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Access
of Africa's poor to energy must remain a priority, says Dione ECA's Director of Sustainable Development Division, Josue Dione, today in Addis Ababa urged the constituent members of UN-Energy/Africa to address the challenge of improved energy access in Africa as part of the efforts to achieve key MDGs. An inter-agency collaboration of UN agencies with energy programmes, UN-Energy/Africa began a two-day meeting today at the head office of ECA to deliberate on its work programme for the next two years. In his opening statement, Mr. Dione said both the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation and the Commission for Sustainable Development (CSD)had concluded that access to energy was crucial to the goal of halving the proportion of people in poverty by 2015. "At the last CSD meeting in New York, it was reaffirmed that without energy, most development efforts will be in vain," said Dione. He said this was why SDD's 2006-2007 work programme had put emphasis on "improving energy access to the rural population" and "Effective energy planning and management through integrated resource planning". He urged members of UN-Energy/Africa to continue to pursue joint programming and implementations of initiatives and design "practical and imaginative ways" to mobilize resources for their work. In this vein, Dione cited the collaborative work between ECA, UNEP and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs in conducting a study and stakeholders' forum on how to make Africa's power sector sustainable through well-designed power sector reforms. "The conclusions
and policy statement which emerged from these activities were later
presented to the 1st Africa Union Conference of Ministers responsible
for electrical energy in Addis Ababa in March 2006", he said.
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