Affordable renewable energy needs to be taken seriously as the crucial ingredient of sustainable development, and the Ashden Awards recognise this
One of the finalists for the 2011 Ashden Awards is the Aga Khan Planning and Building Service, which brings affordable, energy-efficient technologies to families in northern Pakistan. Photograph: Ashden Awards - Photo Caption
Energy, it seems, is the Cinderella of development policy. Listen to governments, aid agencies and the big foundations, and the priorities have been malaria, maternal mortality, vaccinations, HIV – health has hoovered up attention and aid dollars in the last decade. Education has come a close second. Now attention is slowly moving to
include agriculture and food security, but the rhetoric is not being matched by the funding. However, on the issue that affects all of these, energy, there is a gap. When did a UK secretary of state for development, a prime minister or a president get up to make a speech on development and put energy at the top of the agenda?One gets the sense that this will change. That in a decade's time – or even sooner – energy will be central to the debate on effective aid. At the moment, discussion around energy for the poorest in the world has something of the tone of those who talked about food security five years ago: deep knowledge about a hugely complex subject but also strong disagreements about the right approach to take, and no easy messages to grab public attention. What pushed food security to the top of the aid agenda was the price spike of 2008 and the knock-on consequences in food riots. Rising fuel prices could have a comparably destabilising impact, and that might be the point at which affordable renewable energy gets taken seriously as the crucial ingredient of sustainable development.
It's not hard to see how energy is central to every other development outcome. Energy use off the grid is disproportionately expensive and the poorest around the world spend a significant portion of their income on fuel in the form of batteries or kerosene. In rural areas, the use of firewood and charcoal is devastating the land, leading to flooding and soil erosion.
Energy has multiple development knock-on effects. Can kids do their homework? All depends on their homes having light. What is one of the leading causes of death for women and children? Chest diseases from inhaling smoke from cooking on open fires inside homes. What is one of the major constraints on small businesses? A secure, affordable energy supply. And so the list goes on.
On Thursday night, the Ashden Awards recognise companies and organisations across the developing world that are trying to bring clean energy within the reach of the poorest. They ferret out extraordinary stories. The message at their conference on Wednesday attended by the finalists was remarkably hopeful. One of the panellists, Matthew Lockwood, from the Institute of Development Studies, suggested that we may be finally at the tipping point in terms of technological innovation in cookstoves and solar panels so that there are now products coming to market which are cheap and practical enough to reach mass sales in the next few years. For example, the cost of photovoltaic cells for solar panels has gone down 50% in five years.
It's striking that while mobile phones have spread with dramatic speed across the developing world, renewable energy technology has been much slower, often requiring start-up funds from aid agencies to get off the ground. That could be about to change. Two companies in Africa, ToughStuff and Toyola, have developed affordable products that are now reaching hundreds of thousands. To ensure that everyone can afford the small capital outlay – Toyola's cookstoves are $7 each – Toyola has also developed a microcredit scheme to pay in installments.
Repeatedly, finalists mentioned that a key hurdle for developing their renewable businesses was lack of access to finance. Banks were too nervous of the business model to lend. A future possible source of funds could be carbon finance; here, Toyola based in Ghana, offered a fascinating insight into the struggle of getting access as a small business to these big international funds which could become significant if negotiations in Durban later this year are successful. Some of the main beneficiaries of the Clean Development Mechanism have been big Chinese companies, but Toyola's chief executive, Suraj Wahab Ologburo, decided to apply. The form-filling, the expert inspections and the amount of information required was daunting; he said he gave up thinking money would ever arrive. But to his amazement it did: Toyola is the first cookstove manufacturer in Africa to win carbon finance. Goldman Sachs has now bought its carbon offset. That has given it real credibility in its negotiations with banks for loans to expand in several other west African countries. But one suspects Ologburo's determination is unusual: he says Africa is full of entrepreneurs with good ideas, their problem is lack of finance.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jun/16/ashden-awards-renewable-energy