1 00:00:05,400 --> 00:00:11,610 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Oxford Martin School. My name is Charles Godfrey, I'm the director here. 2 00:00:11,610 --> 00:00:17,250 And it's my huge pleasure to welcome our speaker this evening, Dr. Rajiv Shah. 3 00:00:17,250 --> 00:00:23,640 Rajiv Raj is president of the Rockefeller Foundation, has a hugely illustrious career, 4 00:00:23,640 --> 00:00:28,620 was chief scientist at the US Department of Agriculture and was administrator, 5 00:00:28,620 --> 00:00:39,030 which is a sort of trance based on boss of U.S. aid for a under the Obama presidency from 2009 to 2015. 6 00:00:39,030 --> 00:00:56,220 Ross is talking this afternoon on ending energy poverty, reframing the poverty discourse branch. 7 00:00:56,220 --> 00:01:04,740 Good afternoon, how are you? I'm I'm thrilled to be here and thank you, Charles, for that kind introduction. 8 00:01:04,740 --> 00:01:08,340 Thank you also for the invitation to be here at the school. 9 00:01:08,340 --> 00:01:15,720 This is a very special institution and I'm thrilled so many people are present here today to have this conversation. 10 00:01:15,720 --> 00:01:21,900 I am excited to be at Oxford, having never been accepted here in the past. 11 00:01:21,900 --> 00:01:32,400 I'm really thrilled to be here now. And the Rockefeller Foundation has had a long and productive history of working with many of you in this room. 12 00:01:32,400 --> 00:01:40,560 I believe from everything from our world in data to efforts to support and learn more about planetary health. 13 00:01:40,560 --> 00:01:48,640 And I look forward to further discussions both this evening and in the future on the topic at hand tonight. 14 00:01:48,640 --> 00:01:52,230 You know, the Rockefeller Foundation, I will just take a moment to introduce. 15 00:01:52,230 --> 00:01:55,590 The concept was started by John D. Rockefeller, 16 00:01:55,590 --> 00:02:05,640 senior and very much inspired by his commitment to science and technology and its capacity to change the world for the better, 17 00:02:05,640 --> 00:02:10,800 particularly for the world's least fortunate people. And you know, 18 00:02:10,800 --> 00:02:15,630 I keep trying to go back in time and think about what it must have been like in 19 00:02:15,630 --> 00:02:22,170 1913 in the United States before we had an income tax in the United States, 20 00:02:22,170 --> 00:02:28,860 before we had a federal government that had any sort of financial or programmatic 21 00:02:28,860 --> 00:02:37,980 commitment to help those people who lived effectively in poverty have moved themselves up. 22 00:02:37,980 --> 00:02:40,200 And in that setting. 23 00:02:40,200 --> 00:02:52,110 John D. Rockefeller created an institution committed to bringing science to the uplift of the American population and then later all of humanity. 24 00:02:52,110 --> 00:02:59,610 And that took shape in a couple of forms that really persisted for many, many decades. 25 00:02:59,610 --> 00:03:10,200 Originally, it was the conversion of medicine from a field where people sold products on the backs of pickup trucks in the United States to 26 00:03:10,200 --> 00:03:19,980 to a science based discipline where research the creation of knowledge and then ultimately the application of that knowledge. 27 00:03:19,980 --> 00:03:24,930 To the least, fortunate communities could actually lift up millions. 28 00:03:24,930 --> 00:03:32,610 And in fact, our institution was awarded its first Nobel prise for the yellow fever vaccine and global efforts, 29 00:03:32,610 --> 00:03:37,560 which persists to this day to ensure that every child on the planet gets the full 30 00:03:37,560 --> 00:03:43,860 range of vaccines that humanity knows how to produce to help them survive and thrive. 31 00:03:43,860 --> 00:03:49,440 A hugely successful century long enterprise after World War Two, 32 00:03:49,440 --> 00:04:00,270 they similarly reconsidered what their faith in science might mean for the world at that time impoverished populations and committed themselves to 33 00:04:00,270 --> 00:04:10,890 an agricultural and international agricultural research programme that decades later yielded breakthroughs and dwarf wheat varieties and the like, 34 00:04:10,890 --> 00:04:15,960 and then the political engagement with leaders around the world to improve their use 35 00:04:15,960 --> 00:04:21,630 of agricultural technologies in places like Pakistan or India or Latin America. 36 00:04:21,630 --> 00:04:25,890 The result was a green revolution that helped perhaps 800 million, 37 00:04:25,890 --> 00:04:35,130 maybe a billion people move off the brink of hunger and starvation and have enough food to to aspire to have a brighter future. 38 00:04:35,130 --> 00:04:41,250 And so it's against that backdrop that a couple of years ago, when I started at the Rockefeller Foundation, I said, Well, 39 00:04:41,250 --> 00:04:50,100 what is the next frontier of science and technology that has the capacity if applied to the world's more 40 00:04:50,100 --> 00:04:59,730 vulnerable populations to transform their lives for the better and to do so at a meaningful and powerful scale? 41 00:04:59,730 --> 00:05:10,290 And you know, we would all note that there are so many different scientific frontiers that could represent the answer to that question. 42 00:05:10,290 --> 00:05:10,950 But tonight, 43 00:05:10,950 --> 00:05:21,930 I'd like to actually focus this conversation on what and that is the role of energy as an essential tool for helping people rise out of poverty, 44 00:05:21,930 --> 00:05:27,000 be upwardly mobile and improve the condition and the quality of their life. 45 00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:34,020 And perhaps even more than that basic observation, the idea that there's something we can do about it right now, 46 00:05:34,020 --> 00:05:37,800 public sector and private sector scientists and investors, 47 00:05:37,800 --> 00:05:51,600 technologists and entrepreneurs, politicians and consumers working together to ensure that we end energy poverty in a 15 or 20 year time frame. 48 00:05:51,600 --> 00:05:56,450 And in doing so, we transform. The face of poverty around the world, 49 00:05:56,450 --> 00:06:04,640 and so I'm going to make a few claims this evening about what we believe might be possible at the Rockefeller Foundation, 50 00:06:04,640 --> 00:06:07,850 and I'm doing that in the spirit of this being Oxford, 51 00:06:07,850 --> 00:06:16,070 knowing that those that these claims are all probably a bit of an exaggeration and hoping that those of you here will will 52 00:06:16,070 --> 00:06:24,350 push us to improve our collective thinking and think through where we can do better to ensure we craft a pathway forward, 53 00:06:24,350 --> 00:06:30,740 where the application of science and knowledge can really be transformational for hundreds of millions of people. 54 00:06:30,740 --> 00:06:44,840 And so, so with that in mind, my first claim is that energy is more essential to rising out of poverty today than it has been ever before. 55 00:06:44,840 --> 00:06:51,410 And I think that if you look around the world and I've had the chance to visit 56 00:06:51,410 --> 00:06:57,950 very low income households in parts of rural India and urban slums in Africa, 57 00:06:57,950 --> 00:07:08,270 in war torn post-conflict areas in Latin America and in all of those areas, we see some common characteristics of human poverty. 58 00:07:08,270 --> 00:07:15,680 One is that women provide most of the actual manual labour required to get through life. 59 00:07:15,680 --> 00:07:21,620 Sometimes we use the term women, but it is girls collecting firewood, often in the dark. 60 00:07:21,620 --> 00:07:31,220 Often it extraordinary human risk to themselves and their personal safety so their family can have heat or their family can have fuel for cooking. 61 00:07:31,220 --> 00:07:35,120 Sometimes it is women working in agricultural fields, 62 00:07:35,120 --> 00:07:41,390 and I see in this room some folks who've been on the frontiers of understanding smallholder 63 00:07:41,390 --> 00:07:46,850 agriculture and the power of that area of productive life to transform poverty. 64 00:07:46,850 --> 00:07:52,400 But it is women who provide 80 percent of the labour on those farms and often without the 65 00:07:52,400 --> 00:08:00,890 benefit of advanced productivity enhancing tools and technologies that require power to to run. 66 00:08:00,890 --> 00:08:07,280 And they work in environments where they don't have access to that. So with those observations, and frankly, in the last decade, 67 00:08:07,280 --> 00:08:17,180 the transformation of access to connectivity through mobile technology has really been the tool that now is in the hands of every single person, 68 00:08:17,180 --> 00:08:24,260 pretty much on the planet. And I know that's a controversial statement, but but compared to other things, 69 00:08:24,260 --> 00:08:32,210 it has a deeper and higher penetration of access and utilisation amongst lower income populations around the world, 70 00:08:32,210 --> 00:08:37,520 and also now requires power to keep those phones charged and to be connected. 71 00:08:37,520 --> 00:08:43,070 So I would argue today, although I'd love to see a body of research substantiate this over time, 72 00:08:43,070 --> 00:08:50,180 that energy access is in fact more important than ever before and helping people rise out of poverty. 73 00:08:50,180 --> 00:09:01,280 These are photos of night-time satellite imagery of five cities in Afghanistan in 2014, when I was leading. 74 00:09:01,280 --> 00:09:11,060 I'm sorry. This compares Afghanistan to other cities. And when I was leading U.S. aid in that period of time, I kept visiting Afghanistan. 75 00:09:11,060 --> 00:09:13,790 It was our largest single programme in the world. 76 00:09:13,790 --> 00:09:19,640 In fact, here we had a strong partnership with Difford, the Department for International Development here. 77 00:09:19,640 --> 00:09:26,270 And Afghanistan was was your largest commitment when it came to the expenditure of official development assistance. 78 00:09:26,270 --> 00:09:35,690 And the reality was when I would go often with my different counterparts to Kabul, we would talk about our insights on health, 79 00:09:35,690 --> 00:09:44,870 our insights on education, our insights on agriculture and had really institutions that represented decades of expertise in those disciplines. 80 00:09:44,870 --> 00:09:53,510 And what we heard back, whether we were speaking to NATO's commanders and their subordinates in the field, 81 00:09:53,510 --> 00:10:01,850 the Afghan national security forces and their leadership around the country or local leaders from Kabul to Kandahar, 82 00:10:01,850 --> 00:10:07,820 was they first and foremost simply wanted someone to turn on the lights? 83 00:10:07,820 --> 00:10:15,110 And, you know, we always had this conversation. We say yes, but we also know here's what the power of health interventions can do to reduce 84 00:10:15,110 --> 00:10:19,610 mortality rates and create a more sustainable population for development over time. 85 00:10:19,610 --> 00:10:26,840 But the urgency they felt was that you could not have peace and you could not have security if you didn't have light. 86 00:10:26,840 --> 00:10:31,460 And if you didn't have the ability to connect people to electricity, 87 00:10:31,460 --> 00:10:37,370 so they could go about leading a life that had some semblance of productivity and upward mobility. 88 00:10:37,370 --> 00:10:49,790 So you see here the difference looking at night at Kabul versus other other parts of the world, including Atlanta, Madrid, Brasilia and Luanda. 89 00:10:49,790 --> 00:10:53,460 And it is striking that without electricity. 90 00:10:53,460 --> 00:11:05,010 It's hard to imagine other things being in demand from populations around the world, and this experience shaped my observations deeply that, 91 00:11:05,010 --> 00:11:13,890 you know, global development should be driven by what people and leaders on the ground in the places we seek to have the most impact. 92 00:11:13,890 --> 00:11:19,680 Instinctively believe they need and they need with a sense of urgency. 93 00:11:19,680 --> 00:11:21,840 In addition to what we, 94 00:11:21,840 --> 00:11:33,830 as experts and scientists may have to offer as insights with respect to other things that are necessary to create a pathway for global development. 95 00:11:33,830 --> 00:11:42,050 Now, this is a chart that you probably know, well, it's from our world in data on the page, on extreme poverty, 96 00:11:42,050 --> 00:11:48,380 and in many ways this is the standard story that we have told in our community for for many years. 97 00:11:48,380 --> 00:11:55,400 If you measure poverty based on a dollar and 90 cents a day an equivalent income, 98 00:11:55,400 --> 00:12:02,330 the world has in fact made great strides in reducing extreme poverty over the last several hundred years and has 99 00:12:02,330 --> 00:12:10,820 made great strides in the last several decades and has made those strides pretty much everywhere around the world, 100 00:12:10,820 --> 00:12:20,060 including, of course, in places like China that have been these massive engines for for the reduction of poverty on a global basis. 101 00:12:20,060 --> 00:12:25,430 But also in Africa and Latin America and everywhere else as well. 102 00:12:25,430 --> 00:12:33,650 And we have this basic income based measurement of poverty that has helped us define the poverty line. 103 00:12:33,650 --> 00:12:39,710 Of course, that concept of a poverty line was defined in Great Britain in the 1880s. 104 00:12:39,710 --> 00:12:47,420 And so it's appropriate to be here when we're discussing it and the metrics and the measures have been refined over time. 105 00:12:47,420 --> 00:12:59,150 But even as of quite recently, the fundamental underlying measure has been tied to what it takes to consume 20 or 20 100 calories a day. 106 00:12:59,150 --> 00:13:04,820 Because the mindset has always been if you can sustain that level of consumption, 107 00:13:04,820 --> 00:13:11,540 food consumption, you are no, you know, you've crossed the line at which you're debilitating. 108 00:13:11,540 --> 00:13:19,400 Subsistence poverty causes, causes, death and disability through malnutrition and hunger. 109 00:13:19,400 --> 00:13:25,220 And I just reflect on that as a measure relative to what I heard in Kabul and relative to 110 00:13:25,220 --> 00:13:33,710 what we see with young girls in eastern Congo that in fact get enough calories every day, 111 00:13:33,710 --> 00:13:37,100 but are still toiling without access to energy and power, 112 00:13:37,100 --> 00:13:46,430 and feel trapped or stuck in a cycle of poverty and violence and don't have the tools to grow beyond that. 113 00:13:46,430 --> 00:13:50,630 And so while this is an important example of success, 114 00:13:50,630 --> 00:13:57,830 I'd argue tonight that we greatly overstate our success in reducing poverty by using this particular 115 00:13:57,830 --> 00:14:04,870 poverty line measure and describing the incidence of poverty is quite low on a global basis. 116 00:14:04,870 --> 00:14:11,110 A better way would be using Oxford's very own multidimensional indices and poverty measures, 117 00:14:11,110 --> 00:14:16,480 and those of you in this room can explain this to me better than I can to you. 118 00:14:16,480 --> 00:14:26,470 I know that, but the basic idea of taking various deprivations experienced by poor people in their daily lives and building that into a measure of 119 00:14:26,470 --> 00:14:37,750 poverty that is more nuanced and more appropriate than a simple economic poverty line that's tied to a food basket or a consumption. 120 00:14:37,750 --> 00:14:47,680 A certain amount of calories consumed feels very, very appealing and helps us start to identify where poverty is most acute and where it exists. 121 00:14:47,680 --> 00:14:52,300 And so I applaud you for doing that work. 122 00:14:52,300 --> 00:15:02,680 And when I think further about that, I would simply ask you to put yourselves in the shoes of those who in fact live without electricity. 123 00:15:02,680 --> 00:15:12,250 And imagine what your life would be like if you were one of the eight hundred and forty million people who basically lacked any meaningful electricity 124 00:15:12,250 --> 00:15:23,200 access all together or even one of the two billion people who might have intermittent but ineffective and non-productive access to energy and power. 125 00:15:23,200 --> 00:15:30,310 You're using dirty fuels for cooking and spending a lot of time, effort and energy securing those fuels. 126 00:15:30,310 --> 00:15:42,550 You may have a small kerosene lamp to create light, but that is both unsafe, expensive and ineffective as an at scale solution. 127 00:15:42,550 --> 00:15:44,800 And perhaps most notably, 128 00:15:44,800 --> 00:15:55,270 your communities are not benefiting from the labour productivity improvements that come with access to productive energy and power. 129 00:15:55,270 --> 00:16:03,190 Put in more obvious terms, it's much more reasonable to start a business, create jobs and be effective at that. 130 00:16:03,190 --> 00:16:10,750 In a place like Iowa, where you can plug in at 10 cents a kilowatt hour and know the power is going to be there, 131 00:16:10,750 --> 00:16:19,240 then in a place like rural Malawi, where you'll end up requiring a generator, securing fuel, managing the security of that operation, 132 00:16:19,240 --> 00:16:24,700 and after you've made all of the intensive capital investments to run your own power, 133 00:16:24,700 --> 00:16:33,640 you still spend 40 50 60 up to 80 cents a kilowatt hour on diesel and the labour costs required to maintain that system. 134 00:16:33,640 --> 00:16:42,970 So, you know, we ask ourselves, why do these economies feel stuck in low growth and low productivity settings? 135 00:16:42,970 --> 00:16:51,000 One of the answers has to be that huge differential in access to power and electricity. 136 00:16:51,000 --> 00:16:58,030 At the end of the day, that's what energy poverty means, and it's what it means to us at the Rockefeller Foundation. 137 00:16:58,030 --> 00:17:07,180 I lament the fact having been someone who played a modest role in helping to shape the global goals of the Sustainable Development Goals, 138 00:17:07,180 --> 00:17:13,900 that we haven't set the bar high enough in the definition or achievement of energy poverty. 139 00:17:13,900 --> 00:17:18,760 And that is the next second statement I'd like to put out there that we have to be much 140 00:17:18,760 --> 00:17:25,000 more ambitious in our goals related to achieving the end of energy poverty and frankly, 141 00:17:25,000 --> 00:17:30,820 in the investment we make to measure whether or not we are succeeding. 142 00:17:30,820 --> 00:17:33,370 The current measure, as you probably know, 143 00:17:33,370 --> 00:17:45,790 is is that six hundred and fifty million people fall under the SDG target of 100 kilowatt hours of consumption a year. 144 00:17:45,790 --> 00:17:50,140 I'm told that and I said, Well, what does that mean? Because I'm not, you know, that could be a lot. 145 00:17:50,140 --> 00:17:51,870 Sounds kind of like a lot sometimes to me. 146 00:17:51,870 --> 00:18:01,330 And they said, No, no, that's enough to basically power a traditional light bulb for five hours a day on average through the course of the year. 147 00:18:01,330 --> 00:18:10,600 And that is clearly not sufficient if our vision is to provide people with energy access such that they can move themselves out of poverty. 148 00:18:10,600 --> 00:18:19,060 So we would make the case that that number needs to be reconsidered and raised considerably. 149 00:18:19,060 --> 00:18:23,140 And if we did, the six hundred and fifty million is that, as I point out, 150 00:18:23,140 --> 00:18:30,460 would likely go to two billion or north of two billion in terms of how we think about the task at hand. 151 00:18:30,460 --> 00:18:36,760 To further make the point, I'd like to just show you this animated bubble chart that illustrates that 152 00:18:36,760 --> 00:18:45,320 really no rich country is energy poor or can be energy poor around the world. 153 00:18:45,320 --> 00:18:50,270 And you can see in this chart that countries as they move across time, 154 00:18:50,270 --> 00:18:56,090 Hans Rosling used to do this with health charts, and I just I watch them for fun because they're so exciting to me. 155 00:18:56,090 --> 00:19:05,510 But you can see as time goes along, you have countries going from low energy, low income to higher energy, higher income. 156 00:19:05,510 --> 00:19:14,030 And what I find so interesting about it is when you watch the bubbles move across the slide, no one goes down right and then up. 157 00:19:14,030 --> 00:19:22,940 You can't get wealthier without access to electricity and energy to power that upward mobility. 158 00:19:22,940 --> 00:19:30,500 That's true as a nation, as true as a household. And the fact that there are no outliers sometimes in health, we'll talk about, well, 159 00:19:30,500 --> 00:19:36,050 let's look at really low income countries that have these this unique attribute 160 00:19:36,050 --> 00:19:39,960 of having better population health that doesn't exist in energy and power. 161 00:19:39,960 --> 00:19:47,810 There's no such thing as a country that achieves wealth and development without access to electricity and power. 162 00:19:47,810 --> 00:19:56,820 And I think we should take that into account as we think about how we want to accelerate progress in ending poverty around the world. 163 00:19:56,820 --> 00:20:01,710 The inequality of consumption I find also quite stark. 164 00:20:01,710 --> 00:20:12,240 And if nothing else illustrates that contrast. Consider this The country of Kenya as a nation consumes slightly less electricity than all the pools, 165 00:20:12,240 --> 00:20:17,190 televisions and jacuzzis in the American state of California. 166 00:20:17,190 --> 00:20:25,170 And that's despite the fact that Kenya's population is 25 percent larger than California's. 167 00:20:25,170 --> 00:20:31,350 And I just that is such an extraordinary inequality that it is almost hard. 168 00:20:31,350 --> 00:20:38,280 I actually went back over and over say, Is that really true? It is hard for me to actually believe it, but it is in fact true. 169 00:20:38,280 --> 00:20:46,620 And having worked on power and energy in Kenya, I can tell you the average price is probably well north of twenty five cents a kilowatt hour, 170 00:20:46,620 --> 00:20:57,720 and it stifles the creation of businesses and jobs. It motivates people to live in an informal versus formal economy and in the greatest fallacy. 171 00:20:57,720 --> 00:21:05,190 Every time I've been working on Kenyan Power Access, which we did previously through a programme called Power Africa, 172 00:21:05,190 --> 00:21:12,150 when I was in the Obama administration, we were always told, Well, Kenya has enough power to meet its demand. 173 00:21:12,150 --> 00:21:17,760 And I kept thinking, Well, how can that be true? Because I visit rural communities that have effectively no electricity. 174 00:21:17,760 --> 00:21:24,840 I visit urban communities where business leaders tell me they have their own diesel generators for everything, for backup. 175 00:21:24,840 --> 00:21:32,850 I was in my hotel and the power went off four times and clearly diesel backup kept the air conditioning going after a stopped period. 176 00:21:32,850 --> 00:21:37,140 And the answer is the power is so unreliable and it's so costly. 177 00:21:37,140 --> 00:21:41,880 It's such a bad, expensive product that people don't want to pay for it, right? 178 00:21:41,880 --> 00:21:47,160 And so they say, well, Kenya has enough power in its current form to meet its demand. 179 00:21:47,160 --> 00:21:54,960 But if it were reliable, if it were low cost, if it were ubiquitous, the demand would be much, much, much higher. 180 00:21:54,960 --> 00:22:00,120 And and that is really where we need to get to as a global community. 181 00:22:00,120 --> 00:22:07,380 Now we've had an effort at Rockefeller in India to and Africa that we call smart power, 182 00:22:07,380 --> 00:22:14,460 and it has been an effort to bring rural communities power and electricity through mini grids, 183 00:22:14,460 --> 00:22:18,960 which are solar installations that I'll show you in a moment. 184 00:22:18,960 --> 00:22:25,680 But this gentleman serum is a carpenter and a customer of one of the many grids we support in Bihar India. 185 00:22:25,680 --> 00:22:31,170 And since getting access to power via this option, which he pays for, 186 00:22:31,170 --> 00:22:39,480 he has doubled his productivity, hired two more workers in his in his place of employment, 187 00:22:39,480 --> 00:22:49,530 increases revenues and profits 20 percent, all thanks to an electric lathe that drills grinds and shapes wood because he is a carpenter. 188 00:22:49,530 --> 00:22:59,760 And it's so simple as to be obvious, but frankly, having been and seeing how our overall global development effort works, 189 00:22:59,760 --> 00:23:05,970 I'd argue it dramatically under invest in getting this type of small business owner, 190 00:23:05,970 --> 00:23:13,020 the power and electricity required to create the engine of employment growth and upward economic mobility. 191 00:23:13,020 --> 00:23:19,530 This machine consumes two and a half kilowatts per hour, over 60 times more power than the average light bulb. 192 00:23:19,530 --> 00:23:23,850 And I think more or less single handedly makes the case that the United Nations 193 00:23:23,850 --> 00:23:30,840 definition of 100 kilowatt hours per year is grossly outdated and way too low. 194 00:23:30,840 --> 00:23:39,180 Now, whether that number should be 4000 or 5000 or 6000 kilowatt hours per year is something we could all debate, 195 00:23:39,180 --> 00:23:47,160 but it's most likely in that range as opposed to 100. 196 00:23:47,160 --> 00:23:55,020 The way we were able to provide her with power is the is the kind of third statement I'd like to propose 197 00:23:55,020 --> 00:24:01,830 knowing that this one in particular is probably the most aggressive relative to facts and data to support it. 198 00:24:01,830 --> 00:24:11,220 But I'm curious as to whether we could say that given the state of technology knowledge and understanding of climate, 199 00:24:11,220 --> 00:24:16,170 that decentralised renewable energy is the single best opportunity. 200 00:24:16,170 --> 00:24:23,850 We have to end energy poverty as we know it and look for more than a century and a half. 201 00:24:23,850 --> 00:24:33,360 We've all had the mindset that achieving energy access requires building large power plants, connecting them to centralised grids, 202 00:24:33,360 --> 00:24:41,730 extending those grids and the services they provide via quasi public utilities to every single household, 203 00:24:41,730 --> 00:24:44,880 every single business, every single enterprise. 204 00:24:44,880 --> 00:24:53,160 And the reality is that model has worked in some places, but in large, large parts of the world, it simply does not work. 205 00:24:53,160 --> 00:25:03,540 Utilities look at poor customers, whether they are in urban slums or rural communities, either as people who steal power and electricity, 206 00:25:03,540 --> 00:25:11,820 or if they're forced to provide them power as loss leaders that they have to serve to meet some regulatory requirements. 207 00:25:11,820 --> 00:25:17,100 And today, a hundred and fifty years after we kind of invented this strategy, 208 00:25:17,100 --> 00:25:24,450 we think you can look at the technology frontier and do much, much better than that. 209 00:25:24,450 --> 00:25:37,470 One example of doing better than that is this micro power or mini grid station that is part of our Smart Power India programme in rural north India. 210 00:25:37,470 --> 00:25:47,940 And these installations, which are primarily solar with a little bit of diesel backup and battery for smoothing out consumption and supply, 211 00:25:47,940 --> 00:25:50,160 are getting better every day. 212 00:25:50,160 --> 00:25:57,960 They're getting cheaper every day, and they can provide as little as 10 to 15 kilowatts of energy and as much as one megawatt, 213 00:25:57,960 --> 00:26:10,620 depending on size and scale in this particular setting. You'll note that the thirty six kilowatt solar power generation sits next to telecom towers, 214 00:26:10,620 --> 00:26:19,110 and those telecom towers can be initial anchor customers for this kind of a micro business or many business. 215 00:26:19,110 --> 00:26:25,110 But then they can go out and wire homes and businesses throughout that area, 216 00:26:25,110 --> 00:26:30,870 according to we know what drives the cost of these structures in our India programme. 217 00:26:30,870 --> 00:26:36,630 In particular, we're able to get power to customers for twenty five to twenty eight cents cents a kilowatt hour. 218 00:26:36,630 --> 00:26:38,580 That's seen as very expensive, you know, 219 00:26:38,580 --> 00:26:46,170 and I have yet to meet a public official who doesn't start by saying they can produce coal fired energy at four cents a kilowatt hour in India, 220 00:26:46,170 --> 00:26:56,250 and so they see that cost differential. But by the time you factor in transmission and distribution collections and availability, 221 00:26:56,250 --> 00:27:03,420 the truth is we don't think this is a costlier solution anymore than traditional power on the traditional grid. 222 00:27:03,420 --> 00:27:09,660 And we also believe the cost of these systems will come down dramatically later this year. 223 00:27:09,660 --> 00:27:17,940 In November, I'll be announcing a major partnership with the energy company in India to reach 25 million rural Indians 224 00:27:17,940 --> 00:27:28,140 with a joint venture business to extend the reach of these types of systems to 10000 local communities. 225 00:27:28,140 --> 00:27:32,100 And I'm particularly excited about that because we've already seen the scale of 226 00:27:32,100 --> 00:27:37,230 ambition has brought the cost structure of these systems down by 40 percent, 227 00:27:37,230 --> 00:27:40,290 and we've now honed in on a few areas of technology. 228 00:27:40,290 --> 00:27:48,510 Importantly, the battery itself that is part of the system that can help us reduce the cost even further. 229 00:27:48,510 --> 00:27:51,090 According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 230 00:27:51,090 --> 00:28:02,520 the price of solar photovoltaic modules has fallen globally by 99 percent in the last four decades and will continue to get cheaper and better. 231 00:28:02,520 --> 00:28:10,860 And frankly, we'd love to tether our strategies and investments to technology curves that have that kind of movement over time, 232 00:28:10,860 --> 00:28:22,640 because we can imagine that that only gets better as the world becomes more proficient at manufacturing and creating these types of solutions. 233 00:28:22,640 --> 00:28:30,410 The programme in India currently reaches about two hundred thousand people, and we've seen one other important outcome of this effort. 234 00:28:30,410 --> 00:28:38,570 We've seen that ninety seven percent of the bills sent out are paid by the poorest customers 235 00:28:38,570 --> 00:28:43,880 that are on the other end of these projects and these businesses and these enterprises. 236 00:28:43,880 --> 00:28:51,650 And that's critically important because it changes the mindset that started with saying these customers are in 237 00:28:51,650 --> 00:29:00,080 fact lost leaders and now sees these customers as entrepreneurs or people who are willing to pay for reliable, 238 00:29:00,080 --> 00:29:06,020 dependable energy, even if it is a little more costly than what everyone in this room pays. 239 00:29:06,020 --> 00:29:14,510 In order to give their children the chance to read at night or in order to give themselves a chance to be more productive in their day to day lives. 240 00:29:14,510 --> 00:29:19,940 And I'm very encouraged that as the cost curves get better and better, 241 00:29:19,940 --> 00:29:31,160 this solution will be an extremely powerful one for rural communities and urban communities in India and all around the world. 242 00:29:31,160 --> 00:29:37,430 It leads to the question of is energy access and affordable effort in Liberia, 243 00:29:37,430 --> 00:29:44,390 the electricity price on average is forty nine cents a kilowatt hour, and the product itself is not a particularly good one. 244 00:29:44,390 --> 00:29:49,760 It's highly unreliable in the United States, it's ten point eight cents per kilowatt hour, 245 00:29:49,760 --> 00:29:54,470 and I apologise not knowing what it is sitting right here at Oxford today. 246 00:29:54,470 --> 00:30:01,400 But I just underlying the reality of poverty and inequality, I believe, 247 00:30:01,400 --> 00:30:11,150 is this fundamental lack of access to affordable and reliable power and energy that can make a tremendous difference. 248 00:30:11,150 --> 00:30:15,830 And when you fact focus on the price alone, it's easy to forget that time and again, 249 00:30:15,830 --> 00:30:22,550 we've seen that people are in fact willing to pay higher prices for basic goods, especially lower income. 250 00:30:22,550 --> 00:30:26,960 People see a lot of well-known economists wrote. 251 00:30:26,960 --> 00:30:35,810 I think a very powerful book 15 years ago probably called Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid and introduced the idea that a low income 252 00:30:35,810 --> 00:30:45,260 family in a slum in Nairobi would be more likely to spend three or four times what a middle income family might spend to have clean water. 253 00:30:45,260 --> 00:30:53,930 And that that is OK because for them, the consequence of a child falling sick from having, you know, 254 00:30:53,930 --> 00:31:00,800 catching disease, water borne illness is probably much, much, much more consequential than for that other family. 255 00:31:00,800 --> 00:31:10,690 And similarly, for the access to electricity, I think we will start to see the same basic observation over time. 256 00:31:10,690 --> 00:31:19,210 One of the challenges when working on energy poverty and electricity as a driver of the end of poverty is the 257 00:31:19,210 --> 00:31:27,160 debate that comes between expanding existing grids and creating off grid solutions like the one I just showed you. 258 00:31:27,160 --> 00:31:37,360 And as we've seen in my view, throughout so many different areas of global development cooperation, we believe that debate is largely overstated. 259 00:31:37,360 --> 00:31:44,230 There's no reason why you couldn't build out infrastructure investing in the kinds of mini grids I just showed you. 260 00:31:44,230 --> 00:31:54,940 And then at some point in the future, if done appropriately, simply connect all of that distribution capacity to what we today call the main grid. 261 00:31:54,940 --> 00:32:02,050 To me, it is a far more dangerous and far more lax a diesel proposition to suggest that 262 00:32:02,050 --> 00:32:07,300 we should simply wait for utilities around the world to turn themselves around, 263 00:32:07,300 --> 00:32:16,630 get interested in serving low income customers, build out access to those customers and somehow magically transform both their culture, 264 00:32:16,630 --> 00:32:22,390 the culture of those enterprises and the reality of life for the world's poorest families. 265 00:32:22,390 --> 00:32:33,250 And it reminds me of a discussion and debate I used to have with Dr Muhammad Yunus, who who won the Nobel Peace prise for creating the Grameen Bank. 266 00:32:33,250 --> 00:32:37,240 And he used to tell me that he went out. He was in Bangladesh. 267 00:32:37,240 --> 00:32:44,830 He'd go into rural communities and he'd sit in a circle with a group of women in a poor rural community in Bangladesh. 268 00:32:44,830 --> 00:32:51,910 And these women would have children that were hungry. They themselves would eat maybe one meal a day. 269 00:32:51,910 --> 00:32:56,560 They spend most of their time working on their farms or with their buffalo. 270 00:32:56,560 --> 00:33:06,250 And the one thing he observed, just sitting in that circle and hearing their stories was how incredibly strong their basic work ethic was. 271 00:33:06,250 --> 00:33:08,650 He said, These are the most honest people I've ever met. 272 00:33:08,650 --> 00:33:15,610 They're the most helpful people to their neighbours then that he'd ever met, and they're the hardest working people I've ever met. 273 00:33:15,610 --> 00:33:25,990 So he went back into Dhaka, went into the bank and said, You know, we should be lending in small amounts to these customers, 274 00:33:25,990 --> 00:33:33,190 and I trust they will pay you back because I just sat with them and let me tell you how hard they work and how trustworthy they are. 275 00:33:33,190 --> 00:33:41,380 And if one of them can't afford doesn't have milk for their child, the one who does well will share it with them to ensure that child gets by. 276 00:33:41,380 --> 00:33:48,220 And I've never seen anything like it, and you should lend to them. And of course, the bank said, Well, that's not how we do things. 277 00:33:48,220 --> 00:33:54,940 Thanks for your input. We need collateral and we do credit assessments and they're all not credit worthy. 278 00:33:54,940 --> 00:33:58,690 So we'll serve them. But but, you know, decades from now. 279 00:33:58,690 --> 00:34:02,290 And he went back and said, that's not a sufficient answer. 280 00:34:02,290 --> 00:34:06,250 So he personally guaranteed the first self-help groups, 281 00:34:06,250 --> 00:34:13,420 personally created a banking institution for those poorest families, and several decades later, 282 00:34:13,420 --> 00:34:17,290 and probably hundreds of millions of women served later, 283 00:34:17,290 --> 00:34:23,740 he was awarded the Nobel Peace prise for that courageous observation and committing his life to that task. 284 00:34:23,740 --> 00:34:34,720 And when I look today at the discussion that happens amongst big power companies and big CEOs of utilities and heads of state, 285 00:34:34,720 --> 00:34:40,030 it feels a whole lot like that discussion of with the bankers 40 years ago. 286 00:34:40,030 --> 00:34:43,990 And I believe there's room for perhaps many. 287 00:34:43,990 --> 00:34:51,220 Muhammad Yunus is of the world to come together and actually solve this problem long before they change. 288 00:34:51,220 --> 00:34:59,530 The institutions that we think of today is primarily responsible for providing power to their populations. 289 00:34:59,530 --> 00:35:05,410 And that brings me to my fourth sort of statement here that I want you to test and see if you believe in. 290 00:35:05,410 --> 00:35:16,000 But simply knowing who will pay and what they will pay for reliable power is absolutely critical to solving this challenge. 291 00:35:16,000 --> 00:35:25,150 And this is where data technology, predictive analytics and the scientific tools of just the last few years, 292 00:35:25,150 --> 00:35:30,400 I believe, can be transformational because it's easy to say that, 293 00:35:30,400 --> 00:35:37,000 you know, in our two hundred thousand people that we serve in India through a couple of hundred of these mini grids, 294 00:35:37,000 --> 00:35:40,540 we're seeing people repay it 97 percent. 295 00:35:40,540 --> 00:35:47,440 It's a lot harder to have a conversation with an entrepreneur or an investor and expect them to believe that that high 296 00:35:47,440 --> 00:35:56,530 repayment rate is going to be generalised some other community in rural Africa or a post conflict area in Latin America. 297 00:35:56,530 --> 00:36:04,270 And the reality is, everybody asks the basic question if you build it, will they consume? 298 00:36:04,270 --> 00:36:09,770 And we believe that the answer to that is they will rule customer. 299 00:36:09,770 --> 00:36:20,090 In Kenya reach peak energy consumption after nearly a year after the connexion actually comes to their home and you can say, well, why is that? 300 00:36:20,090 --> 00:36:28,760 Why does it take so long and what's happening there? My guess is what's happening there is what's happened everywhere else in the world. 301 00:36:28,760 --> 00:36:39,140 When we started providing power and electricity in the rural part of the United States of America, the consumption was actually quite low initially. 302 00:36:39,140 --> 00:36:44,750 And then companies like in the US General Electric decided that if they built 303 00:36:44,750 --> 00:36:49,520 refrigerators and sold them really cheap or even gave them away to these families, 304 00:36:49,520 --> 00:36:55,520 that they would have a device in their home that was always consuming power and they'd sell more power. 305 00:36:55,520 --> 00:36:58,220 So they became an appliance company, 306 00:36:58,220 --> 00:37:08,660 and they started offering these life improving solutions to households that had never before had indoor refrigeration or cooling, 307 00:37:08,660 --> 00:37:17,150 or all of the other improvements in quality of life that come with electricity consuming appliances that then built up demand. 308 00:37:17,150 --> 00:37:25,220 And that created the upward slope of consumption, payment and demand that sustained all of these industries. 309 00:37:25,220 --> 00:37:33,680 I suspect you will see the same pathway take place if we try in many parts of the developing world, 310 00:37:33,680 --> 00:37:39,620 but in a highly unique and technology enabled manner. 311 00:37:39,620 --> 00:37:46,190 This is a photograph from one of our the businesses we support and come look for India. 312 00:37:46,190 --> 00:37:51,500 It's one of hundreds of new micro-enterprises that smart power India has been serving. 313 00:37:51,500 --> 00:38:00,710 The woman you see at the bottom of the photos name is Rajni, and she works in this business that obviously consumes power and electricity. 314 00:38:00,710 --> 00:38:10,340 But what we also know she did is she got the electricity connexion at her home and she bought herself a sewing machine for use at home. 315 00:38:10,340 --> 00:38:18,890 So when she's not in this garment factory working, she's at home working as an entrepreneur to supplement her income. 316 00:38:18,890 --> 00:38:26,150 Now, with the benefit of labour enhancement and a potential to imagine a brighter future for her and her family, 317 00:38:26,150 --> 00:38:33,890 those are the kinds of stories that you can unlock with a genuine effort to end energy poverty in the field. 318 00:38:33,890 --> 00:38:41,300 They call this an organic demand, and I keep arguing that we should use language that's, you know, a little more accessible. 319 00:38:41,300 --> 00:38:49,910 This, to me, is just a woman who has wants her kids to have a little bit better of a chance at having a future and is willing to work at 320 00:38:49,910 --> 00:38:57,650 home in a somewhat surprising setting to put in the extra labour to earn the extra income to make that future possible. 321 00:38:57,650 --> 00:39:03,410 But you can imagine as we expand these efforts around the world that in addition to sewing machines, 322 00:39:03,410 --> 00:39:13,220 you'll have electric mobility, you'll have all, you know, irrigation pumps and other agricultural processing technologies. 323 00:39:13,220 --> 00:39:19,730 But the link between technology improvements in improving labour productivity amongst 324 00:39:19,730 --> 00:39:27,900 lower income households and access to electricity is a symbiotic relationship. 325 00:39:27,900 --> 00:39:34,260 I thought I'd effectively closed with a reminder about Dr. Eunice's story, 326 00:39:34,260 --> 00:39:45,990 because much like the Grameen Bank transformed our view of some of the world's poorest women and helped many of us see them, 327 00:39:45,990 --> 00:39:55,860 not as people who were suffering from lack of knowledge or a lack of effort, or even a lack of infrastructure. 328 00:39:55,860 --> 00:39:59,370 We have decades later recognised that they, in fact, 329 00:39:59,370 --> 00:40:05,490 are the engines of improvement for human development indicators in country after country, after country, 330 00:40:05,490 --> 00:40:13,560 and it was their access to lending and their capacity to buy a buffalo or to have milk processing, 331 00:40:13,560 --> 00:40:17,850 or to improve the quality of the roof on their home and protect their family. 332 00:40:17,850 --> 00:40:21,810 That created that upward mobility in the same way, 333 00:40:21,810 --> 00:40:32,700 we really do believe that our customers in smart power have illustrated that they too are dependable, 334 00:40:32,700 --> 00:40:40,330 reliable, hard working and if given the tools to move themselves out of poverty, certainly can. 335 00:40:40,330 --> 00:40:46,750 The final statement that I'd like to posit is that fighting poverty can help the planet as well. 336 00:40:46,750 --> 00:40:53,410 And this is perhaps the toughest one for me because I spent a lot of time in 2014 and 2015 337 00:40:53,410 --> 00:41:00,940 helping to set up both the global climate agreements and the global development agreements. 338 00:41:00,940 --> 00:41:10,120 And if there's one observation I could make is those two communities always felt at odds that in setting up our targets for the Paris Agreement, 339 00:41:10,120 --> 00:41:18,250 we were asking industrial nations and less developed countries to adopt huge transformations 340 00:41:18,250 --> 00:41:24,520 in their economies or their economic development pathways to reduce carbon emissions, 341 00:41:24,520 --> 00:41:36,400 to keep us under the one and a half degree target. And the fundamental debate was always, in my judgement, relatively lower income aspiring economies, 342 00:41:36,400 --> 00:41:46,000 simply observing that much of the rest of the world that we called industrialised had in fact achieved the standard of living they've achieved. 343 00:41:46,000 --> 00:41:56,680 We've achieved by consuming a tremendous amount of cheap hydrocarbon based energy, and we were asking the two three, 344 00:41:56,680 --> 00:42:02,920 four billion people in the world who do not have the same living standard that the other half 345 00:42:02,920 --> 00:42:10,030 of the world has to change their aspirations to make their path forward more complicated, 346 00:42:10,030 --> 00:42:16,030 to delay their desire for the kind of upward mobility everyone can see on a screen in 347 00:42:16,030 --> 00:42:22,870 order to contribute to this global goal of addressing the climate challenge we face. 348 00:42:22,870 --> 00:42:29,620 And that is a tough pill to swallow. It is a tough argument to make, and frankly, 349 00:42:29,620 --> 00:42:37,360 whether you're a powerful emerging market like China or a far less powerful one that smaller somewhere else in the world, 350 00:42:37,360 --> 00:42:43,060 it's not a deal that folks are going to take without, you know, without a better solution. 351 00:42:43,060 --> 00:42:49,690 We think distributed decentralised renewable energy can be that better solution. 352 00:42:49,690 --> 00:42:57,790 And in fact, if you if we collectively invest in these types of solutions, if we bring the technology cost curve down, 353 00:42:57,790 --> 00:43:02,770 if we use the amount of capital we've tried to aggregate for climate finance and 354 00:43:02,770 --> 00:43:09,850 for the transitions that economies need to make to enable real renewable access, 355 00:43:09,850 --> 00:43:15,430 renewable power based access for hundreds of millions of people, we can actually accelerate, 356 00:43:15,430 --> 00:43:20,740 not slow down the pathway out of poverty for two billion people on the planet. 357 00:43:20,740 --> 00:43:30,610 And we can do so while fundamentally changing the carbon equation that allows us to imagine a world that is still here many decades from now. 358 00:43:30,610 --> 00:43:34,630 That was my little reference to traffic problems I had in London this morning. 359 00:43:34,630 --> 00:43:36,610 But but with that said, 360 00:43:36,610 --> 00:43:45,670 I thank you for it for this conversation and the chance to be with you and really to look forward to your feedback and your thoughts. 361 00:43:45,670 --> 00:43:57,040 Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that superb talk. 362 00:43:57,040 --> 00:44:03,370 I'm going to ask a question then questions now, can I remind you that we are broadcast live? 363 00:44:03,370 --> 00:44:09,910 And when you ask a question, could you wait for a microphone to turn up otherwise people can't hear you? 364 00:44:09,910 --> 00:44:19,020 So let me ask four questions. A lady there with a pink scarf? 365 00:44:19,020 --> 00:44:26,670 Hi, good afternoon. It was a very interesting presentation, and I come from India are integrated energy policy. 366 00:44:26,670 --> 00:44:33,960 I think a few years ago has already said that there are 80000 villages in India where the grid won't ever reach. 367 00:44:33,960 --> 00:44:39,310 So diaries the only solution over there and our Ministry of Renewable Energy is doing a commendable job. 368 00:44:39,310 --> 00:44:44,520 What I wanted to ask you was that is there a long term commitment by Rockefeller Foundation to continue to work 369 00:44:44,520 --> 00:44:51,690 in India and give access to electricity to all those people living in those 80000 villages of them villages? 370 00:44:51,690 --> 00:45:04,710 Thank you. Well, thank you. Yes, absolutely. I'd also say that my observations of the history of both the Rockefeller Foundation and effective global 371 00:45:04,710 --> 00:45:12,120 development efforts are grounded in long term partnerships and whether it's bringing science to agriculture or, 372 00:45:12,120 --> 00:45:23,040 you know, public health expertise to vaccinations. The challenge of making these solutions accessible broadly is probably not a short term challenge. 373 00:45:23,040 --> 00:45:32,280 And so we'll have a long term commitment. One other thing I would say about that 80000 number at the same time is that number was introduced. 374 00:45:32,280 --> 00:45:39,870 The Indian government during the political campaign also made the claim that every village had already been connected by power and electricity. 375 00:45:39,870 --> 00:45:42,790 And I say, Well, how can these two things exist side by side? 376 00:45:42,790 --> 00:45:52,380 And the answer, as best I could tell, was the definition of what it means to be connected that if you run a line into a community, 377 00:45:52,380 --> 00:46:02,370 you can say that community is connected. Whether that line produces consumable power for anybody and has helped one girl read at night or avoid 378 00:46:02,370 --> 00:46:09,510 the danger of searching for firewood in the dark is not something that gets measured or assessed, 379 00:46:09,510 --> 00:46:14,910 which is why we advocate now. We don't well, I don't know what the number is. 380 00:46:14,910 --> 00:46:24,060 I think we ought to have a per person kind of consumption of power, a number that helps us see who is living in energy poverty, 381 00:46:24,060 --> 00:46:32,300 who is not and is open and transparent about what's really happening in different parts of the world. 382 00:46:32,300 --> 00:46:38,700 Watch one lady go for that. 383 00:46:38,700 --> 00:46:42,460 All right. Thank you. Great talk. My name is Marcie. I'm from Kusturica. 384 00:46:42,460 --> 00:46:48,030 I've been working or worked for several years and on small biogas systems for homes. 385 00:46:48,030 --> 00:46:55,500 My question is, so you've mentioned about, you know, the firewood, you know, girls having to go get firewood at night. 386 00:46:55,500 --> 00:47:01,560 But most of the projects you mentioned are solar based. I'm assuming that these are not powering cooking or heating. 387 00:47:01,560 --> 00:47:05,640 So what are you guys doing for that part of that? We have been. 388 00:47:05,640 --> 00:47:14,580 So first, I appreciate that, and I do think an appropriate assessment of energy poverty should include heating fuel cooking, 389 00:47:14,580 --> 00:47:18,930 the broad range of applications for which modern energy is transformational. 390 00:47:18,930 --> 00:47:23,340 And we've been toying with an idea that you some of you might be able to contribute to. 391 00:47:23,340 --> 00:47:30,420 But how would you create an index that aggregates these different pillars of energy consumption and allows 392 00:47:30,420 --> 00:47:38,850 one to really understand as a community achieving the right level of energy access and energy consumption? 393 00:47:38,850 --> 00:47:47,610 We have supported a number of clean cookstove efforts, from disaster relief to the larger alliance to come together and do that. 394 00:47:47,610 --> 00:47:52,320 We've observed with great interest the ADHA programme in India, 395 00:47:52,320 --> 00:48:03,660 which has actually helped provide a much more effective subsidy to transition people to canisters and fuel based cooking in that context, 396 00:48:03,660 --> 00:48:13,540 clean cooking. But, you know, we don't have all the answers, and we're going to keep thinking about how to be helpful in that context. 397 00:48:13,540 --> 00:48:18,450 Good evening and fantastic, I really like this the first time I have. 398 00:48:18,450 --> 00:48:20,980 I'm just doing something which is focussed on women, 399 00:48:20,980 --> 00:48:26,260 not only as consumers but also energy in the hands of women could be really a transformative tool. 400 00:48:26,260 --> 00:48:31,510 My question to you was when you are announcing big programmes for India, 401 00:48:31,510 --> 00:48:38,500 do you think women playing a major role as contributors are not only consumers like you are just mentioning? 402 00:48:38,500 --> 00:48:46,000 So we have no plans. You would have some women as entrepreneurs who are dealing with energy so that we take them from micro to macro. 403 00:48:46,000 --> 00:48:51,910 Thank you. Thank you. That's excellent advice that I think we should continue to heed. 404 00:48:51,910 --> 00:48:59,290 I'll note that we have this basic platform project in Myanmar and in a number of African countries. 405 00:48:59,290 --> 00:49:08,350 And frankly, we just had a team returned from Puerto Rico in the United States, where a very similar concept is desperately needed. 406 00:49:08,350 --> 00:49:16,630 And in many of those settings, the people we've invested in as entrepreneurs have been women led. 407 00:49:16,630 --> 00:49:26,700 These are smaller entrepreneurial businesses, but women led businesses. I can have a question about that. 408 00:49:26,700 --> 00:49:32,490 Hello. I'm on the road. I'm a business school student and thanks for the great presentation. 409 00:49:32,490 --> 00:49:34,170 I want you to understand. 410 00:49:34,170 --> 00:49:45,570 How do you justify decentralisation when you say that when the cost of capital will be definitely higher for small, low ticket loans given out? 411 00:49:45,570 --> 00:49:52,230 And then you say it takes 10 months for someone to really maximise on the new power that they generated? 412 00:49:52,230 --> 00:49:58,050 They does the economics play and how does decentralisation make sense with the increased risk? 413 00:49:58,050 --> 00:50:02,340 Yeah. Well, first, thank you and I will say I'm just a special thank you. 414 00:50:02,340 --> 00:50:06,780 I think it is so important to have business school partners in this effort. 415 00:50:06,780 --> 00:50:14,670 So it really isn't. These things only work if they work, if they genuinely are interdisciplinary initiatives. 416 00:50:14,670 --> 00:50:24,870 So two things first is if you look at any other country, if you look at countries that have successfully connected everybody to productive power, 417 00:50:24,870 --> 00:50:31,380 there isn't a single example where there hasn't been a hefty subsidy involved in aiding and abetting that connexion. 418 00:50:31,380 --> 00:50:40,060 So the idea that we should take the world's poorest two billion people and do this without any public investment is, I think, a problem. 419 00:50:40,060 --> 00:50:44,910 And and I would advocate strongly as we have and everywhere we work, 420 00:50:44,910 --> 00:50:54,090 that not only is this an appropriate place for public subsidy and investment, it is a critical and necessary part of the path to getting there. 421 00:50:54,090 --> 00:50:59,550 Second, I would say, even with that, we need to better understand these economics. 422 00:50:59,550 --> 00:51:10,320 So how do you get 10 months to be three months? Perhaps it's bundling appliances or agricultural processing tools and capabilities alongside 423 00:51:10,320 --> 00:51:16,530 the energy and are more entrepreneurial partners that are doing this in East Africa, 424 00:51:16,530 --> 00:51:23,790 for example, are testing exactly those kinds of bundle strategies so that you're both giving someone the capacity 425 00:51:23,790 --> 00:51:30,390 to improve their labour productivity via power and and the capacity of a high demand customer. 426 00:51:30,390 --> 00:51:37,650 One of the things I didn't talk as much about that I'm really excited about is this is the ability to use geospatial data and 427 00:51:37,650 --> 00:51:49,020 predictive analytics to identify which household in a village is likely to be a steep demand curve for power use and which one is not. 428 00:51:49,020 --> 00:51:52,080 And it turns out that you can do that. 429 00:51:52,080 --> 00:51:59,580 And so our partners at the University of Amherst and the Colorado School of Mines in the U.S., but with partners around the world, 430 00:51:59,580 --> 00:52:09,030 are testing different algorithms that would help you see OK, if you live in this village, not everyone in this village is going to be entrepreneurial. 431 00:52:09,030 --> 00:52:13,710 And on the steep part of the demand curve, who's likely to be? 432 00:52:13,710 --> 00:52:16,800 And what does that mean for who you market to and who you sell to? 433 00:52:16,800 --> 00:52:25,690 So making that kind of leap demand more transparent to investors and entrepreneurs is a big part of our strategy. 434 00:52:25,690 --> 00:52:40,580 Another coming from the fact. I I'm David Newman, and all your figures on energy to any of them include non-commercial energy. 435 00:52:40,580 --> 00:52:45,360 I was in Nairobi two years off to the energy conference there, 436 00:52:45,360 --> 00:52:55,550 and a lot of people were surprised to find that ninety five percent of people in the world, their main energy source was wood dung or straw. 437 00:52:55,550 --> 00:53:06,560 And that led to a lot of work on things like energy efficient stoves and that actually solve that problem in places like Kenya, actually anywhere. 438 00:53:06,560 --> 00:53:12,020 It was designed by African women and not European men, and things like the Kenya ceramic Chico. 439 00:53:12,020 --> 00:53:17,690 Now, have you got an up? So the combined with this thing about non-commercial energy, 440 00:53:17,690 --> 00:53:26,540 can you see a way to deal with energy poverty, including both commercial and non-commercial things? 441 00:53:26,540 --> 00:53:31,380 That's an excellent question, and I honestly would have to say I don't know the answer to it. 442 00:53:31,380 --> 00:53:45,700 So that said? I I think we are with Mitt and others working on ways to create an index that would help us understand what a multifaceted 443 00:53:45,700 --> 00:53:53,290 definition of energy poverty is and how you would track community performance against that multifaceted definition. 444 00:53:53,290 --> 00:54:00,010 So by multifaceted, I'm including what you're calling informal sources, I guess, of energy. 445 00:54:00,010 --> 00:54:03,130 What I don't know and what I'd encourage those of you in the research community 446 00:54:03,130 --> 00:54:11,140 to help answer is what are the right long term solutions like you know it most? 447 00:54:11,140 --> 00:54:17,770 I think the bulk of standard thinking is that low cost renewable and reliable 448 00:54:17,770 --> 00:54:25,780 electricity is the baseline for for where power systems need to go in the future, 449 00:54:25,780 --> 00:54:31,150 whether you're in an industrialised country or not, frankly. And but you know what? 450 00:54:31,150 --> 00:54:40,960 Defining what success looks like 10 years, 20 years from now is an important part of this project, and I don't think we've done that fully yet. 451 00:54:40,960 --> 00:54:48,520 And you've got to have a plan. I thank you so much for that presentation. 452 00:54:48,520 --> 00:54:49,810 My name is Alexis McGibbon. 453 00:54:49,810 --> 00:54:55,420 I'm a Masters student and doing a joint degree between environmental science and business of trying to marry these two rocks. 454 00:54:55,420 --> 00:54:59,830 I had a question about how the Rockefeller Foundation deals with areas where the 455 00:54:59,830 --> 00:55:03,790 regulatory environment might not be set up for a transition to renewable energy. 456 00:55:03,790 --> 00:55:07,240 I'm thinking particularly areas where the fossil fuel subsidies or the fossil fuel 457 00:55:07,240 --> 00:55:11,140 lobbies are very strong and they might not want subsidies going towards renewable energy. 458 00:55:11,140 --> 00:55:15,010 How do you manage that transition on a policy level? 459 00:55:15,010 --> 00:55:23,030 Well, first, thank you and I love the choice you've made to go after both of those degrees together, so congratulations. 460 00:55:23,030 --> 00:55:27,520 I do think that's part of the dialogue that's part of the project. 461 00:55:27,520 --> 00:55:39,600 Part of the effort is being a strong advocate for transitions away from fossil fuel subsidies to subsidise the subsidised buildout.