Tom Wallace

At the moment, nearly half of sub-Saharan Africa’s population will remain without electricity until 2030. However, yesterday United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stated that we can’t achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) without increasing energy access.

In my writings, I often mention how many people don’t have access to electricity or modern clean cooking facilities and I say this is a terrible thing. But the real question is WHY? Why is it so terrible not to have access to electricity or modern forms of energy?

Notwithstanding its popularity as tourist destination Thailand has achieved steady economic growth over the last decade largely due to industrial and agriculture exports. These exports are mostly electronics, agricultural commodities and processed foods – the production of which is heavily reliant on electricity. However, 30 years ago, only 25 percent of the population had access to electricity – so what changed?

Tom Wallace, ONE’s policy associate based in the UK, reports on what advances need to be made in the eradication of energy poverty. In 2000, world leaders promised to halve extreme poverty by 2015 and tackle some of the biggest development challenges with a global plan called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Thanks to millions

Regular readers of the ONE blog will be aware that well over 500 million people in sub-Saharan Africa do not have any access to electricity.  This situation has huge economic and social implications for the continent: it restricts education and life-saving healthcare provision, limits business growth and leads to regression in job creation. Zimbabwean student

Many things in our modern lives make us angry: long lines at the supermarket, missing the last bus, traffic jams, difficult-to-open packaging. Sometimes though, it’s worth taking stock and considering something we should be really angry about: energy poverty. Yesterday I was at the launch of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2012 report and sitting in

The provision of a $2 vaccine to save a child’s life for many is an important and obvious thing to support. But sometimes what is less obvious in saving that child’s life is how important the road is that was used to deliver the vaccine, or the electricity that powered the fridge to store the

In the second of two short videos, Richenda Van Leeuwen, executive director of Energy and Climate at the United Nations Foundation, discusses what the private sector, governments and civil society can do in 2012 to tackle energy poverty. I had a chance to interview her during the the recent 2012 Ashden Conference on Sustainable Solution

The recent 2012 Ashden Conference on Sustainable Solution for Better Lives had a focus on energy solutions and was chaired by Richenda Van Leeuwen, executive director of Energy and Climate at the United Nations Foundation. Ms. Van Leeuwen is an international energy expert with more than 20 years of experience and has a particular focus

Unfortunately, there is little denying the failure in international leadership at the UN Convention on Sustainable Development, otherwise known as Rio+20. In a world of rising inequality and unsustainable pressure on our planet’s natural resources — both of which are undermining economic growth and poverty alleviation — government leaders and civil society organizations alike have

Yesterday, the US State Department gave its support to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) Initiative. The initiative seeks to mobilize support and action for the goal of providing universal modern energy access by 2030 as well as doubling the share of renewables in the global mix and doubling the rate

Yesterday at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, the United Nations Foundation released the Energy Access Practitioner Network report: Towards Achieving Universal Energy Access by 2030, a set of recommendations based on international on-the-ground experience to provide electricity to the 1.3 billion people who still lack it. ONE strongly welcomes the report, which