To date, many of the conversations and policy inputs around energy poverty have tended to be incremental in nature. Beyond this, millions of school hours are lost due to lack of lighting in schools and the economy suffers when jobs are either lost or not created due to lack of energy – not to mention the damage done to sensitive machinery by power fluctuations. Whilst not directly related to energy, they are heavily influenced by absence of appropriate infrastructure in the rural areas, including energy.Įnergy poverty also has a very female face to it: it is most often women who have to suffer the indignity and physical pain of gathering firewood, often walking long distances to find it and to bring it back home, and then to suffer the debilitating effects of cooking in a cloud of noxious fumes of firewood combustion. For many of the region’s farmers, post-harvest losses increase food insecurity. The prevalence of energy poverty is literally a killer – from respiratory diseases and related ailments that are the result of prolonged inhalation of firewood smoke and other fumes from cooking fuels, to ruined drugs and vaccines that are not kept at prescribed temperatures due to the inability to guarantee constant refrigeration, not to mention other life-saving equipment in hospitals and clinics that is rendered useless by either frequent black/brownouts or absence of electricity. The knock-on effects of this energy poverty are myriad and contribute significantly to the persistence of inequalities and marginalization. So, the irony is that as the region records world-beating economic growth rates, the majority of our co-citizens remain in conditions of energy poverty, forced to rely on alternative energy sources (notably biomass) to meet their energy needs. Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda are among the most populous countries in East Africa and have the largest populations both with and without access to electricity.” International Energy Agency (2014), p. In East Africa, national economies have in recent years also been recording stellar growth rates which promise new opportunities and discontinuity with the past.ĭespite this record, in its Africa Energy Outlook 2014, the International Energy Agency remarked: “More than 200 million people in East Africa are without electricity, around 80% of its population. Recent discoveries of hydrocarbons in various African countries and the massive investments in energy generation capacity have created expectations that the blackouts and brownouts that several African countries have endured for the past decades will soon be a thing of the past. SDG 16: Policies to address the gender dimension of Illicit Financial Flowsīy Arthur Muliro Wapakala, Society for International Development (SID). ![]()
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