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Energy is a problem for the rural poor in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Although in the modern world electric light and clean cookers are considered essential, most of the rural poor know that they are not part of their reality. Modern energy technologies are not available in their communities, and in the cases where they are, the energy products are ill-adapted to their specific demands and affordability. As a consequence, worldwide, nearly 2.4 billion people use traditional biomass fuels for cooking in health threatening traditional fireplaces, and nearly 1.6 billion people do not have access to electricity.
In international meetings, the nations of the world agree that enhancing modern energy access is essential for reaching the Millennium Development Goals. This political will on international level has hardly been translated to improvements on the ground. In fact, the situation seems to be getting worse.
Many rural energy access projects have failed because they were not able to reach the poor target groups in an effective let alone sustainable way. They have come to realize that the rural poor live far away in dispersed settlements, where roads and electricity do not easily reach. They have also found that the rural poor live in a very different cultural and social context, distant from the urban based companies, NGOs, and development agencies. The distance makes it difficult to listen to the poor, understand their language, recognize their energy practices and better understand their energy market context, and to identify what would be priorities for development projects to focus on.
The rural poor in their turn have learned to depend only on themselves and their communities. The market channels that link them to the national and world market are few, fragile, and mostly informal.
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