ENERGY, EDUCATION AND ENTERPRISE

Energy as a driver to development
Energy has long been a prime mover for socio-economic growth and development. In the Commission for Africa report , energy was highlighted as a priority for the business sector and for poor households alike, demonstrating that access to energy provides opportunities for people at all levels. This was obvious. It is also considered critical to the success of meeting the Millennium Development Goals as it has an impact across so many sectors.

Modern energy sources such as electricity or liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) are available only to a few urban centres and economic structures, with the majority of the poor using whatever available biomass is around them, and in its raw form.

Fuels used traditionally include fuel wood, charcoal, and kerosene in urban areas; and fuel wood, crop residues and animal wastes in rural areas, which provide basic heating for cooking and limited quality lighting. Low levels of lighting in the home make working or studying in the evening particularly challenging and therefore hinder educational and skills development.

Rural infrastructure and skills shortages
Taking East African countries as a case, their economies are largely driven by agriculture and small enterprises, characterised by infrequent use of motive energy (tractors and trucks), and consequently, low levels of energy consumption. This makes it less attractive for private enterprises to offer services in this sector, which compounds the problem of having limited infrastructure available. Without infrastructure (including clean energy services), it remains very difficult to persuade skilled people to move back into rural areas, leading to a shortage of trained teachers, nurses, engineers etc. in rural areas.

The Commission for Africa (2005) makes the link between education, health and wealth generation in its 2005 report:

‘A healthy and skilled workforce is vital to the success of any economic activity. Healthcare and education are the birthrights of every child but they are also essential for the health of the nation. Countries cannot develop properly if only elites are educated. Countries with poor health and low levels of education find it more difficult to achieve economic growth.’

Women and girls are still disproportionately burdened by lack of access to modern fuels and electricity because they are responsible for time-consuming fuel gathering, cooking and food preparation. Traditional staple food preparation involves threshing, husking or grinding, mostly done by female labour in the poorest households because of lack of access to mechanical power. Many girls are withdrawn from school to attend to such domestic chores, resulting in lifelong damage to their literacy and economic opportunities. They suffer considerable damage to their health, especially respiratory diseases from indoor air pollution, cooking indoors on poorly ventilated stoves.

Figure 1 Out-of-school children by wealth quintile, area of residence and gender (42 countries), 2000-2008

The role of education
How can we help households gain the most benefits from the fuels available to increase their quality of life through better access to education, health care services and non-agricultural economic opportunities?
Education, at all levels of society, can have a significant impact on these highlighted issues. At every decision-making level, appropriate technologies should be understood and promoted in line with national development strategies. Both large- and small-scale energy provisions are important; whilst large-scale energy projects are important for countries as a whole, the poorest sections of society require small-scale interventions based on relevant knowledge, basic financing and appropriate training in the use of the technologies provided.

Appropriate technology training
Experience has shown that education and skills development in their conventional forms may not necessarily respond to the actual needs on the ground be it in energy supply, processing of the agricultural produce, or even in water supply. The main problem is that the training institutions tend to maintain uniform, standard curricula most of which are borrowed from developed economies and the academic world, and may not necessarily address the nature of the problems affecting developing countries.

Campaigns to support the adoption of more efficient technologies should target the right audience; if people are illiterate, there’s no point sending out detailed leaflets!  At the technical level, attention must be paid to the use of local materials and the ability to maintain and repair technologies. To this effect, one needs to come up with innovative ways of combining the general conventional academic knowledge with the actual problems requiring attention, and come up with solutions that are pertinent to the actual needs of our societies. For example, the engineering theories required to design an efficient chimney for a rural fuelwood stove may not necessarily be found in conventional engineering literature, and similarly, designing an efficient domestic or institutional biogas stove or lamp may need some adjustments to normal engineering formulae for it to work.

After realising that graduates from the universities, both in country and abroad, took several years before they were able to produce solutions relevant to the local environment, the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) in Rwanda established the ‘Centre for Innovation and Technology Transfer (CITT)’. At this centre, young graduates from KIST and other institutions of higher learning in the country and abroad who wish to start a business get offered ‘business incubation facilities’ for a period of time where they acquire more focused skills on their technology of choice.

Such technologies include, but are not limited to; bread-oven production, assembly of simple energy supply kits (such as solar lighting lanterns), solar water heaters, construction of biogas plants, fabrication of gas stoves, as well as efficient charcoal and fuel wood stoves. Some graduates wish to become independent power suppliers in micro-hydro plants, both feeding electricity into the grid and setting up isolated grids, The technology facilities are coupled with skills acquisition in business and marketing where they get to know how to prepare business plans and marketing strategies that enable them to acquire bank loans and other assistance.

Employment opportunities
There are plenty of business opportunities such as these, especially in developing countries. In Rwanda for instance, these simple but enterprising businesses are engaging not only the young university graduates but also the less well-educated; young and elderly people from the communities. For example, there is a group of women who were trained in simple solar technologies by the ‘Barefoot College’ of India. They now install solar PV units on school roof tops, clinics, and households in different villages, earning themselves income to keep their families.

These business opportunities have attracted the e.quinox group from the UK. This is a group of young graduates from Imperial College in London who produce energy kits, such as simple solar lighting units and mobile telephone charging kits at low prices. These units are sold in villages not only in Rwanda but also in other countries of Africa and Asia where local people can adopt and use them. 

Quality of life benefits
For most people, having electricity in their homes means that they have gained status, they can have lighting, perhaps a television, a radio and maybe even a refrigerator, a better life. At village level, education should focus on the opportunities provided by access to energy which go beyond these uses. For example, energy access can stimulate water pumping, carpentry works, welding business, or running an internet café.

Teaching entrepreneurship
To encourage these activities requires an approach that is equipped with tools that respond to the local requirements, with future efforts focusing primarily on entrepreneurship.  Some people are born entrepreneurs, but they are scarce and ‘teaching’ entrepreneurship is a challenge in any country. There are many examples describing how organisations go into a community and run workshops on job-creation. If the best examples provided are, for example, making pancakes and donuts to sell to people who pass through the town in a bus, then everyone starts to make pancakes and donuts to sell to people on buses. It is difficult to encourage innovation, and people have to learn how to identify new market opportunities. This challenge requires constantly new approaches to training.

People have an extraordinary capacity to find solutions to local problems. However, many will use that knowledge and move to larger cities with the prospect of making a better income. If incentives can be found to persuade people to stay in their local communities instead of moving, people in rural communities will experience greater benefits and will be inspired to develop their own economic opportunities from greater access to energy. When people stay in their local areas it fosters peer-to-peer learning and training which in turn leads to people being trained in non-agricultural activities and therefore provides a larger ‘talent pool’ for other investors or businesses who may decide to move into the area, which in turn can provide employment opportunities for more people and the prospect of greater benefits for their children.

Let me conclude this paper by referring to a story of a lady who, in her campaign to disseminate the wider use of improved cookstoves, said to the users that an efficient cookstove saves 50% of the fuelwood compared to the traditional stove. And she went on to say that if one used two such stoves, then the saving would therefore be 100%, implying that one would never need fuel wood or charcoal for the cooking again. Although her mathematics was wrong, the stove lady highlights another very important dimension to consider when working in this field: commitment, passion, motivation and enthusiasm for learning, adopting and implementing.  The stove lady was enthusiastically overzealous, and I admire that.

References

Our Common Interest, Report of the Commission for Africa, March 2005, http://www.commissionforafrica.info/2005-report [Accessed July 2011]
 
Liberia: Giving Power Back to the People, World Bank, March 2011 http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/EXTAFRREGTOPENERGY/0,,contentMDK:22847892~menuPK:717365~pagePK:34004173~piPK:34003707~theSitePK:717306,00.html [Accessed July 2011]
 
Global Initiative  on Out-of-School Children, UNICEF and the UNESCO,  Institute for Statistics, 2011, http://www.unicef.org/education/files/OOSCI_flyer_FINAL.pdf [Accessed July 2011]