Poor People's Energy Outlook 2012

Access to energy is essential for poor people to earn a decent living, to work their way out of the vicious cycle of poverty and subsistence. Whether you earn off the land, from a small business, through a job in a larger enterprise or through the supply of energy itself, energy is important. Poor P...

Decentralized Energy Access and the Millennium Development Goals

Gwénaëlle Legros, Kamal Rijal, Bahareh Seyedi

Decentralized, off-grid power supplies such as micro hydropower can be perceived as expensive investments by poor countries like Nepal. Can these investments be justified by the benefits that electricity brings to villages in remote mountainous regions? This book describes research into the developm...

Designing and Building Mini and Micro Hydro Power Schemes

Luis Rodriguez, Teodoro Sanchez

Small hydro power installations have the potential to provide a renewable supply of energy to people in remote, hilly communities, far from the national gird. This book is based on the authors' considerable experience of installing hydroelectric schemes that produce up to 500kW for powering small co...

Uncertain Futures

Jonathan Ensor

Community-based adaptation is a new concept whose meaning is still to be fully understood. Most agree that communities should be supported to respond to the challenges they face, and some see this as the goal of community-based adaptation. By contrast, Uncertain Futures proposes that community-based...

Expanding Energy Access in Developing Countries

For centuries, water pumping, food processing, and manufacturing , amongst other productive uses, have been enhanced by the application of mechanical power. Recent technological advances in mechanical power have further enhanced productivity and reduced the drudgery of human labour associated with t...

More People, More Trees

William Critchley

Over 20 years ago, concerned famers’ groups in Kenya and Burkina Faso began to adopt new measures to conserve soil and water and to re-establish trees in their fields. Two videos, Looking after our Land and Building on Traditions, recorded the new participatory approaches for land conservation being...

Capacity Development for Scaling up Decentralized Energy Access

Elisabeth Clemens, Kamal Rijal, Minoru Takada

Micro hydro power is ideally suited to meeting the energy needs of remote communities.A national micro hydro programme has been operating for more than a decade in Nepal. Similarly a fuel-wood-conserving cooking stoves programme has been operating in Nepal for decades. Capacity development for scali...

The Hidden Energy Crisis

Teodoro Sanchez

Billions of people worldwide are without access to clean, modern energy, which leads to drudgery, ill health and sometimes death. Although a lack of adequate energy affects people's health and well-being, as well as their productive and educational capacities, addressing this deficit is a low priori...

Making Good Local Governance Grow

Patrick Robinson, Sara Wehrli

"Making Good Governance Grow" presents experiences of participatory natural resource management based on four case studies from Helvetas projects in Bhutan, Guatemala, Mali and the Dominican Republic. The approach considers how to involve the local population in the sustainable management and sharin...

Climate Change and Gender Justice

Geraldine Terry

Climate change is often framed as a problem that needs mainly technical and economic solutions. Climate Change and Gender Justice considers how gender issues are entwined with people’s vulnerability to the effects of climate change, and how gender identities and roles may affect women’s and men’s pe...