Access to Energy
Ecoal, March 2010, Volume 70
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) recently released a report entitled "The Energy Access Situation in Developing Countries: A Review Focusing on the Least Developed Countries and Sub-Saharan Africa".
Energy access is an issue of great importance to the work of the WHO and UNDP due to its impact on almost all aspects of human welfare, including agricultural productivity, health care, education and environmental sustainability.
Reaching the Millennium Development Goals
The report has been produced with the target date for the UN Millennium Development Goals just five years away. Although the report acknowledges that there is no specific goal for energy set by the UN, it points out that many of the goals will be unachievable without better access to electricity in developing countries. This includes the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people living on less than $1 per day, which the International Energy Agency (IEA) has suggested would require the number of people without access to electricity to fall to under one billion. However, current projections suggest that this figure will still be around 1.6 billion in 2015.
Access to Electricity
The report analyses large quantities of data on access to electricity and access to modern fuels (classified by the WHO and UNDP as electricity, liquid fuels and gaseous fuels,such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), natural gas and kerosene). There is a specific focus on the situation in Least Developing Countries (LDCs) and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the areas with the lowest levels of access to modern energy services.
The report found that electrification rates for the developing world still remain relatively low at 72%, compared with 99.8% for OECD and transition economies. For some SSA countries, including Burundi, Liberia and Chad, the percentage of the population with access to electricity is still as low as 3%. However, there is more positive news for small island states such as Tonga, Samoa and Tuvalu, all of which have electricity access rates of over 90%.
Further Challenges
The reliance on solid fuels - traditional biomass and coal - for indoor cooking, and the potential associated health risks, is also highlighted by the report. Overall, 42% of the population in developing countries still rely on wood as the primary cooking fuel. For LDCs alone, this figure is even higher at 73%.
High dependence on biomass for cooking not only brings direct health risks but places a heavy burden on many people, particularly women and children, in terms of gathering the fuel themselves.
WHO and the UNDP highlight that energy access issues are still a challenge in developing countries and also clearly show the associated difficulties in achieving a number of the Millennium Development Goals. The need for developing countries to implement their own energy access targets is one of the key messages arising from the report. The report also calls for greater efforts to expand energy services in developing countries which would include 'political leadership, appropriate priorities and policies, and the massive scaling up of programmes' in order to attract increased investment in the energy infrastructure of developed countries.
Distribution of People Without Electricity Access by Developing Regions (2008)
