In March 2008, Dr. Laura Stachel arrived in the obstetrics ward of a state hospital in Zaria, Nigeria, determined to find out why so many women were dying in childbirth.
The poverty-stricken country on the coast of West Africa accounts for 2 percent of the world's population but 10 percent of maternal deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Stachel, an obstetrician-gynecologist then pursuing a doctorate of public health at UC Berkeley, expected to provide clinical advice on ways to improve procedures.
But she learned something far more basic was going wrong: The hospitals and health clinics simply didn't have electricity for large and unpredictable parts of the day.
Stachel saw midwives delivering babies by kerosene lantern. She observed a cesarean section during which the lights went out, forcing the surgeons to finish using her flashlight. She watched as a woman who arrived with a uterine rupture and barely a pulse was told to find a clinic with power.
"I was seeing the sickest patients I'd ever seen in rooms not as well equipped as an American garage," she said. "I would be there at night and think, 'I'm just here to watch these women die.' "
Without reliable electricity and standard tools, "(hospital workers) couldn't do the job they were trained to do," she said.
So instead of giving medical advice, she decided to get them more reliable power. As it happened, she knew whom to ask. Her husband, Hal Aronson, has spent more than a decade teaching about renewable energy systems throughout California.
When Stachel returned from Nigeria, they set to work designing a solar system for the hospital. The project would eventually lead them to form WE CARE Solar (wecaresolar.org), a Berkeley nonprofit that's now delivered 80 compact solar systems to health clinics around the world, including Burma, Liberia and Haiti. Dozens more will soon be en route to Uganda, Nigeria and India.
On Thursday, the organization will be recognized as one of 15 laureates at the Tech Awards in San Jose, an annual event celebrating individuals and organizations around the globe that leverage technology to benefit humanity.
Stachel never intended for any of this to happen.
She spent 14 years as an obstetrician-gynecologist, building up a Berkeley practice that she loved, helping thousands of women deliver healthy babies. But a degenerative back condition made it harder and harder to do the job, eventually forcing her to give up all deliveries and surgical procedures in 2002.
"I had this injury where I couldn't do what I was trained to do," she said, echoing the words she used for those doctors in Nigeria. "I was robbed of that."
She decided to study public health, which was what brought her to Nigeria as a consultant. The Zaria solar project eventually became the subject of her dissertation. But even that was supposed to be a one-off - until things took an unexpected turn.
Solar suitcase
Using a grant from the Blum Center for Developing Economies and funds from UC Berkeley, Stachel and Aronson went to work on a more than $20,000 project to provide a blood bank, communications system and nearly 1-kilowatt solar system at the hospital. It would be enough to keep the lights, suction machines and other critical infrastructure humming when the power flickered out.
To test their design, Aronson and Stachel created a miniature prototype that fit into a suitcase, in part to minimize customs issues. That small system, however, had a big, immediate impact at the hospital.
The local doctors pleaded with Stachel to leave the suitcase while the full system was under development. Smaller health clinics in outlying regions that got word of the hospital's solar system would later petition for one as well.
The couple realized they'd inadvertently struck upon what could be a scalable solution for health clinics throughout Nigeria and other impoverished regions. The prototype "solar suitcase" contained less than $1,000 of gear. How could they say no?
In the year after the large solar system was installed in the Zaria hospital, the maternal mortality rate dropped by about 70 percent.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/15/BUFR1LHQVQ.DTL&type=tech
