Solar O&M Training — Northern State, Sudan

MIMAH brought its operations and maintenance training programme to Northern State as part of the UNDP Healthcare Solarisation Project, working alongside the National Medical Supplies Fund (NMSF) and the Federal Ministry of Health. Health facility staff and local technicians from across the state took part in the sessions.

The goal was simple: when the trainers leave, the people who work in these facilities should be able to run their solar systems themselves.

The Healthcare Solarisation Project has put solar power into 110 health facilities across Sudan. Panels and batteries are only half of the job; every one of those systems needs someone nearby who understands it. Without that, a facility waits for a technician from Khartoum each time a warning light comes on, and small faults grow into outages.

Training local staff is what closes that gap, and it had to work for a mixed audience: facility staff, technicians and community representatives with very different starting points.

Classroom sessions ran with two trainers presenting together, slides on the projector and notes going up on the whiteboard in Arabic. The material covered system components, daily operation, reading performance, and the difference between a fault you fix on site and one you escalate.

The strongest part of the training happened outside the hall. The group moved to an installed system and worked through it for real: trainers opened the inverter and battery cabinets, walked through the wiring and breakers, and uncovered the earthing pit so trainees could see what a proper ground connection looks like. Trainees crouched around that pit with phones out, recording every step; that level of detail rarely makes it into a manual.

A facility team that understands its own equipment spends less time offline, catches small problems before they become big ones, and calls for help only when help is actually needed.

That is capacity building in practice, not as a slogan: local staff, running local infrastructure, keeping healthcare available in Northern State.