Solar panels perched on the roof of Tanghin Dassouri's medical clinic have lit two decades of births and deaths for the 60,000 people in this cluster of villages just outside of Ouagadougou.
"It's feeble but it's better than nothing," said Sister Georgette Ilboudo, one of the nurses who tends to patients in the mud-walled clinic with the faint buzz of the solar current in the background.
Weak or not, energy experts believe that with better investment in the informal private sector that engages the majority of Africans, panels like these could breed a revolution in renewable energy for the world's poorest - and many believe sunniest - continent.
Mindful of rising prices for fossil fuels and Africa's shrinking forests, as well as the growing population of unemployed, African heads of state have begun to take a closer look at the feasibility of developing the alternative energy sector.
Creating jobs in renewable resource management was among key recommendations earlier this month at an anti-poverty summit of some 20 heads of state who gathered in Ouagadougou under the aegis of the African Union.
"If the states take concrete action to support evolving activity in the sector there will come a time that we can use local materials and artisanal labour to harness the sun," said Issa Bikienga of the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS).
"Here we are with this ample resource and we are not using it to our advantage," for pumping water, lighting and refrigeration, he added.
"In the Sahel, 40 percent of people do not have access to drinking water; we can use solar to help."
Advances in technology have helped bring the price of photovoltaic panels substantially lower, helping to light villages across the continent where grid electricity is a distant promise for one-tenth of their 1980s-era cost.
Still, at 600 dollars for a pair of 40-watt panels, they remain beyond the reach of rural Africans, most of whom survive on less than one dollar a day.
Add in the cost of import tariffs and pages of pedantic regulations, "and you are looking at a perfect way to squander something that could be of such benefit," said Malakilo Diasso, who in 1979 was the first solar panel dealer in landlocked sunspot Burkina Faso.
"If you have a centralised, high-powered system you can light up a village of 20,000 people. What is needed is the courage from government to say that this is feasible."
The UN Environment Program (UNEP) champions microcredits to develop the sector as a way for rural landholders to pay for their solar energy in instalments. "Right now it means that Africans have to finance 20 years of electricity up front," noted Eric Usher, a UNEP renewable energy expert.
"Why should a poor farmer in Mali have to do that while someone in California does not?"