Increasing access to energy services in rural areas - REEEP ...

MODULE 10: INCREASING ACCESS TO ENERGY SERVICES IN RURAL AREAS
page 10.7
3. APPROACHING ENERGY SERVICES
FOR RURAL AREAS OF DEVELOPING
COUNTRIES
3.1. The extent of rural areas
The difficulty in approaching rural areas for study is that there is no international
standard or agreed definition of urban and rural areas that would be applicable
to all countries or even to countries in a single region. There are a wide-range of
definitions of what urban areas are; an “urban” area could be a village as small
as only 1,000 inhabitants or a large administrative city, depending on which country
is considered. 9 However, taking indicators on human settlements compiled by
the UN Statistics Division, 10 and discounting populations of developed countries,
table 1 summarizes the extent of rural populations in 114 countries that are considered
in this document, showing the 12 most populous countries that make up
nearly three-quarters of the total population of 5 billion by themselves. 11
At some three billion (about 46 per cent of the world’s population) representing
59 per cent of developing country populations, the true extent of rural areas can
be appreciated. The rural numbers do not rise considerably from 2004 to 2010
due to the general trend of migration to urban areas. 12
The proportion of rural
people actually decreases over this period, but people in rural areas still make
up more than half of total developing country populations.
3.2. The situation of access to energy services
When approaching “energy” for rural areas many people think of this in terms of
provision of electricity or “bringing in the power grid”. But energy covers a number
of different forms, for example, direct light, heating, cooling, shaft power as
well as electricity, and for a huge number of different tasks (cooking, lighting,
water pumping, refrigeration and communications) and end-users (domestic,
businesses, basic social services, transportation etc.). Because energy is just the
9
Demographic Yearbook 2001, Table 6 – see unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/sconcerns/densurb/
Defintion_of%20Urban.pdf.
10
unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/socind/hum-sets.htm – 12 July 2004.
11
in order of size – China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Mexico, Vietnam,
Philippines, Egypt, Ethiopia.
12
all except in the central Asian former Russian states, Gambia, Palau and Sri Lanka.