Tsilitwa Project

The DEAT-funded contract in Tsilitwa represents the culmination of a six-year search for funding to establish the beginnings of a “sustainable village”, a concept that arose from an application submitted in 1997 by the founders of SVA, when in the employ of CSIR, to the Dutch Government who awarded US$ 2 million to the project.

The concept of the sustainable village was founded upon the premise that a village with adequate electrical power and access to better systems of water supply would be able to be organised such that its economy could be revitalised, thereby overcoming the historical constraints that had all but destroyed even the memory of once having had a viable economy.

With many rural villages possibly not even planned to have formal grid power from Eskom within the medium term, SVA resorted to the use of renewable energy sources to achieve these goals. In this way, not even the lack of grid power could stop the forward progress and the village would actually be in the forefront of modern environmentally responsible development

Graphic illustration.

In the foreground is the homestead area, showing crop rotation and animal farming activities at the back of the property.
Behind the homestead is the cooperative in support of all the farming homesteads.
The inset shows a possible renewable energy technology (biomass), which could provide the whole village with electrical power, using less than 2 tons of biomass per day.

The components of the DEAT project, described below, will form an integrated system within Tsilitwa, designed to stimulate and activate the latent economy within this typical rural village.

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