Access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy is often considered as vital to alleviating extreme poverty. Beyond technology, the challenge is to make these technologies accessible to rural populations.
The toolkit focuses on end-user finance for renewable energy technologies for rural households, smallholder farmers, and rural micro, small and medium enterprises.
Key issues
Energy is a key part of people’s livelihoods. Access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy is proven to be vital to alleviating extreme poverty (World Bank, 2018). Yet access to clean sources of energy is still a challenge for many smallholder farmers, their families and rural entrepreneurs. Today, an estimated 1.2 billion people, around 16 per cent of the global population, do not have access to electricity (IEA, 2016).
Among them, over 95 per cent are in sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia, and around 80 per cent live in rural areas. Furthermore, over 2.7 billion people, representing 38 per cent of the world’s population, still rely on the traditional practice of using solid biomass for cooking, using inefficient cookstoves or open fires in poorly ventilated spaces (IEA, 2016). Again, the majority of people living without clean cooking facilities are in sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia, and in rural areas.
You can download this toolkit for free here.
