FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

REEF TAKES ON POVERTY WITH CLEAN ENERGY, EDUCATION, SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES, AND A CORP OF VOLUNTEERS FROM ACROSS THE PROFESSIONAL SPECTRUM

OAKLAND, Ca. – Feb. 1, 2011 – Renewable Energy Enterprises Foundation (alleviatepovertynow.org), a California based 501(c)(3), has announced initiation of the Family First Program, the first of a three-pronged approach to tackling problems of poverty within the western Zambales region of the Philippines. REEF’s approach to poverty addresses poverty at three separate points of the culture’s social structure: impoverished families, poor communities, and future professionals in the post-secondary university systems.

The Family First Program identifies households from the lowest economic class and, after screening, provide tools for upward economic mobility including electric light bulbs, an energy efficient refrigerator, a clean cook stove and batteries. The tools are powered by renewable power systems, typically solar.

Founder and CEO Ralph Chesley comments, “With our research and interaction with stakeholders throughout the community, we’ve seen that just a few basic tools are often all that stand between upward [economic] mobility, and a cycle of poverty and strife across generations. Relatively small sums from the industrialized west can yield substantial benefit to the poor in under-developed regions of the world.”

REEF will have the preliminaries of its first clean energy system completed by the end of 2011, and plans three more in 2012.

About REEF

The company is a collective of volunteer professionals, located both in the Philippines and in the United States, with expertise across multiple disciplines in the sciences and humanities. REEF works to assist communities throughout the world caught in poverty traps develop a sustainable infrastructure, which will allow for economic advancement.

For more information, or to assist REEF with financial or in-kind donations, visit http://www.alleviatepoverynow.org.
 

Energy Access Seen as Vital to Abolishing Worst Poverty

by David Jolly, The New York Times
September 21, 2010

More than $36 billion a year is needed to ensure that the world’s population benefits from access to electricity and clean-burning cooking facilities by 2030, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.

In a report prepared for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals meeting in New York, the agency said the goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2015 would be possible only if an additional 395 million people obtained access to electricity and one billion gained access to more modern cooking facilities that minimize harmful smoke in the next few years.

“Without electricity, social and economic development is much more difficult,” Fatih Birol, the energy agency’s chief economist, said by telephone. “Addressing sanitation, clean water, hunger — these goals can’t be met without providing access to energy.” The problem of energy inequality mirrors the gap between rich and poor countries, Mr. Birol said. “The amount of electricity consumed by sub-Saharan Africa, with 800 million people, is about the same as that used in New York State, with about 19 million people,” he said.

The agency, which produced the report in conjunction with the United Nations Development Program and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, looked at both the lack of access to electricity and the reliance on and use of traditional biomass like wood as cooking fuel. In sub-Saharan Africa, the report notes, the electrification rate is 31 percent, and 80 percent of people rely on biomass for cooking.

About 1.4 billion people around the world lack electricity, and they are overwhelmingly in rural areas, the report said, while 2.7 billion rely on traditional biomass to cook. In addition to contributing to deforestation in poor nations, traditional cooking fuels degrade air quality, causing serious health problems and premature deaths, the energy agency report says. Mr. Birol played down concerns that bringing more of the global population into the modern energy economy would be bad for the environment.

He predicted that meeting the development goal would raise global oil consumption just 1 percent, while raising carbon emissions only 0.8 percent. Still, “without a concerted international effort, it’s unlikely that the problem will be solved, because markets alone won’t address it,” Mr. Birol said. Companies are reluctant to invest in many areas because the return is not guaranteed, he said, so seed money is needed from wealthier countries.

In Nigeria, a major oil exporter with a population of about 155 million people, 76 million do not have electricity, he said. “If only 0.4 percent of their oil and gas revenues were invested in power production, they would solve the problem,” he said, “so it’s not just a question of money, it’s how the money is managed.”

Separately on Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that the United States would provide about $50 million in seed money over five years for a project known as the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. More than a dozen other partners, including governments, multilateral organizations and corporate sponsors, are to contribute an additional $10 million or more.