Sustainable energy for all is one of the explicit goals of the United Nation’s post-2015 development agenda, aiming to overcome the unaffordability, unavailability and unsustainability of energy supply. It refers to the one third of the world’s population that still relies on intermittent or non-existent electricity supply, and on fossil fuels for cooking and heating; and which is mostly located in rural areas where there is little or no possibility of obtaining cleaner fuels, grid connection or decentralized energy systems. Microfinance services, among other mechanisms, offer a vehicle to improve energy supply of these underserved population. The number of microfinance institutions (MFIs) providing green lending programs, i.e., offering consumer finance solutions for the acquisition of modern energy technologies, has steadily increased. However, the success of the scaling- up process of green lending is still debatable. Thus, by facilitating tools, the microfinance sector can estimate its potential in committing to meeting the proposed global goals and strengthen its role in enabling energy access. So far, a series of indicators exist to measure the environmental performance of MFIs but none to measure the energy situation of clients. Such indicators would allow MFIs to support decision-making processes, monitor clients’ achievements in energy access or even supply input to assess other basic needs. Hence, this research addresses the challenges of measuring energy access at household level, defining the role of the microfinance sector in achieving and improving energy access and the misleading potential of poverty assessment metrics to predict the quality of energy supply. During field research in south-west of Colombia at the MFI Contactar, a thorough energy needs assessment following the ESMAP multi-tier framework (MTF) [Bhatia and Angelou, 2015] has been conducted on a representative sample size (384 households-clients) in rural, peri-urban and urban areas. The results, capturing much broader dimensions of electricity access and cooking facilities, unveil the real quality of energy at the households, which the majority are currently connected to the grid. Based on the results collected from the field, adopting the underlying structure of the ESMAP MTF and refining suggestions from [Groh et al., 2016, Bensch, 2013, Stevens et al., 2015], the Progress out of Energy Poverty Index (PEPI) toolkit has been designed to measure and monitor access to electricity services and supply and cooking solutions at household level. It also aims to bring energy services to the core of the metric, facilitating the implementation and understanding of the multi-tier approach for the microfinance and energy sector, and provides a meaningful tool for monitoring and assessing progress.
Assessment of household energy access: the Progress out of Energy Poverty Index (PEPI) toolkit for the microfinance sector
Bewertung von Energiezugang auf der Ebene von Haushalten: Index zur Bewertung der Energie-Armuts-Entwicklung-(PEPI-)Toolkit für den Mikrofinanz-Sektor
2017
Sonstige
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
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