Lifeline Energy is deeply committed to helping achieve the MDGs through our innovative approaches to providing access to light and information.

For the millions living on less than US$1 a day, poverty is not only defined by lack of food, education, or opportunity, but by the silent darkness they inhabit as the sun sets each night. Access to electricity isn’t just a convenience. Light and information, in particular, can be transformational. A clean burning light adds as many as eight hours to the day for working and studying. Information – delivered in the form of news, educational programs and entertainment – can save lives, teach basic skills, and connect listeners to the world around them.

 

With access to information and light, people seize educational and economic opportunities to improve health, create jobs and advance quality of life. Access to light and information underpin the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), established at the 2000 United Nations Summit when 186 heads of state agreed to join forces to end global poverty by 2015.

 

The goals are ambitious, but provide a roadmap for collaboration and commitment. Poor nations pledge to reform governance and social services; richer nations pledge to provide technical and financial support. Progress has been made – much more is needed.

 

The Lifeline Energy joins its many partners in support of the MDGs. Lifeline radios and Lifelights can help individuals, communities and nations take small steps toward the MDGs and toward better lives and a hopeful future.

MGD 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

Raising household incomes often means creating income-earning activities for women. Because her day is already filled with farming and child-rearing activities, extra work such as beading, weaving and sewing could be conducted in the evening hours – when light is readily available.

 

Improving agricultural yield is often within reach for African farmers – but they lack the information needed to combat pests, identify improved seeds and improve harvest practices. Radio programming from government extension offices is only available to those farmers who can afford electricity or batteries. Programmes like the Kenya Radio Communications Initiative (KERACI) collaborated with 12 partner organisations to distribute 10,000 Lifeline radios that disseminate a wide range of information, including agriculture, agriculture, climate, civic education and the environment.

 

MDG 2: Achieve universal primary education

Radios support formal education by broadcasting school lessons that can be consistently applied even in the most remote areas. In areas where schools or teachers are nonexistent, children can listen to programming in family or social groups. In Zambia, Lifeline Energy radios are being used to t broadcast the national curriculum in maths, language and English via interactive radio instruction. The radios also act as innovative training tools for national educators, district educators, supervisors and local teachers. Lighting, too, is important. Better lighting allows learners to study at night without straining their eyesight and lets teachers prepare lessons and grade papers.

 

MDG 3: Promote gender equality and empower women

Throughout Africa, women are frequently excluded from civil society participation, lack access to educational and income-earning opportunities and suffer from gender-based violence, early and forced marriages and female genital cutting. Experience shows that women and men can unite to change these traditions – when they are given access to information. For most of Africa’s poor, radio remains the main source of information, even though radio ownership is extremely low given the tremendous poverty – and most owners are men.

 

In parched northeastern Kenya, refugees from neighboring war-torn Somalia have formed 60 women’s groups, representing approximately 1,200 refugee women, to receive training on forming and running radio listening groups. The trainers are mainly Somali-speaking journalists who not only teach the women but also learn from them about the issues they would like to hear discussed on the radio. This information is then fed back to the programme writers.

 

MDG 4: Reduce child mortality

In sub-Saharan Africa, one child in six dies before age five. It is a troubling statistic – and unnecessary. Simple information, readily available in developed economies, would prevent many of those deaths.

 

Protracted conflict in northern Uganda has displaced 1.6 million people, living in overcrowded conditions in camps for the internally displaced. Children suffer most. Acute malnutrition is widespread and children are vulnerable to malaria, pneumonia, diarrhoea and other diseases. Lifeline radios were distributed to women and children in the most affected camps. Women formed listening groups to hear radio broadcasts that included health and safety messages, improving life skills and increasing trust and social cohesion within the camps.

 

MDG 5: Improve maternal health

Babies are born at every time of the day – and night.  Across sub-Saharan Africa, many are born in homes without electricity. Candles and kerosene wick lamps are dim, fires are hazardous and it isn’t healthy for mothers or babies to breathe kerosene. Clean, bright LED Lifelights can assist mid-wives in during and after the birth, helping them to deal with any complications. 

 

Access to information for well baby and post-partum care is also a challenge. Throughout Africa, radio programmes which address breastfeeding, illness prevention, safety and hygiene are only accessible to those with radios – and the odds are stacked against the new mother. Radios are most often owned by men and require  disposable batteries which are expensive. One Lifeline radio and a Lifelight shared in a village can transform the lives of mothers and their babies and increase their chance for survival and good health.

 

MSG 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases

Lifeline radios provide 24-hour sustainable reception for the many radio health communications initiatives in Africa, including soap opera dramas that carry social messages of disease prevention and care. Programmes are broadcast in English, French, and local languages through community and mainstream radio stations.  Radio programmes foster positive behaviour and stimulate dialogue between couples and between communities and health centres on family planning reproductive health, malaria, nutrition, improving child survival and HIV/AIDS.  Information about malaria and many other diseases can be targeted to specific geographic areas and seasonal cycles.

 

Lighting is important for host of health reasons. Clean, bright lighting can assist care givers who work in dark shacks to change dressings or identify infections or other problems.  Rural mid-wives or other local health workers need light.  Even something as basic as walking to and from a pit latrine at night can be aided with the use of a Lifelight.

 

MDG 7: Ensure environmental sustainability

Most of the energy sources available to the poor are heavily polluting. Batteries are inefficient, requiring 50 times the energy to make as they create. On disposal, they leech heavy metals and toxins into the soil or waterways. Biofuels such as firewood and dung produce toxic indoor and outdoor air pollution. Wood collection falls mainly to girls and women, takes a tremendous toll on the environment leading to severe deforestation, erosion and reduced biodiversity. Connecting to a power grid reduces the pressure on biofuels, but brings concerns of its own, depending upon the source of the power.

 

And it is unlikely that the 1.6 billion people currently without electricity will be grid connected in our lifetimes. These enormous pressures can be abated with renewable human powered of technology, combined with solar power.

 

MDG 8: Develop a global partnership for development.

Partnership lies at the heart of the Lifeline Energy’s work. We believe that lasting improvements in people’s lives come about when all those directly involved and affected by change are offered space for their voices to be heard and access to a platform from which they can participate. We collaborate with governments, international aid organisations, in-country NGOs, local communities, individuals and corporations to achieve our goals, working across a range of disciplines:  education, health, agriculture, complex emergencies, and peacemaking. 

 

The Millennium Development Goals themselves were built upon Lifeline Energy of partnership – bringing the 186 United Nations member states together for an historic commitment. The Lifeline Energy is proud to be part of this important effort.