Igniting hope for displaced communities in a changing climate

Despite these efforts, there is still much to be done

Indoor air pollution and other health risks, deforestation, conflict, drudgery, and the danger of physical or sexual violence are all exacerbated by poor access to clean energy. Gender disparities mean that women and girls are disproportionately affected.

Affordability is one of the biggest barriers to accessing clean energy. Displaced people often live in poverty with limited disposable incomes; access to jobs, regular incomes, and affordable loans are often hard to come by. The remote location of many refugee and internally displaced people’s camps, coupled with inadequate infrastructure, further complicates efforts to deliver energy solutions and financial or technical support.

Most governments are reluctant to accept displaced people on a long-term basis, but in reality, many are not short-term, emergency shelters. They exist for years, even decades, as crises continue. Privately owned companies are often discouraged from operating in camps due to people’s low purchasing power or barriers imposed by camp authorities. Not only does this result in the long-term energy needs of displaced people remaining largely unmet, vital infrastructure, markets, and skills also remain undeveloped.

Achieving total energy access in displacement settings will require a dramatic increase in political will, financial investment, and collaboration among governments, humanitarian agencies, private sector companies, NGOs, and other stakeholders.

Over $10 billion is needed to meet all refugee energy needs globally between 2022 and 2030.

To meet everyone’s needs, blended and mixed investment approaches including public, private, and humanitarian or development actor participation must be used to create and strengthen markets. The private sector can free up humanitarian funds and generate longer-term economic opportunities, but to meet all needs, tailored subsidies that increase affordability will remain critical. We also need to integrate displaced people into countries’ national climate policies and plans in order to ensure that their climate vulnerability and adaptation needs are addressed.

Practical Action has pioneered innovative strategies that show how inclusive, market-based solutions, aligned with humanitarian principles, can deliver transformative energy services to displaced populations and their host communities.

A key aspect of this is enabling private suppliers to operate in these settings. This includes adapting and trying out different business models, ensuring companies obtain operating permits, supporting improvements in product quality and performance, ensuring affordability and cultural appropriateness, increasing financial access, and providing capacity building for after-sales services.

What are we doing about it?

As a minimum, we ensure that our interventions address both men’s and women’s practical needs for clean, reliable, and affordable energy. However, we seek gender transformative change as our ultimate ambition. This involves equal decision-making power, access to markets, wages, political representation, and distribution of household tasks.

In Rwanda, the second phase of the Renewable Energy for Refugees (RE4R) programme, funded by SIDA, is boosting our impact and providing energy access to over 100,000 people, businesses, and community services across all five of the country’s refugee camps. We’re achieving this by partnering with UNHCR, the government, and energy companies. To ensure vulnerable refugee populations can afford clean energy for cooking and their livelihoods (productive use of energy), we are also running a demand-side subsidy scheme that uses Results-Based Finance which is funded by EnDev.

We want to empower refugees to grow their businesses, increase their incomes and become self-reliant, so we are launching a new programme that tests how tailored subsidies can make productive use of energy appliances, such as solar fridges and solar mills, more affordable.

We know that energy access is crucial, but it’s one piece of the broader humanitarian and development puzzle. We are therefore drawing on our expertise in areas like agriculture, water and waste management, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction to develop integrated programmes that tackle energy alongside other critical challenges. In Mahama refugee camp we have been implementing the Climate Resilience Farming project which enables refugees and surrounding communities to adopt regenerative agriculture activities through a solar-powered irrigation scheme.

Our recent study – Can Market Mechanisms Enable Energy Access for People Living in Extreme Poverty? – shows that displaced, marginalised and other vulnerable communities need tailored solutions to enable energy access, including market mechanisms and financial interventions adapted to their circumstances. So we welcome the growing interest of influential organisations like the World Bank, FCDO, GOGLA, and Acumen, in seeking solutions for the hardest-to-reach populations, including those living in displacement.

Our goal is to enable over 4 million people in humanitarian settings across Africa, Asia and Latin America to access affordable, reliable, and low-carbon energy solutions by 2030. We plan to achieve this by contributing to systemic change and continuing to partner with key funders and humanitarian organisations. This includes being an active steering committee member of the Global Platform for Action, and working alongside other likeminded organisations to implement and expand proven methods.

We look forward to exploring new ideas and opportunities for transforming access in displacement settings at the upcoming Humanitarian Energy Conference in Nairobi.