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?

This guest post is by journalist Abby Higgins, in partnership with The Seattle Globalist. It’s the second in a four part series which reveals the economically complex and culturally rich life of urban slums, and challenges our perceptions of what life is like for the 1 billion people around the world that live in them.

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?

Yesterday, 210 ONE members stormed Capitol Hill for Lobby Day, attending nearly 175 meetings with members of Congress to urge them to protect our life-saving programs for the world’s poorest people. Lobby Day is the crown jewel of the the 2013 ONE Power Summit. After three days of learning about ONE’s issues, sharing best practices

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

As we watched what must have been the Super Bowl director’s worst nightmare unfold, it was easy to forget that half-a-billion people in Africa never have power. Photo credit: CNN For about five hours on the night of the Super Bowl, the only thing to be found on every social media platform was a discussion

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

Earlier this week, before I was fired up to watch the first presidential debate, I had the privilege to view a screening of “Into the Niger Delta,” a documentary about the catastrophic oil spills in the Niger Delta at a special screening at the George Washington University in D.C. Oil pipeline in the Niger Delta

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

Last week, the lights went out for roughly 2.7 million people thanks to a freak storm that swept the mid-Atlantic region. No power, no refrigerator, no air conditioning. With temperatures rocketing to 100 degrees, people resorted to sleeping in their basements to avoid the heat, and freezers full of food have spoiled. Roughly a quarter

This week, I had the opportunity to attend InterAction’s Best Practices and Innovation Initiative‘s award ceremony, which is aimed at sharing success stories and recognizing organizations that effectively build local capacity in countries around the world. Heifer International and Mercy Corps, two nonprofits from the agriculture and food security sector, won for their work in