In the long walk towards universal energy access, refugees are among the hardest to reach. Across the world there are 120 million people living in refugee camps, and 94% of them don’t have clean and affordable power. That’s something that my colleagues at Ashden are working on, as part of a project called Transforming Humanitarian Energy Access, or THEA.
The project finds promising refugee-led companies and organisations in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, and helps them to scale up with grants and technical assistance. Here’s a video that we watched in a recent staff meeting, and it really shows the difference that energy makes to those at the margins. Clean and affordable energy is an enabler of so many other things – raising incomes for small businesses, reducing the risk to women gathering firewood, freeing up household income to pay for school fees, allowing displaced people to communicate with family and friends elsewhere.
There are lots of solutions, and in the video you’ll find entrepreneurs working with solar power, but also biodigestion, charcoal briquette production, and I particularly enjoyed seeing mushroom farming in there too.
- More about Ashden Climate Solutions.
The Earthbound Report 