Resource information
The present report was prepared on the
basis of the findings of an international workshop held from
September 12-14, 2005, in Salvador da Bahia, and was
attended by delegations of three to five practitioners from
12 cities in Latin America, Africa and Asia. It had two main
objectives: (a) to share experiences on innovative solutions
to provide electricity services in poor peri-urban and urban
areas; and (b) to develop a body of knowledge to be
disseminated and used by a wide array of practitioners
involved in the provision of energy services in those areas.
One of the most important conclusions of the Bahia workshop
was that excluding part of the population from access to
energy on account of their poverty, marginalization and the
informality of the settlements has enormous long-term
social, economic and financial costs. The root cause of the
contemporary difficulty in providing electricity and other
infrastructure services through public or private utilities
is decades of such social exclusion, poverty and
marginalization which have led to total distrust between
formal structures and consumers, and to the rise of illegal
and costly electricity distribution systems, often managed
by private illegal entrepreneurs. Do current regulatory
systems support slum electrification? At the institutional
level, it was confirmed that in the majority of the
countries participating in the workshop, except for Brazil,
electrification programs for poor peri-urban and urban areas
are being deployed with a lack of appropriate regulatory
frameworks to support these efforts. The regulatory
frameworks which have been developed for the general model
of public-private partnership do not meet the need of
distribution companies working in predominantly poor areas.
In particular, they do not reflect the need for innovative
technical characteristics and the informal sector
relationships which characterize poor urban and peri-urban
areas, nor are there regulatory mechanisms for risk-sharing
or resolving disputes, for example, when the infrastructure
is damaged. It would be important, therefore, to adapt
regulatory frameworks for the various business models used
to extend the grids to slums. Currently, utilities are left
to their own devices to find out practical solutions. This
is an area which was identified as needing more analytical work.
