Access to energy in the digital age

Hosted by Energising Development
Tuesday, June 23 / Room C

Digital communication isn’t possible without access to energy. Around a quarter of the world’s population is currently without access to electricity, meaning it has no access to digital communication. That in turn cuts it off from communication and information, in other words from the digital future.

Without sufficient access to energy, people are not only unable to cook their food, heat their homes or cool their food and medications, but also to take part in economic or political processes via modern communication channels. Energy is an essential requirement to survival and development in a modern digital world.

The world community is committed to ensuring “universal access to modern energy services” by 2030 and announced this as the first of the three interlinked objectives of the Sustainable Energy for All initiative launched in 2011 by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

The multi-donor, multi-implementer partnership Energising Development (EnDev) contributes to this universal access objective. EnDev is currently financed by six donor countries – The Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Australia, the United Kingdom and Switzerland – and is coordinated and implemented by the German international aid organization Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) as lead agency together with the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO).

EnDev promotes sustainable access to modern energy services that meet the needs of the poor, aiming at access for at least 18 million people by 2019. Within ten years, EnDev facilitated sustainable access for almost 14 million people, 16,000 social institutions, and 30,500 small enterprises and demonstrated that this leads to significant improvements in health, gender equality, the environment and climate change, and economic development. Without modern communication these benefits would not be possible. Without energy access there would be no communication.

This workshop intends to demonstrate different perspectives regarding the correlation between energy access and access to digital communication and discuss the role of media toward enabling universal access to modern energy services.