Father Vincent Ngwira is a man who follows the way, the truth and the light. As a Catholic priest, the 44-year-old Zambian has held congregations across the south African nation, sharing the good word with rural and urban populations alike.

But in 2017, Ngwira recognized another beacon worth evangelizing about: solar power.

“In the past, I have worked in very rural areas with no hope of getting the electricity network there,” says Ngwira. “Instead people would burn candles and that led to house fires. I would hear stories of children, and even elders, dying [in them].”

Safe, free to run, and without the need for expensive energy infrastructure, solar has helped to power off-the-grid communities across the world.

And in recent years solar has been a game changer across Africa. Since 2014, for example, Africa’s solar capacity has nearly increased tenfold, from 1.67 gigawatts to 13.48 gigawatts in 2023 — enough to power 100 million lightbulbs. According to a report by the International Energy Agency, Africa has 60 percent of the world’s best solar resources, and it is already the cheapest source in many parts of the continent.

However, as that growing amount of solar equipment has begun to age, it has also begun to break down.

In fact, according to a report in 2023 by the nonprofit SolarAid, of the 375 million solar energy kits that have been sold and distributed to off-grid populations around the world since the early 2000s, more than 250 million have fallen into disrepair.

It estimated that 75 percent of all solar products in sub-Saharan Africa — 110 million lights — no longer work.

Renewable energy experts warn that the solar industry has until now failed to create a sufficiently circular economy for solar devices to be repaired and refurbished, even as the size of the global solar market grows at astonishing rates of over 20 percent.

“Advances in the solar space have been nothing short of amazing,” says Tobias Hanrath, a professor of engineering and the Croll Chair for Energy Transitions at Cornell University. “But it’s short-sighted to think all we have to do is install a bunch of panels and it stops there. We have to look at these products over their lifetime.”

Hanrath cites the example of plastic, which has been mass produced since the 1950s with very little thought as to how the waste would be processed, creating the plastic waste crisis that we have today.

But SolarAid is not only shining a light on the problem; it’s already working on fixing it. More than 90 percent of these broken solar-powered devices in sub-Saharan Africa can be repaired, the nonprofit estimates, and it has been training people in Zambia and Malawi, including Father Ngwira, to diagnose and repair devices.

In his first few years working with SolarAid, Father Ngwira distributed solar lights to hard-to-reach communities in Zambia, selling more than a thousand, he estimates, in his so-called role as a “solar entrepreneur.”

Then, last year, Ngwira took his solar work to the next level: He trained for three days to become a “repair agent” — allowing him to carry out basic repairs and resolve issues like battery replacements. “It was intense and very enlightening,” he says, perhaps subconsciously firing out puns. “And it was empowering at the same time.”

In September, for example, he made two repairs after spreading the word about his skills as a solar repairman at church. One was a solar panel that had wiring issues and the other was a solar flashlight whose switch had broken. 

The latter repair cost just 20 Zambian Kwacha ($0.75) — a crucially affordable price point in what is one of the world’s poorest countries.

“I was able to clean and replace it within 10 to 15 minutes,” says Ngwira.

In Zambia, there are now 10 of these agents, working alongside a team of seven repair technicians who are able to fix more complex breakdowns. In the 2023-24 financial year, SolarAid’s teams across Zambia and Malawi repaired 2,422 solar products.

Fred Mwale, project manager for SolarAid’s repair project in Zambia, argues that their approach reduces electronic waste, increases the lifespan of products and improves access to solar lights, as well as creating job opportunities and keeping money in the local economy, which in turn builds “stronger, more financially resilient” communities.

Given the limited transport networks in Zambia and Malawi, SolarAid focuses on providing repairs in centrally located shops to maximize accessibility for users. “That way they won’t have to travel 80 kilometers (50 miles) to get there,” says Mwale.

Meanwhile, solar repair agents and technicians are usually hired based on their experience repairing electronics like radios, making the training process, which only takes a few days, straightforward. “They catch on very quick,” he adds.

Professor Hanrath goes as far as to say that the Global North could do well to learn from the repair and reuse culture in Africa. “What’s happening there is pioneering,” he says. “Whereas in the U.S., there is a throwaway culture. It’s just too cheap to buy something new, to order something on Amazon, instead of repairing.”

Changing that culture, whether it be through societal attitudes or policy enforcement, is where Hanrath sees the great challenge ahead.

“If it is too cheap to get a new one, compared to repairing, then it’s tough policy-wise to fix this — you can either make it more expensive to throw away or more expensive to buy a new one, but there will likely be consumer pushback,” says Hanrath, who previously worked on a project with Cornell students to repair 1,200 damaged solar panels from a utility-scale solar farm near Ithaca, New York.

Mwale also says that SolarAid has had issues with importing replacement solar batteries from China, which can take several months and can have significant minimum order requirements. Manufacturers have also been reluctant to share information that could aid repairs due to fears over product tampering.

SolarAid’s report State of Repair, published in October 2024, found that access to spare parts is a “major logistical challenge” for off-grid solar distributors across the Global South, even though batteries, which are simple to replace, are “by far the most likely failure point” in off-grid solar products.

“Better access to spare parts is still a challenge,” says Mwale. 

At the same time, Father Ngwira points out that 72 languages are spoken in Zambia, which means communication can be tricky in rural areas where education levels tend to be lower. 

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Yet he says that communities nonetheless see the mass potential for solar power and repair and that the demand has gotten huge, particularly as the climate crisis brings more extreme weather like drought.

“People are asking me all the time,” he says. “They want solar to power lights but also refrigerators and TVs. There’s a lot of demand.”

As the solar revolution continues at a rapid pace, proponents believe this is a chance to both develop a genuine circular economy around the solar industry, as well as to help reach the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal of providing “affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy access for all” by 2030.

“It’s an opportunity to do things right,” says Hanrath.