EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Energy Access: Illusion or Reality for the Poor?

Latsoucabe Fall
Additional contact information
Latsoucabe Fall: Secretary General, WEC Senegal Member Committee

Energy & Environment, 2005, vol. 16, issue 5, 743-761

Abstract: Electricity access is vital for alleviating poverty, and reversing the past and current negative economic and social trends in developing countries. However, despite efforts undertaken so far, the technological accomplishments and so-called breakthroughs, as well as global wealth, the population without electricity access in developing countries is still tremendous. In Sub-Saharan Africa, at least three-quarters of the population currently have no access to electricity; and over the past three decades, the number of people without access to electricity in this region has doubled. Moreover, if we applied the electricity connection rates of the past decade, one must wait until at least the end of this century, before achieving the electricity access objective set for the region. Some experts contend that electricity reform options experienced in Africa have not yet reached the expected beneficial effects, in terms of improvement of the electricity access rate for the poor, and that they were not designed to address the energy problems of the poor, but were explicitly aimed at achieving other objectives. It is thus well founded to raise the following questions: Is the WSSD objective of energy access realistic or utopian, particularly for Africa? Is the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of African poor by 2015 a ‘white vow’? How can we reverse the past and current negative trends and move towards the achievement of ambitious yet realistic objectives of widespread energy access?

Date: 2005
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1260/095830505774478594 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:engenv:v:16:y:2005:i:5:p:743-761

DOI: 10.1260/095830505774478594

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Energy & Environment
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:sae:engenv:v:16:y:2005:i:5:p:743-761