As a key enabler of development, energy access is widely acknowledged as critical to the achievement of many other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as ending poverty, achieving food security and promoting sustainable agriculture, ensuring equitable quality education, achieving gender equality, promoting sustainable economies and decent employment for all, reducing inequality and responding with urgency to climate change and its impacts.
To inform strategic policy intervention, a clear understanding of the linkages between energy access – its various modes of delivery, its quality and its cost – and other development goals is needed. Often times this critical insight is lacking due to data availability. This body of work involves field data collection and use of analytical methods to explore these linkages. We focus specifically on agriculture and job creation, two major pillars of development in emerging economies.
