2011.11.19

Fighting Poverty Can Save Energy

/news.nationalgeographic.com November 25th 2010/

Introductionp

Aiding poor people, regions, or countries with highly efficient and complexed goods dose often fail to improve their lives. But the example in the Nicaragua project is ideal model for all the rest of support program in the developing world. Why is it working so effectively, and sustainably ? 

SignSpotting

• The successful story in Nicaragua shows how to avoid the dilemma in aiding.
• What is the crucial factor to maintain supports for the poor successfully ?
• Does it have any room to improve itself and spread widely ?

Briefing(including opinion)

The famous dilemma in aiding the poor ― improving the quality of life can lead to stimulating more consume and cause environmental problems get worse ― has been proved to be avoidable by Nicaraguan energy project. The project introducing progressive electricity fee saved much energy and made the service hours longer. Moreover, the project succeeded to give villagers and authorities  the incentive to apply much more efficient energy facilities like CFL lightbulbs and renewable energy generators. This is because they got educated to take long term effects into account, including variable petroleum costs, health risks by conventional facilities etc, and now they feel affordable about initial investment cost of those new efficient system. To spread this trials nationwide and worldwide, the system may need to be improved into much simple and easy to maintain one, because the facilities like new generators provably requires complicated technical cares. 

Opinion

As my teacher said, one of the most important factors in supporting developing countries is to make them independent from our support, which means they need to manage what we gave by themselves. In such a context, the example of this article is successful and even promising for its application on larger scale. But very few people know this as represented in Japanese government’s ODA which poured some trillion yens on developing countries but rarely works.