I have been reading an excellent report from the Shell Foundation ‘Accelerating Access to Energy’. The statistics are challenging. Here are a few:
1. Low income households in Africa spend up to 40% of their income on energy.
2. 1.2bn people lack any access to reliable and affordable electricity and for another 800 million the grid is unreliable and unpredictable.
3. Half the children in the developing world go to schools that have no electricity.
The Shell Foundation, through many years of experience have adopted what they call the “enterprise based theory of change”. This has involved identifying and tackling market failures, helping create social enterprises, patient and flexible grant funding and business skills development.
They have now refined this into a six stage process that takes between 5 to 10 years to reach maturity. The first three stages are to catalyse, pilot and create pioneers. The major step is number 4; scale. This involves a mixture of grant money and market revenues. It is this stage that we are getting involved with through Scotland Lights up Malawi. There is good evidence from Kenya and Tanzania that the model of distributing solar lights through schools works well and by about year 3 or 4 of the scaling stage the business can be self funding.
So if you haven’t donated to Scotland Lights up Malawi, the 2020 Climate Group's climate justice initiative yet please think about it, access requires action! You can find more details elsewhere on the 2020 group webiste but remember any personal donations are doubled until 5 February by UK Aid Match which matches any public donation pound for pound.
