Hello! My name is Tash and I recently joined the TONIBUNG team out in Penampang, Malaysian Borneo. I also worked for Rolls-Royce back in the UK, and left in May to spend a few months volunteering in the Makwanpur region of Nepal. It was excellent preparation as I arrived in Sabah already acclimatised to the Asian heat, humidity and squat toilets!

I’ll be looking into productive end uses for the electricity generated by TONIBUNG’s systems. The first concept that I’m investigating is rice milling. The preliminary research and business modelling was completed by Julian, one of last year’s EWB volunteers, and his work has been a great platform to start from. My job is to shape this into a formal business plan and (hopefully) to pilot it too.

Long Telingan in Sarawak has been identified as the village that TONIBUNG would like to implement this in, and on Friday we embarked on the long and bumpy journey to get there.

                                                       Logging on the road to Long Telingan

                                                                       A rather excellent lunch

My first impressions of Long Telingan were very positive. It’s beautifully located and I was surprised by the houses, which appeared as affluent as any in Penampang. Our host family spoke good English, which was really useful as they were able to answer some of my questions about the village. They were incredibly hospitable and the food was amazing! At dinner we feasted on wild pig from the surrounding jungle and freshly caught fish from the river.

                                                                            Long Semadoh

Long Telingan is part of a cluster of 3 villages (the other two are Long Semadoh and Long Airport) located in an area native to a particularly valuable type of rice, Beras Bario. At present, around 50% of households have their own petrol-driven rice mills. These machines are cheap, but they mill to a low quality, meaning that farmers are unable to achieve the profit margins that they could with better equipment. In our proposal such a mill would be mechanically driven from Long Telingan’s 20 kW micro hydro turbine. It would be owned and operated by a cooperative comprising members from all 3 villages, and the rice would be sold at premium prices to a company in Kuala Lumpur. It’s estimated that the price the locals sell their crops at could be raised from 25 MR / gantang to 40 MR / gantang under such a scheme (1 gantang = 3.4 kg). A cut of the profits would go to TONIBUNG to pay for the initial instalment of the micro hydro system.

A petrol driven rice mill

We stayed in Long Telingan for just one night, and it was really helpful to get to know the layout of the village, to verify the assumptions behind the business model and to talk to some of the locals about the project feasibility. I will be returning for a longer visit in a month’s time to properly engage the community and to finalise the details of how the project would operate. In the meantime, I’ll be heading out to the Philippines with Jenny to visit SIBAT, another EWB project partner. SIBAT have successfully set up several rice milling social enterprises so I’m hoping to learn from their past experiences.

                                                              A paddy field in Long Telingan

                                                                           Catching dinner