When darkness falls

Okay, I admit it. As a kid, I was afraid of the dark. When I had to go back to my pitch-black room to retrieve something I had forgotten, I would have to be very strategic about it. I would sneak around the corner until I could just barely peek out from behind it, then BAM, I would make a frenzied dash to the light switch and throw on the lights, scanning the room quickly to be sure there did not happen to be a monster on my bed, waiting to get me.

The fact that the light switch was there, and that flipping it would illuminate the room, had always been blindingly obvious to me. What does one do when the sun begins to set and it becomes too dark to continue reading? What does one do when entering an unfamiliar area, perhaps the basement, or the garage? “Well, duh,” my smart-aleck younger self might had replied. “You figure out where the light switch is!”

However, for almost a quarter of the Earth’s population, that light switch doesn’t exist. According to a WHO/UNDP report released November 2009, there are one and a half billion people in the world today who lack access to electricity. The problem is worst in Sub-Saharan Africa, EGG-energy’s home turf. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 74% of people don’t have access to electricity, and in Tanzania, the figure comes in at a shocking 89%. As we can see from Map 1, over 80% of those without electricity worldwide reside in Sub-Saharan Africa or in South Asia.

But the problem doesn’t stop there. Research shows that households without access to modern energy sources (such as electricity) often turn to solid fuels (coal or traditional biomass, such as wood, dung, or charcoal). Indoor air pollution caused by the smoke from solid fuel use has been linked to almost two million deaths per year worldwide from child pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and lung cancer. A remarkable 99% of these deaths are occurring in developing countries, suggesting that these deaths are highly preventable.

Important an issue as energy is here in the developed nations, regularly bandied about in the halls of our capitals, how much more important must it be in the developing nations that don’t enjoy our indulgent level of access! The fact of the matter is, energy is a challenge for all of us, because it touches upon so many inescapable aspects of our well-being, from quality of education to quality of medical care, from economic impact to ecological impact.

Developing countries, especially, cannot hope to achieve the national energy access targets they have set (and in particular, those Millennium Development Goals set for six years from now) without a significant increase in efforts to make modern energy sources available to their citizens, efforts that EGG-energy is very much a part of. Working together, we can and we will start switching on the lights for those 1.5 billion people still living in the dark, and help them begin to vanquish the monsters that they face in their own lives every day.

-Mark