mobility in sub-Saharan Africa. But the data cannot capture what it feels like to be a child doing homework by your own light for the first time and understanding, in your body, that someone fought for your future.
That is not infrastructure. That is ancestral repair.
Infrastructure as Liberation Theology
The word liberation gets used loosely. We mean it precisely. The communities we serve in Uganda did not lose access to energy by accident — they were excluded by design, through the same colonial logic that decided which lands were worth developing, which people were worth investing in, which futures were worth imagining.
Solar energy, when it arrives through a community-centered model rather than a corporate extraction model, does something the national grid cannot: it distributes power back to the people who generate it. The sun does not invoice you. The sun does not redline your neighborhood. The sun, as our elders across the African diaspora have always known, belongs to everyone.
Ubuntu Village’s model with BrightLife Uganda is structured around affordability and dignity — not charity and dependency. Families access solar home systems through a payment structure designed to meet them where they are, ensuring the path to energy independence is built on dignity, not dependency.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7 — affordable and clean energy for all — frames this as a global imperative. We frame it as a spiritual one. When a people can generate their own light, they remember they were never meant to live in the dark.
East Harlem to Uganda: One Wound, One Work
People sometimes ask why a nonprofit based in East Harlem is doing solar work in Uganda. The answer is Ubuntu — I am because we are. The energy apartheid experienced by rural Ugandan families and the environmental injustice faced by Black and brown communities in New York City are not separate problems wearing different costumes. They are the same wound on a body that spans continents.
Ugandan rural families have historically had no access to the grid at all. The common thread is not geography — it is the deliberate exclusion of Black communities from the infrastructure that sustains modern life.
When Ubuntu Village works in Uganda, we carry both realities with us — our East Harlem home neighborhood and the communities we serve. Our Solar Initiative in Uganda is not a foreign aid project. It is an act of diaspora solidarity — East Harlem reaching across the Atlantic to say: your liberation is ours, and ours is yours.
That is the medicine we are administering. That is what the light carries.
Light is a human right. Help us deliver it.
Every contribution to Ubuntu Village’s Solar Initiative brings one more family in Uganda one step closer to safe, reliable, self-determined energy. Our first commitment was 70 families; our revised goal is 100 families, and 32 families’ homes are lit with solar so far. This is what community power looks like — and you can be part of it.
Support the Solar Initiative →References
- International Energy Agency. (2023). SDG7: Data and Projections.
- United Nations. (2024). Sustainable Development Goal 7 — Affordable and Clean Energy.
- BrightLife Uganda. Solar Home Systems and Clean Energy Access — Uganda.
- Ubuntu Village Inc. Solar Power Initiative — Uganda Program Overview.
- ‣ Three Lights Ignite: Solar Power Reaches Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda
- ‣ Light After Dark: Solar Energy and Caregiver Safety in Rural Kenya and Uganda
- ‣ What Our Ancestors Knew About Rest — and What 70 Families Will Finally Reclaim on June 1st
Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine. Read more about Michele, or connect with her on LinkedIn.