Margaret Owino

Margaret Owino is the director of Solar Cookers International East Africa Office.

Solar Cookers International celebrates Margaret’s 10th anniversary as Solar Cookers International’s regional representative and director of eastern Africa programs. Growing up in rural western Kenya, Margaret credits her mother with insisting she get a good education, including a university degree in the days when Kenya had no free public education and children had to live away from home in sometimes harsh missionary boarding schools. Margaret became a school teacher, then a school administrator. Later, after moving to Nairobi with her civil servant husband and their four sons, she developed educational materials for KENGO, a network of Kenyan energy and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Solar Cookers International (SCI) started work in Kenya in 1994, sponsoring two Kenyan solar cooker conferences and several teachers’ trainings for Kenyan NGOs, as well as helping to create a network of solar cooker promoters called the Kenya Solar Network (Kesonet). SCI then launched solar cooker projects in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe with the help of Faustine Odaba, an outstanding Kenyan trainer. Faustine learned to solar cook from a Peace Corps volunteer and had independently trained many in her western Kenya community.

By 1998 it clearly was time for an office in eastern Africa, and SCI was fortunate to hire Margaret to lead and nurture these programs and the network, which evolved into Solarnet with its own office and staff and an annual Solar Day exhibition in Nairobi. Margaret’s first “office” was a desk in a shared room in the office of a photovoltaic consultant / businessman. Margaret single-handedly and effectively improved support services for SCI’s scattered field projects, and quickly became highly respected by SCI’s many and varied partners and vendors. She also developed training curricula and tools for participative education and program evaluations. One of her first additional staff was Faustine, and together they have trained women in several countries to become solar cookers trainers and helped women to start small businesses making locally adapted, improved solar cookers, selling them and the food and pastries baked in them. Margaret has earned several awards for the eastern Africa office, including the prestigious Ashden Award for Renewable Energy presented by HRH the Princess Royal. Margaret is featured in the recent film SUNCOOKERS by Australian filmmaker Catherine Scott.

Margaret is equally inspiring speaking at international United Nations conferences as she is meeting with rural women whose difficult daily lives are barely on the edge of survival. SCI now has a modest but attractive independent office in Nairobi with a handful of employees, and several field staff covering one urban and three rural communities. Margaret finds ways to transcend countless challenges, and thanks to her and her excellent staff, your support of SCI is increasing access to solar cookers and empowering African women whose lives are among the heaviest-burdened in today’s world.

Audio and video

• April 2008: World Bank audio interview with SCI's Margaret Owino
• September 2006: Video interview with Margaret Owino (High bandwidth or low bandwidth)

• September 2006: An interview with Margaret Owino that was broadcast on WBAI in New York (WMA: 22k or MP3: 24k)

• Margaret Owino and her work with solar cooking is featured in the documentary Suncookers from Deep Dish TV. It has shown on the Documentary Channel, at the Woodstock Film Festval, and the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. More information about the film can be found at http://www.deepdishtv.org.

• [http://solarcooking.org/media/audio/owino-on-bbc.wma Audio interview with Margaret Owino on the BBC program Network Africa discussing the Kakuma Refugee Camp project

See also

• July 2006: Simplest Solar Cookers and Women's Micro-Enterprise
• July 2006: SOLAR COOKER DISSEMMINATION: LESSONS LEARNT - Margaret Owino
• Solar Cookers International East Africa Office
• Suncookers - DVD showing Margaret Owino's work with solar cookers in Kenya

Contact

maggyapondi@yahoo.com