Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Oxford Martin School. My name is Charles Godfrey, I'm the director here.
And it's my huge pleasure to welcome our speaker this evening, Dr. Rajiv Shah.
Rajiv Raj is president of the Rockefeller Foundation, has a hugely illustrious career,
was chief scientist at the US Department of Agriculture and was administrator,
which is a sort of trance based on boss of U.S. aid for a under the Obama presidency from 2009 to 2015.
Ross is talking this afternoon on ending energy poverty, reframing the poverty discourse branch.
Good afternoon, how are you? I'm I'm thrilled to be here and thank you, Charles, for that kind introduction.
Thank you also for the invitation to be here at the school.
This is a very special institution and I'm thrilled so many people are present here today to have this conversation.
I am excited to be at Oxford, having never been accepted here in the past.
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.
I believe from everything from our world in data to efforts to support and learn more about planetary health.
And I look forward to further discussions both this evening and in the future on the topic at hand tonight.
You know, the Rockefeller Foundation, I will just take a moment to introduce.
The concept was started by John D. Rockefeller,
senior and very much inspired by his commitment to science and technology and its capacity to change the world for the better,
particularly for the world's least fortunate people. And you know,
I keep trying to go back in time and think about what it must have been like in
1913 in the United States before we had an income tax in the United States,
before we had a federal government that had any sort of financial or programmatic
commitment to help those people who lived effectively in poverty have moved themselves up.
And in that setting.
John D. Rockefeller created an institution committed to bringing science to the uplift of the American population and then later all of humanity.
And that took shape in a couple of forms that really persisted for many, many decades.
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
to a science based discipline where research the creation of knowledge and then ultimately the application of that knowledge.
To the least, fortunate communities could actually lift up millions.
And in fact, our institution was awarded its first Nobel prise for the yellow fever vaccine and global efforts,
which persists to this day to ensure that every child on the planet gets the full
range of vaccines that humanity knows how to produce to help them survive and thrive.
A hugely successful century long enterprise after World War Two,
they similarly reconsidered what their faith in science might mean for the world at that time impoverished populations and committed themselves to
an agricultural and international agricultural research programme that decades later yielded breakthroughs and dwarf wheat varieties and the like,
and then the political engagement with leaders around the world to improve their use
of agricultural technologies in places like Pakistan or India or Latin America.
The result was a green revolution that helped perhaps 800 million,
maybe a billion people move off the brink of hunger and starvation and have enough food to to aspire to have a brighter future.
And so it's against that backdrop that a couple of years ago, when I started at the Rockefeller Foundation, I said, Well,
what is the next frontier of science and technology that has the capacity if applied to the world's more
vulnerable populations to transform their lives for the better and to do so at a meaningful and powerful scale?
And you know, we would all note that there are so many different scientific frontiers that could represent the answer to that question.
But tonight,
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,
be upwardly mobile and improve the condition and the quality of their life.
And perhaps even more than that basic observation, the idea that there's something we can do about it right now,
public sector and private sector scientists and investors,
technologists and entrepreneurs, politicians and consumers working together to ensure that we end energy poverty in a 15 or 20 year time frame.
And in doing so, we transform. The face of poverty around the world,
and so I'm going to make a few claims this evening about what we believe might be possible at the Rockefeller Foundation,
and I'm doing that in the spirit of this being Oxford,
knowing that those that these claims are all probably a bit of an exaggeration and hoping that those of you here will will
push us to improve our collective thinking and think through where we can do better to ensure we craft a pathway forward,
where the application of science and knowledge can really be transformational for hundreds of millions of people.
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.
And I think that if you look around the world and I've had the chance to visit
very low income households in parts of rural India and urban slums in Africa,
in war torn post-conflict areas in Latin America and in all of those areas, we see some common characteristics of human poverty.
One is that women provide most of the actual manual labour required to get through life.
Sometimes we use the term women, but it is girls collecting firewood, often in the dark.
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.
Sometimes it is women working in agricultural fields,
and I see in this room some folks who've been on the frontiers of understanding smallholder
agriculture and the power of that area of productive life to transform poverty.
But it is women who provide 80 percent of the labour on those farms and often without the
benefit of advanced productivity enhancing tools and technologies that require power to to run.
And they work in environments where they don't have access to that. So with those observations, and frankly, in the last decade,
the transformation of access to connectivity through mobile technology has really been the tool that now is in the hands of every single person,
pretty much on the planet. And I know that's a controversial statement, but but compared to other things,
it has a deeper and higher penetration of access and utilisation amongst lower income populations around the world,
and also now requires power to keep those phones charged and to be connected.
So I would argue today, although I'd love to see a body of research substantiate this over time,
that energy access is in fact more important than ever before and helping people rise out of poverty.
These are photos of night-time satellite imagery of five cities in Afghanistan in 2014, when I was leading.
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.
It was our largest single programme in the world.
In fact, here we had a strong partnership with Difford, the Department for International Development here.
And Afghanistan was was your largest commitment when it came to the expenditure of official development assistance.
And the reality was when I would go often with my different counterparts to Kabul, we would talk about our insights on health,
our insights on education, our insights on agriculture and had really institutions that represented decades of expertise in those disciplines.
And what we heard back, whether we were speaking to NATO's commanders and their subordinates in the field,
the Afghan national security forces and their leadership around the country or local leaders from Kabul to Kandahar,
was they first and foremost simply wanted someone to turn on the lights?
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
mortality rates and create a more sustainable population for development over time.
But the urgency they felt was that you could not have peace and you could not have security if you didn't have light.
And if you didn't have the ability to connect people to electricity,
so they could go about leading a life that had some semblance of productivity and upward mobility.
So you see here the difference looking at night at Kabul versus other other parts of the world, including Atlanta, Madrid, Brasilia and Luanda.
And it is striking that without electricity.
It's hard to imagine other things being in demand from populations around the world, and this experience shaped my observations deeply that,
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.
Instinctively believe they need and they need with a sense of urgency.
In addition to what we,
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.
Now, this is a chart that you probably know, well, it's from our world in data on the page, on extreme poverty,
and in many ways this is the standard story that we have told in our community for for many years.
If you measure poverty based on a dollar and 90 cents a day an equivalent income,
the world has in fact made great strides in reducing extreme poverty over the last several hundred years and has
made great strides in the last several decades and has made those strides pretty much everywhere around the world,
including, of course, in places like China that have been these massive engines for for the reduction of poverty on a global basis.
But also in Africa and Latin America and everywhere else as well.
And we have this basic income based measurement of poverty that has helped us define the poverty line.
Of course, that concept of a poverty line was defined in Great Britain in the 1880s.
And so it's appropriate to be here when we're discussing it and the metrics and the measures have been refined over time.
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.
Because the mindset has always been if you can sustain that level of consumption,
food consumption, you are no, you know, you've crossed the line at which you're debilitating.
Subsistence poverty causes, causes, death and disability through malnutrition and hunger.
And I just reflect on that as a measure relative to what I heard in Kabul and relative to
what we see with young girls in eastern Congo that in fact get enough calories every day,
but are still toiling without access to energy and power,
and feel trapped or stuck in a cycle of poverty and violence and don't have the tools to grow beyond that.
And so while this is an important example of success,
I'd argue tonight that we greatly overstate our success in reducing poverty by using this particular
poverty line measure and describing the incidence of poverty is quite low on a global basis.
A better way would be using Oxford's very own multidimensional indices and poverty measures,
and those of you in this room can explain this to me better than I can to you.
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
poverty that is more nuanced and more appropriate than a simple economic poverty line that's tied to a food basket or a consumption.
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.
And so I applaud you for doing that work.
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.
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
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.
You're using dirty fuels for cooking and spending a lot of time, effort and energy securing those fuels.
You may have a small kerosene lamp to create light, but that is both unsafe, expensive and ineffective as an at scale solution.
And perhaps most notably,
your communities are not benefiting from the labour productivity improvements that come with access to productive energy and power.
Put in more obvious terms, it's much more reasonable to start a business, create jobs and be effective at that.
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,
then in a place like rural Malawi, where you'll end up requiring a generator, securing fuel, managing the security of that operation,
and after you've made all of the intensive capital investments to run your own power,
you still spend 40 50 60 up to 80 cents a kilowatt hour on diesel and the labour costs required to maintain that system.
So, you know, we ask ourselves, why do these economies feel stuck in low growth and low productivity settings?
One of the answers has to be that huge differential in access to power and electricity.
At the end of the day, that's what energy poverty means, and it's what it means to us at the Rockefeller Foundation.
I lament the fact having been someone who played a modest role in helping to shape the global goals of the Sustainable Development Goals,
that we haven't set the bar high enough in the definition or achievement of energy poverty.
And that is the next second statement I'd like to put out there that we have to be much
more ambitious in our goals related to achieving the end of energy poverty and frankly,
in the investment we make to measure whether or not we are succeeding.
The current measure, as you probably know,
is is that six hundred and fifty million people fall under the SDG target of 100 kilowatt hours of consumption a year.
I'm told that and I said, Well, what does that mean? Because I'm not, you know, that could be a lot.
Sounds kind of like a lot sometimes to me.
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.
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.
So we would make the case that that number needs to be reconsidered and raised considerably.
And if we did, the six hundred and fifty million is that, as I point out,
would likely go to two billion or north of two billion in terms of how we think about the task at hand.
To further make the point, I'd like to just show you this animated bubble chart that illustrates that
really no rich country is energy poor or can be energy poor around the world.
And you can see in this chart that countries as they move across time,
Hans Rosling used to do this with health charts, and I just I watch them for fun because they're so exciting to me.
But you can see as time goes along, you have countries going from low energy, low income to higher energy, higher income.
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.
You can't get wealthier without access to electricity and energy to power that upward mobility.
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,
let's look at really low income countries that have these this unique attribute
of having better population health that doesn't exist in energy and power.
There's no such thing as a country that achieves wealth and development without access to electricity and power.
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.
The inequality of consumption I find also quite stark.
And if nothing else illustrates that contrast. Consider this The country of Kenya as a nation consumes slightly less electricity than all the pools,
televisions and jacuzzis in the American state of California.
And that's despite the fact that Kenya's population is 25 percent larger than California's.
And I just that is such an extraordinary inequality that it is almost hard.
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.
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,
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.
Every time I've been working on Kenyan Power Access, which we did previously through a programme called Power Africa,
when I was in the Obama administration, we were always told, Well, Kenya has enough power to meet its demand.
And I kept thinking, Well, how can that be true? Because I visit rural communities that have effectively no electricity.
I visit urban communities where business leaders tell me they have their own diesel generators for everything, for backup.
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.
And the answer is the power is so unreliable and it's so costly.
It's such a bad, expensive product that people don't want to pay for it, right?
And so they say, well, Kenya has enough power in its current form to meet its demand.
But if it were reliable, if it were low cost, if it were ubiquitous, the demand would be much, much, much higher.
And and that is really where we need to get to as a global community.
Now we've had an effort at Rockefeller in India to and Africa that we call smart power,
and it has been an effort to bring rural communities power and electricity through mini grids,
which are solar installations that I'll show you in a moment.
But this gentleman serum is a carpenter and a customer of one of the many grids we support in Bihar India.
And since getting access to power via this option, which he pays for,
he has doubled his productivity, hired two more workers in his in his place of employment,
increases revenues and profits 20 percent, all thanks to an electric lathe that drills grinds and shapes wood because he is a carpenter.
And it's so simple as to be obvious, but frankly, having been and seeing how our overall global development effort works,
I'd argue it dramatically under invest in getting this type of small business owner,
the power and electricity required to create the engine of employment growth and upward economic mobility.
This machine consumes two and a half kilowatts per hour, over 60 times more power than the average light bulb.
And I think more or less single handedly makes the case that the United Nations
definition of 100 kilowatt hours per year is grossly outdated and way too low.
Now, whether that number should be 4000 or 5000 or 6000 kilowatt hours per year is something we could all debate,
but it's most likely in that range as opposed to 100.
The way we were able to provide her with power is the is the kind of third statement I'd like to propose
knowing that this one in particular is probably the most aggressive relative to facts and data to support it.
But I'm curious as to whether we could say that given the state of technology knowledge and understanding of climate,
that decentralised renewable energy is the single best opportunity.
We have to end energy poverty as we know it and look for more than a century and a half.
We've all had the mindset that achieving energy access requires building large power plants, connecting them to centralised grids,
extending those grids and the services they provide via quasi public utilities to every single household,
every single business, every single enterprise.
And the reality is that model has worked in some places, but in large, large parts of the world, it simply does not work.
Utilities look at poor customers, whether they are in urban slums or rural communities, either as people who steal power and electricity,
or if they're forced to provide them power as loss leaders that they have to serve to meet some regulatory requirements.
And today, a hundred and fifty years after we kind of invented this strategy,
we think you can look at the technology frontier and do much, much better than that.
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.
And these installations, which are primarily solar with a little bit of diesel backup and battery for smoothing out consumption and supply,
are getting better every day.
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,
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,
and those telecom towers can be initial anchor customers for this kind of a micro business or many business.
But then they can go out and wire homes and businesses throughout that area,
according to we know what drives the cost of these structures in our India programme.
In particular, we're able to get power to customers for twenty five to twenty eight cents cents a kilowatt hour.
That's seen as very expensive, you know,
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,
and so they see that cost differential. But by the time you factor in transmission and distribution collections and availability,
the truth is we don't think this is a costlier solution anymore than traditional power on the traditional grid.
And we also believe the cost of these systems will come down dramatically later this year.
In November, I'll be announcing a major partnership with the energy company in India to reach 25 million rural Indians
with a joint venture business to extend the reach of these types of systems to 10000 local communities.
And I'm particularly excited about that because we've already seen the scale of
ambition has brought the cost structure of these systems down by 40 percent,
and we've now honed in on a few areas of technology.
Importantly, the battery itself that is part of the system that can help us reduce the cost even further.
According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
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.
And frankly, we'd love to tether our strategies and investments to technology curves that have that kind of movement over time,
because we can imagine that that only gets better as the world becomes more proficient at manufacturing and creating these types of solutions.
The programme in India currently reaches about two hundred thousand people, and we've seen one other important outcome of this effort.
We've seen that ninety seven percent of the bills sent out are paid by the poorest customers
that are on the other end of these projects and these businesses and these enterprises.
And that's critically important because it changes the mindset that started with saying these customers are in
fact lost leaders and now sees these customers as entrepreneurs or people who are willing to pay for reliable,
dependable energy, even if it is a little more costly than what everyone in this room pays.
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.
And I'm very encouraged that as the cost curves get better and better,
this solution will be an extremely powerful one for rural communities and urban communities in India and all around the world.
It leads to the question of is energy access and affordable effort in Liberia,
the electricity price on average is forty nine cents a kilowatt hour, and the product itself is not a particularly good one.
It's highly unreliable in the United States, it's ten point eight cents per kilowatt hour,
and I apologise not knowing what it is sitting right here at Oxford today.
But I just underlying the reality of poverty and inequality, I believe,
is this fundamental lack of access to affordable and reliable power and energy that can make a tremendous difference.
And when you fact focus on the price alone, it's easy to forget that time and again,
we've seen that people are in fact willing to pay higher prices for basic goods, especially lower income.
People see a lot of well-known economists wrote.
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
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.
And that that is OK because for them, the consequence of a child falling sick from having, you know,
catching disease, water borne illness is probably much, much, much more consequential than for that other family.
And similarly, for the access to electricity, I think we will start to see the same basic observation over time.
One of the challenges when working on energy poverty and electricity as a driver of the end of poverty is the
debate that comes between expanding existing grids and creating off grid solutions like the one I just showed you.
And as we've seen in my view, throughout so many different areas of global development cooperation, we believe that debate is largely overstated.
There's no reason why you couldn't build out infrastructure investing in the kinds of mini grids I just showed you.
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.
To me, it is a far more dangerous and far more lax a diesel proposition to suggest that
we should simply wait for utilities around the world to turn themselves around,
get interested in serving low income customers, build out access to those customers and somehow magically transform both their culture,
the culture of those enterprises and the reality of life for the world's poorest families.
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.
And he used to tell me that he went out. He was in Bangladesh.
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.
And these women would have children that were hungry. They themselves would eat maybe one meal a day.
They spend most of their time working on their farms or with their buffalo.
And the one thing he observed, just sitting in that circle and hearing their stories was how incredibly strong their basic work ethic was.
He said, These are the most honest people I've ever met.
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.
So he went back into Dhaka, went into the bank and said, You know, we should be lending in small amounts to these customers,
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for your input. We need collateral and we do credit assessments and they're all not credit worthy.
So we'll serve them. But but, you know, decades from now.
And he went back and said, that's not a sufficient answer.
So he personally guaranteed the first self-help groups,
personally created a banking institution for those poorest families, and several decades later,
and probably hundreds of millions of women served later,
he was awarded the Nobel Peace prise for that courageous observation and committing his life to that task.
And when I look today at the discussion that happens amongst big power companies and big CEOs of utilities and heads of state,
it feels a whole lot like that discussion of with the bankers 40 years ago.
And I believe there's room for perhaps many.
Muhammad Yunus is of the world to come together and actually solve this problem long before they change.
The institutions that we think of today is primarily responsible for providing power to their populations.
And that brings me to my fourth sort of statement here that I want you to test and see if you believe in.
But simply knowing who will pay and what they will pay for reliable power is absolutely critical to solving this challenge.
And this is where data technology, predictive analytics and the scientific tools of just the last few years,
I believe, can be transformational because it's easy to say that,
you know, in our two hundred thousand people that we serve in India through a couple of hundred of these mini grids,
we're seeing people repay it 97 percent.
It's a lot harder to have a conversation with an entrepreneur or an investor and expect them to believe that that high
repayment rate is going to be generalised some other community in rural Africa or a post conflict area in Latin America.
And the reality is, everybody asks the basic question if you build it, will they consume?
And we believe that the answer to that is they will rule customer.
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?
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.
When we started providing power and electricity in the rural part of the United States of America, the consumption was actually quite low initially.
And then companies like in the US General Electric decided that if they built
refrigerators and sold them really cheap or even gave them away to these families,
that they would have a device in their home that was always consuming power and they'd sell more power.
So they became an appliance company,
and they started offering these life improving solutions to households that had never before had indoor refrigeration or cooling,
or all of the other improvements in quality of life that come with electricity consuming appliances that then built up demand.
And that created the upward slope of consumption, payment and demand that sustained all of these industries.
I suspect you will see the same pathway take place if we try in many parts of the developing world,
but in a highly unique and technology enabled manner.
This is a photograph from one of our the businesses we support and come look for India.
It's one of hundreds of new micro-enterprises that smart power India has been serving.
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.
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.
So when she's not in this garment factory working, she's at home working as an entrepreneur to supplement her income.
Now, with the benefit of labour enhancement and a potential to imagine a brighter future for her and her family,
those are the kinds of stories that you can unlock with a genuine effort to end energy poverty in the field.
They call this an organic demand, and I keep arguing that we should use language that's, you know, a little more accessible.
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
home in a somewhat surprising setting to put in the extra labour to earn the extra income to make that future possible.
But you can imagine as we expand these efforts around the world that in addition to sewing machines,
you'll have electric mobility, you'll have all, you know, irrigation pumps and other agricultural processing technologies.
But the link between technology improvements in improving labour productivity amongst
lower income households and access to electricity is a symbiotic relationship.
I thought I'd effectively closed with a reminder about Dr. Eunice's story,
because much like the Grameen Bank transformed our view of some of the world's poorest women and helped many of us see them,
not as people who were suffering from lack of knowledge or a lack of effort, or even a lack of infrastructure.
We have decades later recognised that they, in fact,
are the engines of improvement for human development indicators in country after country, after country,
and it was their access to lending and their capacity to buy a buffalo or to have milk processing,
or to improve the quality of the roof on their home and protect their family.
That created that upward mobility in the same way,
we really do believe that our customers in smart power have illustrated that they too are dependable,
reliable, hard working and if given the tools to move themselves out of poverty, certainly can.
The final statement that I'd like to posit is that fighting poverty can help the planet as well.
And this is perhaps the toughest one for me because I spent a lot of time in 2014 and 2015
helping to set up both the global climate agreements and the global development agreements.
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,
we were asking industrial nations and less developed countries to adopt huge transformations
in their economies or their economic development pathways to reduce carbon emissions,
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,
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.
We've achieved by consuming a tremendous amount of cheap hydrocarbon based energy, and we were asking the two three,
four billion people in the world who do not have the same living standard that the other half
of the world has to change their aspirations to make their path forward more complicated,
to delay their desire for the kind of upward mobility everyone can see on a screen in
order to contribute to this global goal of addressing the climate challenge we face.
And that is a tough pill to swallow. It is a tough argument to make, and frankly,
whether you're a powerful emerging market like China or a far less powerful one that smaller somewhere else in the world,
it's not a deal that folks are going to take without, you know, without a better solution.
We think distributed decentralised renewable energy can be that better solution.
And in fact, if you if we collectively invest in these types of solutions, if we bring the technology cost curve down,
if we use the amount of capital we've tried to aggregate for climate finance and
for the transitions that economies need to make to enable real renewable access,
renewable power based access for hundreds of millions of people, we can actually accelerate,
not slow down the pathway out of poverty for two billion people on the planet.
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.
That was my little reference to traffic problems I had in London this morning.
But but with that said,
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.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that superb talk.
I'm going to ask a question then questions now, can I remind you that we are broadcast live?
And when you ask a question, could you wait for a microphone to turn up otherwise people can't hear you?
So let me ask four questions. A lady there with a pink scarf?
Hi, good afternoon. It was a very interesting presentation, and I come from India are integrated energy policy.
I think a few years ago has already said that there are 80000 villages in India where the grid won't ever reach.
So diaries the only solution over there and our Ministry of Renewable Energy is doing a commendable job.
What I wanted to ask you was that is there a long term commitment by Rockefeller Foundation to continue to work
in India and give access to electricity to all those people living in those 80000 villages of them villages?
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
development efforts are grounded in long term partnerships and whether it's bringing science to agriculture or,
you know, public health expertise to vaccinations. The challenge of making these solutions accessible broadly is probably not a short term challenge.
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.
The Indian government during the political campaign also made the claim that every village had already been connected by power and electricity.
And I say, Well, how can these two things exist side by side?
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,
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
the danger of searching for firewood in the dark is not something that gets measured or assessed,
which is why we advocate now. We don't well, I don't know what the number is.
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,
who is not and is open and transparent about what's really happening in different parts of the world.
Watch one lady go for that.
All right. Thank you. Great talk. My name is Marcie. I'm from Kusturica.
I've been working or worked for several years and on small biogas systems for homes.
My question is, so you've mentioned about, you know, the firewood, you know, girls having to go get firewood at night.
But most of the projects you mentioned are solar based. I'm assuming that these are not powering cooking or heating.
So what are you guys doing for that part of that? We have been.
So first, I appreciate that, and I do think an appropriate assessment of energy poverty should include heating fuel cooking,
the broad range of applications for which modern energy is transformational.
And we've been toying with an idea that you some of you might be able to contribute to.
But how would you create an index that aggregates these different pillars of energy consumption and allows
one to really understand as a community achieving the right level of energy access and energy consumption?
We have supported a number of clean cookstove efforts, from disaster relief to the larger alliance to come together and do that.
We've observed with great interest the ADHA programme in India,
which has actually helped provide a much more effective subsidy to transition people to canisters and fuel based cooking in that context,
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.
Good evening and fantastic, I really like this the first time I have.
I'm just doing something which is focussed on women,
not only as consumers but also energy in the hands of women could be really a transformative tool.
My question to you was when you are announcing big programmes for India,
do you think women playing a major role as contributors are not only consumers like you are just mentioning?
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.
Thank you. Thank you. That's excellent advice that I think we should continue to heed.
I'll note that we have this basic platform project in Myanmar and in a number of African countries.
And frankly, we just had a team returned from Puerto Rico in the United States, where a very similar concept is desperately needed.
And in many of those settings, the people we've invested in as entrepreneurs have been women led.
These are smaller entrepreneurial businesses, but women led businesses. I can have a question about that.
Hello. I'm on the road. I'm a business school student and thanks for the great presentation.
I want you to understand.
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?
And then you say it takes 10 months for someone to really maximise on the new power that they generated?
They does the economics play and how does decentralisation make sense with the increased risk?
Yeah. Well, first, thank you and I will say I'm just a special thank you.
I think it is so important to have business school partners in this effort.
So it really isn't. These things only work if they work, if they genuinely are interdisciplinary initiatives.
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,
there isn't a single example where there hasn't been a hefty subsidy involved in aiding and abetting that connexion.
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.
And and I would advocate strongly as we have and everywhere we work,
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.
Second, I would say, even with that, we need to better understand these economics.
So how do you get 10 months to be three months? Perhaps it's bundling appliances or agricultural processing tools and capabilities alongside
the energy and are more entrepreneurial partners that are doing this in East Africa,
for example, are testing exactly those kinds of bundle strategies so that you're both giving someone the capacity
to improve their labour productivity via power and and the capacity of a high demand customer.
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
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.
And it turns out that you can do that.
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,
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.
And on the steep part of the demand curve, who's likely to be?
And what does that mean for who you market to and who you sell to?
So making that kind of leap demand more transparent to investors and entrepreneurs is a big part of our strategy.
Another coming from the fact. I I'm David Newman, and all your figures on energy to any of them include non-commercial energy.
I was in Nairobi two years off to the energy conference there,
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.
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.
It was designed by African women and not European men, and things like the Kenya ceramic Chico.
Now, have you got an up? So the combined with this thing about non-commercial energy,
can you see a way to deal with energy poverty, including both commercial and non-commercial things?
That's an excellent question, and I honestly would have to say I don't know the answer to it.
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
definition of energy poverty is and how you would track community performance against that multifaceted definition.
So by multifaceted, I'm including what you're calling informal sources, I guess, of energy.
What I don't know and what I'd encourage those of you in the research community
to help answer is what are the right long term solutions like you know it most?
I think the bulk of standard thinking is that low cost renewable and reliable
electricity is the baseline for for where power systems need to go in the future,
whether you're in an industrialised country or not, frankly. And but you know what?
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.
And you've got to have a plan. I thank you so much for that presentation.
My name is Alexis McGibbon.
I'm a Masters student and doing a joint degree between environmental science and business of trying to marry these two rocks.
I had a question about how the Rockefeller Foundation deals with areas where the
regulatory environment might not be set up for a transition to renewable energy.
I'm thinking particularly areas where the fossil fuel subsidies or the fossil fuel
lobbies are very strong and they might not want subsidies going towards renewable energy.
How do you manage that transition on a policy level?
Well, first, thank you and I love the choice you've made to go after both of those degrees together, so congratulations.
I do think that's part of the dialogue that's part of the project.
Part of the effort is being a strong advocate for transitions away from fossil fuel subsidies to subsidise the subsidised buildout.