The Buin District Health Centre is a level 3 medical facility that primarily offers health and ambulatory care. Built in the 1960’s, it’s been a central lifeline for people in Southern Bougainville, serving about 200 patients a month. 

Since 2017, nurse Cecilia Naguo has served the people of the town with passion and devotion. The work is far from easy and Cecilia and her colleagues grapple with many challenges, the biggest being frequent power outages. 

That scenario is about to change, as a new solar farm - funded by the Government of Japan and built by UNDP’s Pacific Green Transformation Project - will provide consistent power supply to the entire town of Buin. Naguo has been anticipating this moment for years, and she says it is transformative for the health clinic. 

She chose healthcare as a profession as she was influenced by her grandfather’s positive experience at a hospital, when he was admitted for an illness. He was so pleased by the way that the nurses cared for him that he thought Naguo should join the profession. She took that to heart. 

At nursing school Naguo was even more impressed with the education, that she says has shaped her values. Despite encountering a series of obstacles, her motivation to treat people and make them feel better has never faltered.

“The nursing school taught me to value life and what we do,” she says. “We don’t work for just money, we work from our heart, so that people within our communities can have peaceful (and healthy) lives.”

The blackouts in Buin are more than inconvenient. They can often last for hours a day, and sometimes weeks. They directly affect the daily operation of the health clinic that needs water supply, cold chain storage, and lights for small surgeries and deliveries. The facility operates 24/7 under difficult conditions with a total workforce of about 100 people, including 20 nurses and community health workers. Without consistent power, the operations of the clinic are curtailed and lives can be put in jeopardy. 

The clinic’s labor ward handles 20 deliveries a month, which requires the water pump to work so that sanitary conditions are maintained and medical instruments are cleaned and sterilized, to prevent infections. 

“During power outages, we go outside to fetch water with buckets,” explains Naguo. Nurses need to carry water back and forth many times to refill the tank. Lack of water also risks a rise in communicable diseases. “We are very cautious about hospital infections and try to minimize that. We don’t want patients coming in and getting infections,” she says. 

The standby gensets run on gasoline, but fuel is expensive so they are used sparingly, mostly for emergencies and critical procedures where good lighting is critical. If there is no electricity, the nurses must resort to using torches. Currently, there are some small solar panels for critical functions such as vaccine storage. However, power supply remains unstable, forcing staff to operate manually most of the times. 

Despite these difficulties, being a nurse gives Naguo purpose and she feels that her mission is to improve services for the community. She is among the few nurses on the island of Bougainville, where health infrastructure remains limited, following a civil conflict that ravaged the island throughout 1990s. “If I don’t provide services then who else will do it? That’s why I have to keep going. When my time is up, somebody else will come and carry on what we have been doing.” 

The Buin Solar Farm, supported by the Pacific Green Transformation Project, promises a new energy transition. Naguo is not the only one to express enthusiasm for the new source of power, her family and her colleagues are also excited. 

“Our services won’t be disrupted by power cuts and we won’t have to go back and forth to fetch water and look for torches anymore. It’s a very beneficial development for the hospital and surrounding communities,” Naguo said.

Currently, the health facility mainly relies on a stand-by generator that costs about 4,000 kina, about US $948, to operate every two weeks. A consistent supply of power provided by the solar farm will not only solve disruptions in medical services but is also expected to reduce the cost of the energy by up to 50 percent. 

When Naguo started working in Buin in 2017, she faced a heavily male-dominated environment that almost led her to quit. However, there were plenty of people who encouraged her to hang in there and provided her with moral support. She is glad she endured because today she is the Executive Director of Southern Bougainville Health Services.

Now with consistent, clean, and renewable energy coming on, the future of the health facility looks bright, as does the future for women in Bougainville.