Bill Clinton greets villagers during his visit to the Ethiopian highlands. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty images
Sarah Boseley, The Guardian
He dropped out of the sky and left, an hour or so later, the same way, helicopter rotor blades driving a gritty dust storm from the dirt playing field into the faces of hundreds of Ethiopian hill villagers. They waved and clapped and shook the hand of a white-haired man who used to hold the most powerful office on the planet and who has just failed to help his wife secure it in her turn. Yet the people of Rema had no idea who William Jefferson Clinton was or what he was doing in their village.
One man knew the name, though his wife looked blank. “Clinton,” said Awke Tiruneh, whose hut the president had been due to visit but didn’t, because of the tight schedule powerful men run to. “He is from Germany.” It is the only foreign country Tiruneh has heard of, because a German NGO is based on Rema’s doorstep, but he has not a clue where either Germany or America are. The outside world is the village on top of the next hill, a long, rocky walk down one mountain and up another.
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Yet Clinton came to put Rema on the map, hailing it as a model for the developing world and a place that could teach the US a thing or two. Rema, in the northern highlands, is now the first solar-powered village in Ethiopia – a cluster of 1,100 homes that shine in the dark evenings like white beads on a string. Every home has electric light from an energy-efficient LED bulb hanging from the straw ceiling. Children can do schoolwork after 6pm while women weave the gabi – a white cotton head-to-toe wrap that is worn in church and in the evenings to keep out the cold (now Clinton has one too). Night classes have started in the school for adults who want to learn to read, there is a solar-powered fridge at the health centre that cannot run out of fuel, and women no longer have to walk a mile to the well, thanks to a solar-powered pump. High-quality equipment has been installed that will last for 25 or 30 years. Villagers pay around 80p a month to cover the cost of maintenance and new batteries.
Rema has become a model for the future energy needs of developing countries, Clinton believes. Solar power could be a revolution for Africa. “It’s the energy equivalent of the cellphone movement,” he says.
Bill is not the only Clinton whose imagination has been caught by this project. His 28-year-old daughter Chelsea is there too, as are Clinton’s brother Roger and 14-year-old nephew Tyler. Chelsea took indefinite unpaid leave from her management consultancy job to help her mother’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination. “She wasn’t back at a new task yet so she wanted to come with me, and I love it,” her father tells me later in the presidential suite at the Addis Ababa Sheraton, whose marbled elegance and air conditioning would make a Rema villager’s eyes pop. “We like to travel together.”
The shade of Hillary’s momentous campaign travels with them. Clinton speaks of it with a sort of warm afterglow, in spite of the panning he personally received. “I’m immensely proud of Hillary,” he says. “Her performance in March, April and May, to June 3, was literally miraculous. If you’d told me, given the facts that existed on March 1, that she’d come back, win more popular votes, do as well as she did, I would never have believed it … I thought she learned, she grew and I think by the end she was running like a house on fire.
“I’m very grateful actually, personally, that I had a chance to get out and see so much of America, because her only option after she lost all those caucuses in February and knew she was going to be outspent was to raise this incredible grassroots campaign. And Chelsea made 450 appearances for her mother. In the last three months alone I went to 350 different communities. I got to see parts of America I never saw when I was running or serving, and it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.”
Now, however, he is on a whistle-stop tour of his charitable foundation’s projects in Africa: today Ethiopia, tomorrow Rwanda, the next day in and out of Liberia and on to Senegal. Much of it is to do with health – Clinton’s influence, his ability to flatter, charm and persuade, has had great success in negotiating down drug prices for Aids and malaria for the developing world. He is pushing to increase dramatically the numbers of women with HIV given drugs in pregnancy to stop their babies becoming infected. But here in the northern highlands of Ethiopia, we are looking at ways to mitigate the effects of climate change.
“My whole theory about climate change is that the biggest problem in aggregate is the fact that India and China are about to pass the US in emissions and no country is going to agree to remain poor in order to avert climate change. We have to be able to show that there are economically viable options.
“I think it is really important that the vast mass of countries that are developing find ways to skip the carbon stage of economic development – ways that accelerate rather than undermine their wellbeing.”
Shouldn’t the US take steps to reduce its own emissions before it starts visiting its ideas on Africa? “I think that the United States does need to pass climate change legislation, we need to put a price on carbon, we need to set up a capping trade system and one that can’t be cheated on: I agree with all that. But when people say that most loudly, they are usually looking for an excuse to do nothing, and if we burn up the planet then no one will give you laurels for having come up with the best available excuse to do nothing. Your grandchildren won’t be proud of you. And we may have an irreversible situation,” he says.
“Secondly, because all these developing countries have to be worried about the problems at hand, feeding the people that are there, educating them, providing basic healthcare, having some near-term economic strategy, I think that people like me who care about this stuff have to find economically attractive options for them.”
Environmentally friendly energy policies can go hand in hand with economic growth, he says. It’s happened in the UK and Denmark, he says, two of only six countries – excluding “some former communist countries that, prior to 1990, were running very, very dirty carbon-based inefficient industrial economies” – that have been on course to meet their Kyoto target.
“The biggest problem with Kyoto was the United States bugged out on it, so it gave everybody an excuse to take a bath,” he says.
“I’m not a government and I don’t have access to vast amounts of money, and I’m frustrated that even when the Democrats are in, we still haven’t given a tax credit, for example, for wind energy that goes more than three years. Nonetheless, somebody needs to go out there and help people figure out how to do this stuff. That’s what I do.
“I just try to figure it out and I try to get other smart people around who figure out how to do this, because I was so struck by all these countries that won’t meet their Kyoto targets. Most of them were not led by people who were dishonest when they signed Kyoto. They aren’t lazy, they aren’t stupid and they aren’t corrupt. They’re well-meaning, hard-working people who are, like all political leaders, facing all kinds of competing pressures in an economy that is not organised for tomorrow’s energy – it’s organised for yesterday’s.
“One reason I went to that little village today is that that little village is now organised for tomorrow. I’ll go home now and I’ll be able to tell people that I went to the highlands of Ethiopia and saw a classroom with two LED lights – nobody will believe that – and that it works economically for them.”
The man who brought light to Rema was neither a former president nor a technology geek. Harald Schützeichel studied music and theology, he tells me. He started the Solar Energy Foundation because he wanted to help development. If there are environmental benefits, so much the better. He was completely astonished when he got an email saying Clinton wanted to visit. He is still not quite sure why, but he knows that the boss of Good Energies, the company that has donated 80% of his funding, is a friend of the former president.
What Schützeichel does not realise is that Marcel Brenninkmeijer, founder and CEO of Good Energies, who also jumps out of the Clinton helicopter, is shelling out cash – it took £240,000 to equip Rema – because he is part of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). It is a kind of networking with good deeds attached. Clinton brings together wealthy businessmen and government leaders for an annual jamboree and they promise action on global problems, not just talk. If they fail to carry out their promises, they don’t get invited again.
Schützeichel, though, is innocent of the politics of global philanthropy. Clinton invites him to give a presentation to the next meeting in September. Afterwards, Schützeichel confesses he has no idea what the CGI is. He wants help to expand his solar-powered villages across Ethiopia by setting up a microfinance bank that will allow villagers to borrow money for solar power installation and pay it off at a rate they can afford. “I need €10m [£7.8m],” he says, barely appreciating that he has just been handed his best-ever opportunity of getting it.
Rema had its installation for free, to show what could be done. Down the hill from the village, Schützeichel has built an International Solar Energy School, which has trained 24 technicians from all over Ethiopia. The plan is for them to return to their regions and set up their own businesses, equipping more villages, which will borrow the necessary funds from Schützeichel’s microfinance bank.
We’re thousands of miles away from the US, but not from its politics. Some of the foundation staff worked for Hillary’s nomination and they talk of it as something momentous, with a sort of awe-struck sadness that they were part of it and she lost. “I just want very much the country to change course,” says Clinton. “I want us to be on a different economic course, a different social policy course, a different course in the world. And we’re going to do what we can to be helpful.”
What about criticisms of his role in Hillary’s campaign? “It’s all part of the deal,” he says, laughing. “Look, what we were doing was working, so you had to assume there was going to be some blow-back. It’s a contact sport, politics … I would never have gotten back into politics if it hadn’t been for Hillary, but I felt so strongly that she should be elected and she needed all of us – she needed Chelsea and she needed me. Our bodies made up for the financial disparity a little bit. And so we threw ourselves into the fray and did our best and you just get up and go on.
“And I’m immensely proud of her, but I think she’s the political leader of our family now – I’m not in politics. And I’m going to do exactly what she says we should do and agree with her decision. I think she’s been big and positive and that’s what we should all be.”
And so he and Chelsea are in Africa to change the world in other ways. Rema’s name will be spoken of in high circles, as a byword for environmentally friendly development. More visitors may descend from the skies. A solar-powered cinema is mooted, where films on development will be shown, so that Rema’s people will understand what they can aspire to.
Awke Tiruneh and his wife Emaye Beyene are not the only couple who are faintly bemused. They are pleased with their two lightbulbs, one in the main room and a second in the kitchen annexe of their pristine mud hut, and with the radio that everybody in Rema tunes to get music, not news. But they say they don’t want anything else.
“When they have more money, they don’t know what to do with it in Rema,” says Samson Tsegaye, country director of the Solar Power Foundation. “They are happy. They don’t need a Mercedes or a television. When they have money, the men are always going to the bar.
The solar cinema is to show them what money can do – how opportunity can come to their lives. They have three meals a day but they don’t know what is going on in the world.”
Are Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have been at the centre of what is going on in the world, happier than the villagers of Rema? It’s an interesting question.