EPI - Introduction

After graduating from BYU's Master of Public Administration program in 2008, I was hired as the Executive Director of a new nonprofit, Empower Playgrounds. The project began in 2007 with Ben Markham, an engineer who served a full-time LDS mission in Ghana with his wife, Julie. While there, he noticed several things: the schools were dark, there was no electricity at night, and there were no hands-on lab activities to teach the children science. He thought, why not use playground equipment to generate electricity for children in rural Ghana?

Empower Playgrounds designs, builds, and installs playground equipment in rural schools in Ghana that are off the electric grid. The energy generated from childrens' play is stored in a car battery, which is later transferred to portable LED lanterns for the children to study with at night. The project has three main goals: (1) to provide educational recreation to children in rural schools in Ghana, (2) to provide electricity for children to study with, and (3) to create a science lab to teach children principles of energy transfer, physics, and mechanics. The third goal is perhaps the most interesting as hands-on opportunities often have much greater sticking value than lectures.

I spent three months in Ghana in the summer of 2008 to get the organization registered, select five schools for the pilot program, have community meetings with the villages receiving the equipment, create applications for villages, launch the lantern distribution, create criteria for selection of schools, and so forth. A student physics intern named JJ Campbell accompanied me and built the first electricity producing zip-line in the workshop in Ghana. Details about the experience will follow.