E-raamat: Challenge of Rural Electrification: Strategies for Developing Countries [Taylor & Francis e-raamat]

Most of the contributors have had experience actually designing, building, operating, and using rural electrical systems, rather than merely wheeling and dealing for funding, permissions, and the like from an office in Geneva. Citing case studies mostly from non-industrialized countries, but also Depression era US and postwar Ireland, they describe how to develop effective institutions, provide subsidies, and keep distribution utilities afloat financially during a period of rapid expansion in ways that have proved politically acceptable to a wide range of constituents. Distributed in the US by Johns Hopkins University Press. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Douglas Barnes and his team of development experts provide an essential guide that can help improve the quality of life to the estimated 1.6 billion rural people in the world who are without electricity. The difficulties in bringing electricity to rural areas are formidable: Low population densities result in high capital and operating costs. Consumers are often poor, and their electricity consumption is low. Politicians interfere with the planning and operations of programs, insisting on favored constituents. Yet, as Barnes and his contributors demonstrate, many countries have overcome these obstacles. The Challenge of Rural Electrification provides lessons from successful programs in Bangladesh, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Mexico, the Philippines, Thailand, and Tunisia, as well as Ireland and the United States. These insights are presented in a format that should be accessible to a broad range of policymakers, development professionals, and community advocates. Barnes and his contributors do not provide a single formula for bringing electricity to rural areas. They do not recommend a specific set of institutional arrangements for the participation of public sector companies, cooperatives, and private firms. They argue instead that successful programs follow a flexible, but still well-defined set of principles: a financially viable plan that clearly accounts for any subsidies; a cooperative relationship between electricity providers and local communities; and an operational separation from day-to-day government and politics.