Refugees ready to go green
MILLIONS of refugees worldwide struggle to access energy for cooking, lighting and communication and often pay high prices for fuels like firewood which are bad for their health.
Yet, two-thirds would consider paying for clean stoves and more than one-third for solar household products, according to a survey by the Moving Energy Initiative (MEI), a partnership between Britain, the UN and charities.
“Energy providers don’t tend to think of refugees as potential energy consumers, but the opportunities to build a relationship with them are huge,” Mattia Vianello, one of the report’s authors, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
Clean energy for refugees is a global priority for the UN refugee agency, which provides free solar power to thousands of displaced people in camps in Jordan and Kenya. Campaigners are seeking to create a market for cleaner, less-polluting stoves and fuels to supply millions of households worldwide that are using inefficient, dangerous methods.
When burned in open fires and traditional stoves, wood, charcoal and other solid fuels emit harmful smoke that claims millions of lives each year.
In Uganda, refugees collect wood from surrounding areas, “devastating” the local environment and creating tensions with locals, Raffaela Bellanca, an energy adviser with the charity Mercy Corps, said.
Humanitarians should work with the private sector to provide more sustainable energy to displaced people, said the report, which surveyed about 500 refugees, business owners and aid workers in Burkina Faso and Kenya.
“Refugee camps have the potential to become energy innovation hubs with a spillover effect on surrounding host communities,” Bellanca said.