APPENDIX 3
Post-Forum Interim Report
The SYLFF Forum on "Distributed Electricity Services in Africa" was convened as planned form June 1 through June 5, 1999. The Forum was held at the Breakwater Lodge in Cape Town, South Africa.
The participants included (show number for the categories shown below):
18 Students from SYLFF institutions
8 Students form non-SYLFF institutions
3 Faculty from SYLFF institutions
3 Faculty from non-SYLFF institutions
17 Researchers, government officials, and NGO experts
The Forum was conducted as planned.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS
Today, two billion people have no access to an electricity grid, and millions more only have recourse to a limited and unreliable supply. Despite the tremendous social and economic benefits of electricity, many nations are unable to maintain their centralized electricity generation stations and distribution grids, let alone extending service to new areas.The problem is particularly acute in sub-Saharan Africa where a majority of the population lacks grid electricity due to ineffective utility bureaucracies and the high cost of extending electricity service to dispersed rural populations.
｡腱rom June 2-5 of 1999, nearly fifty graduate student and expert participants from over ten countries gathered in Cape Town, South Africa for the SYLFF Forum on Distributed Electricity Services (DES). Most of the participants at the DES Forum were graduate students from SYLFF-endowed universities, including UC Berkeley and Princeton University in the United States, as well as the University of Nairobi in Kenya and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. To complement and inform students' research, carefully selected experts delivered presentations and led topical workshops on various complex aspects of DES. These expert participants also helped to facilitate a student-led debate regarding public policy towards DES in the African context.
The principal organizer of the conference was a graduate student from Princeton University in close collaboration with his adviser and the Energy & Development Research Centre (EDRC) of the University of Cape Town.
DES is a comprehensive approach to meeting energy service needs. It encompasses energy efficiency as well distributed generation technologies. For example, hundreds of thousands of rural households that lack access to an electricity grid use solar panels to provide electricity for lighting, television and radio. DES allows these people to meet their most essential electricity needs without having to rely on often incompetent electric utilities.
