Pri's blog

I spent three days last week  in Nairobi, Kenya at the Advisory Group Meeting of ENERGIA, the international network on gender and sustainable energy.  ENERGIA, led by its beautiful and energetic head, Sheila Operaocha, has transformed itself from a network of organisations (mainly NGOs working with women and renewable energy technologies) interested in mainstreaming gender into energy projects and programmes and empowering  poor women, to a 15 million euro programme intent on providing energy services to poor women, through fostering women’s entrepreneurship in the energy services sector.   The goal of  empowering women  and going to the last mile to address energy poverty is still part of the network’s vision, but this fifth phase programme is a  huge step up  (up?) from what it was doing before, and the organisations delivering the programme ( Solar Sisters , Kopernic etc)  are much better described as social entrepreneurs rather than NGOs.  Interestingly Practical Action

The Human Development Report 2014 is entitled Sustaining human progress: Reducing vulnerabilities and Building Resilience, and if nothing else has foregrounded two of the key concepts in the current development discourse i.e. vulnerability and resilience. The concept of vulnerability In discussing vulnerability, the HDR aims to move beyond the traditional concept of vulnerability that comes from the disaster risk reduction discourse and  which is about exposure to risk and risk management including insuring against shocks and diversifying assets and incomes,    to what it calls ‘human vulnerability’ which is the prospects of eroding peoples’ capabilities and choices.  This definition can be linked to the idea of peoples’ agency, and also to Sen’s idea of entitlement  and serve to broaden the policy debate .   But unfortunately, at the outset itself the HDR then reduces human vulnerability to a categorisation of ‘who’ is vulnerable, ‘what’ they are vulnerable to and why (see

I have been having a conversation with Jamie Enoch, Research and Policy Analyst at the UKCDS, on a study that the UKCDS did for DFID on Mapping Infrastructure Research for Development .  You can read the exchange of words  on the Linked In AFCAP (African Community Access Programme) group if you are a registered member of Linked In, and are inclined to join the group. .  Much of it is show casing the work of the International Forum for Rural Transport and Development (IFRTD) , which, though supported by DFID for several years, received no mention in the report’s chapter on transport.   Despite this omission, it is good to know that another analyst, e.g. Steven Jones, an Associate Professor at the University of Alabama, working with AFCAP on identifying " rural transport issues in Sub-Saharn Africa (SSA) to be targeted for future research... aimed at developing a more comprehensive understanding of the overall health impacts (crashes, polllution. healthcare access etc) asso