Practical Action and The Church Urban Fund
1. Energy for development
Handley and Anne Stevens’s daughter Lucy, who wrote this article, has worked for Practical Action, one of the charities HPC supports, since 2002. Her son, Adam Robert, was born on 23 August.
As I embark on my second spell of maternity leave, I’ve been contemplating the different kinds of ‘energy’ this may require… Apart from my own physical energy, there are all the other sources of energy I may need – for lighting in the middle of the night, cooking, refrigeration, heating as autumn draws in, and of course electricity for making all those cups of tea and charging my mobile phone and laptop to help me stay in touch with the world! We sometimes forget how much of a ‘total’ benefit energy is – and how even we use lots of different sources of energy (not just electricity from the mains, but also batteries, gas for cooking, fuel for transport, and various kinds of mechanical power when that’s more convenient).
Too often, energy provision for poor people has focused on just one type of energy – perhaps on providing electrical power, or improving cooking stoves. And while this can transform lives in profound ways it doesn’t solve all their energy needs. Helping provide a ‘total energy’ solution which encompasses energy for not only lighting, but also cooking and water heating, space heating, cooling, communications, and earning a living would truly set poor people on the path to development. This is something that we’ve learned from the years of working to provide off-grid electricity for poor people, and improve their cooking stoves and fuels. I’ve seen the huge difference it can make to a family in Nepal to have a clean, smokeless kitchen, and lighting into the evening.
This is a message Practical Action has been promoting in its ‘Poor People’s Energy Outlook’ published last year, and set to be updated again this year. We hope it will stimulate debate and move us towards consensus on an international standard for total access to energy. <http://practicalaction.org/ppeo>
In order to achieve this, a few things are needed. One is that there should be more attention given to the potential of small-scale, decentralised solutions. Compared to current energy sector spending, the cost of delivering energy to meet the needs of poor people is only about 2.85% of total global energy investment. We are calling on the EC Commissioner (controlling the biggest development budget in the world) to commit to ‘Energy for all by 2030’. We are also excited about being a key part of the UN Foundation’s ‘International Year of Sustainable Energy for All’ in 2012. And while all this is going on at the international level, we remain committed to changing things on the ground for poor people. The money you give helps us deliver life-changing projects on the ground.
All this, we feel sure, would resonate with our founder, the economist EF Schumacher. This year marks the 100th Anniversary of his birth (find out more at: www.ef-schumacher.org <http://www.ef-schumacher.org>). Practical Action, which he founded as ‘Intermediate Technology Development Group’ continues to apply and develop the values and economic principles that he first set out in his seminal book Small is Beautiful (1972). For example, the concept of Technology Justice: the right for poor people to choose and use technologies that assist them in leading the kind of life they value, lies behind current programmes helping to improve poor people’s services and incomes. They range from advice and help to dairy farmers in Bangladesh (often women who own just one cow), smoke-free cooking (Sudan, Nepal and Kenya), cleaner latrines designed for different environmental conditions (Bangladesh), and ‘zeer’ pots for preserving food for longer in Sudan. All these projects, responding directly to the needs and wishes of poor people, have the capacity to help them to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty.
For me, it’s the connection between people’s everyday realities, and the big global questions of the day which makes working for Practical Action exciting. We are playing our part in changing things at both levels, and it’s your support that makes that possible.
2. Church Urban Fund
The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, wrote the following piece for the Guardian ahead of Poverty Sunday on 26 June. The article was originally published on Friday 24 June and can be found in full on their website cuf.org.uk
In a time of economic downturn, it is vitally important that we do all that we can to support those in genuine economic need. We must be ready to stand alongside them. We need, together, to rediscover the springs of solidarity.
We have heard much talk of “the Big Society”, but if we want to transform our nation for the better in practical ways, then we have to start by valuing the contribution that every individual can make to our wider society. Whether you are a company director, the person who empties the bins, or someone who volunteers their time to help other people, your contribution in the community needs to be recognised as important and worthwhile. We need to be careful that we do not perceive the worth of people simply by the amount that they earn.
Poverty levels in Britain are growing rapidly. The Save the Children Fund published a report this month entitled ‘Telling it like it Is’. The report looked at how major policy issues affect the lives of ordinary families. There is no doubt that poverty makes people’s lives shorter and more brutal. It is not about just being on a low income and going without – it’s the perpetuating cycle of being denied power, respect, good health, education and housing, basic self-esteem and the ability to participate in social activities.
Severe poverty is classed as a family getting by on less than £134 a week for a lone parent with one child, or £240 per week for a couple with two children. These families cannot afford the cuts in welfare, or the increases in VAT and inflation. Worklessness compounds the risk of severe poverty, however, while it may be easy or convenient to characterise people living in poverty as choosing not to work, we should note that 680,000 of the children in severe poverty live in households where at least one adult is working.
Therefore there is a significant problem in our country where even those who work hard are not able to put food on the table for their families.
Children have little chance of escaping the poverty they are brought up in, and if this is combined with low aspiration and low levels of educational attainment, it further reduces the skills being made available to employers in these areas and impedes wider economic growth. A study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that child poverty costs Britain at least £25 billion a year.
Does it really have to be this way? Big Society or not, a good society is shaped around the dignity and infinite worth of each human being. For me this springs from God’s bold investment in humanity — when, in Jesus of Nazareth, “though he was rich he became poor so that we might become rich”.
Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York