Expanding access to adequate, reliable and affordable sources of modern energy is essential if the world’s poorest nations are to escape the poverty trap, says The Least Developed Countries Report 2017: Transformational Energy Access.

According to The Least Developed Countries Report 2017, published on Wednesday, the world’s 47 least developed countries (LDCs) are falling far behind the rest of the developing world in terms of getting power to homes and businesses. While they have made great strides in recent years, achieving the global goal of universal access to energy by 2030 will require a 350 per cent increase in their annual rate of electrification.

“Achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 is not only a question of satisfying households’ basic energy needs,” UNCTAD Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi said in Geneva, ahead of the report’s publication on Tuesday, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) stated in a press release. “That in itself has valuable welfare implications, but we need to go beyond… for electrification to transform LDC economies, modern energy provision needs to spur productivity increases and unlock the production of more goods and services.”

 “The productive use of energy is what turns access into economic development, and what ensures that investments in electricity infrastructure are economically viable. But that means looking beyond satisfying households basic needs to achieving transformational energy access—satisfying producers’ needs for adequate, reliable and affordable energy,” said Kituyi.

 While on average 10 per cent of people in other developing countries lack access to electricity, this remains the case for more than 60 per cent of the population in LDCs. And LDCs as a group have around just 8 per cent the capacity of other developing economies to generate electricity per person, and barely 2 per cent that of wealthier nations.

The two-way relationship between the productive use of energy and economic development, which the report dubs “the energy-transformation nexus”, remains very weak in LDCs, says the report.

More than 40 per cent of businesses operating in these countries are held back by inadequate, unreliable and unaffordable electricity. On average, they suffer 10 power outages per month, each lasting around five hours, and this costs them 7 per cent of the value of their sales.

The report says it is high time for donors to meet aid commitments.

Achieving universal access to modern energy in LDCs by 2030 will be costly, according to the report. Based on previous global estimates, the report puts the cost at US$12 billion to US$40 billion per year. Transformational energy access would cost still more.

This far exceeds the resources currently available, the report says.

Total official development assistance to the energy sector is just US$3 billion per year, domestic resources for public investment are scarce in most LDCs, and most also face serious limits to borrowing without risking an unsustainable debt burden.

Better still, the report says, would be for international donors to honour their long-standing commitment to provide at least 0.15-0.20 per cent of their national income in aid, as part of the Istanbul Programme of Action for the Least Developed Countries for the Decade 2011-2020 of the United Nations. Current aid levels to LDCs fall short of this target by US$33 billion to US$50 billion per year.

Renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, could have a revolutionary effect in rural areas, home to 82 per cent of those without power in LDCs, and help to overcome the historical obstacles to rural electrification, according to the report.

But non-hydro renewable energy in these countries has so far come mostly from small-scale technologies, such as solar lanterns and stand-alone home systems. While these have brought some progress, they fall short of the game-changing access to power that LDCs need to transform their economies.

Utility-scale renewable technologies capable of feeding the grids and mini-grids necessary not only to power homes, but also to grow businesses and industries, need to be deployed rapidly. But to achieve this, LDCs must overcome important technological, economic and institutional obstacles. This will require both the right national policies and stronger international support.