Electrification of the Remote Communities in Developing Countries: Solving or Creating Problems?

 

Preface

When I began to consider which topic to explore for my final Environmental Philosophy project, I felt drawn to and at the same time repelled by the idea of exploring electrification in remote areas of the third world.  This topic has personal significance to me because of my career goals of promoting distributed renewable energy in areas of rural Latin America.  Despite the many benefits of these electrification projects, my experiences traveling have made me slightly skeptical of the overall merits of these projects because of the sweeping changes they introduce in a society.

My reservations about these projects beg the question, “Why dedicate your life’s work to completion of projects that may have negative consequences?”  I suppose I must blame my practical nature which knows that where there is a need, there will soon be a market.  By implementing these systems in areas that are industrializing rapidly, I would just be slightly ahead of the curve since it is just a matter of time before these areas receive electricity through governmental projects.  Helping to implement renewable energy is better than the traditional model of stringing long transmission lines from heavily polluting sources.   And, I can always point to the good these types of projects bring to ease the worries of my conscience.

Despite these rationalizations, I know that the time to investigate this question fully is now, before I begin work that I may later deem destructive.  Therefore, I have embarked upon seeking the answer to this difficult question through an in-depth analysis of one particular electrification project.  I will also include anecdotes from this and related projects undertaken by organizations like the Solar Electric Light Fund, the World Bank, and USAID and incorporate my own experiences from living abroad to illuminate the issue of electrification from a variety of perspectives. 

Writing an academic paper about a topic that is so personal is a new challenge for me, but is a task that must, for my conscious, be undertaken.  Unlike most analyses that I complete, I do not know what the outcome will be before I begin writing.  Hopefully this process will help guide my studies towards a career I find fulfilling and believe in whole-heartedly.

<p>Introduction

Of the world’s six billion inhabitants, two billion do not have access to electricity.   For these people, electricity has the potential to completely revolutionize their lives.  The changes that accompany access to electricity are vast and varied.  The appliances that are introduced into a society once it has been electrified can be as rudimentary as a pump to bring water from a well to the Earth’s surface, decreasing the time it takes to gather water daily, or as complex as a television set and refrigerator.   According to a Nepalese villager responsible for electrifying his community, Bringing electricity to communities that currently live without it is like “leapfrogging people from the 14th century directly into the 20th.”  Communities that are currently being electrified face rapid changes that affect each aspect of life in a fraction of the amount of time that electrical devices were invented and disseminated throughout the lives of people in developed countries.  The speed of this change became apparent to me while I lived with a Secoya community on the banks of the Aguarico River in the rainforest of Ecuador in 1998.  I saw a community that relied on a shaman for its medical needs and had little contact with anyone outside of their tribe suddenly connected to a global network through a satellite internet connection.  They had also recently gained access to a television set and video games that ran on a car battery inside of their thatched roof huts. 

As communities such as this are thrust into a modern world at warp speed, they ostensibly become more developed as far as economic indicators are concerned.  They seek jobs in nearby cities that allow them to earn more money per person in order to buy more electronic devices and products of this modern world.  This move boosts the country’s per capita income or gross national product (GNP).  They live longer by having access to modern medicine.  Their children learn to read and write the language of the country in which they live, increasing the country’s literacy rates.  While these indicators may seem positive on the surface, they are not always an accurate measure of the quality of life.   Furthermore, there are other consequences of electrification that I will pursue in this paper that are equally as important, but far less studied. 

Although analyzing the cultural effects of electrification may seem too expansive to tackle in a one, short paper, I contend that this issue must be considered holistically.  Dissecting problems and seeking specialized solutions has fragmented our world to the point where experts rarely investigate the cultural changes initiated daily by the rapid developments in technology.  Rarely do today’s experts consider solutions to the new societal challenges that address the root of the problem.  Author Francis Moore Lappé identifies the problem with “solv[ing] by dissection” in her book Hope’s Edge when she urges for integrated solutions that attack the source of the problem.   Having this larger vision, which identifies the cause of the problem and its solution, allows one to realize that for each innovation that technology creates, there is a negative externality, unintended consequence that affects the environment or humans, that also results.  As scientists just begin to recognize and take into account the externality of pollution associated with electrical generation, perhaps it is time philosophers and anthropologists look critically at the cultural externalities associated with electrification projects.

Organizations Working Towards Electrification

The organizations that support rural electrification projects have lofty goals that aim to better the communities they serve.  Engineers Without Borders (EWB) is a non-profit group that has the goal of “building a better world, one community at a time.”   Most recently, the University of Colorado chapter of EWB installed photovoltaic panels on top of a community medical center in Rwanda so that the doctor there would have better light for performing surgery.   Another non-profit called the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) promotes solar rural electrification projects and works out long-term payment plans with communities.   Developed countries work collectively to electrify communities through the World Bank, whose mission is to “provide low-interest loans, interest-free credit and grants to developing countries for education, health, infrastructure, communications and many other purposes.”  The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) also supports electrification through projects that promote “long-term and equitable economic growth and the advance[ment] U.S. foreign policy.”  

While the missions of these organizations may be noble, it is important to view their work with a critical eye in order to determine whether or not their goals are being achieved.  Not only is this type of analysis important for the welfare of the communities in question, but it is also essential that the supporters of these programs, U.S. taxpayers and private donors, know exactly what they are promoting.  However, it is not always easy to gain access to this information.  EWB has existed for only six years and completed few studies on the effects of its programs after implementation.  These studies are not released to the public unless an EWB chapter needs to reference one in order to complete a project.   The World Bank and USAID have extensive libraries of studies on the effects of their projects, but these reports almost exclusively focus on the success of the project in terms of how well the electrical generating machinery worked and the number of jobs created by these projects.   None of their studies assess the impact of the project on the community’s culture or attempt to determine whether or not the project has improved the individual lives of the community’s citizens.  Furthermore, all of the studies for these organizations were completed by the organization itself.  The absence of a third party evaluator lends less credibility to the evaluation reports since it is in the organizations’ best interest to report only favorable results.

A Case Study

Because of the lack of reports that critically examine how these projects affect the lives of citizens in the rural communities served, I used a report from an independent source to illustrate how one appliance powered by electricity, the television, has impacted a newly electrified community.  I will consider some of the electrical externalities associated with introduction of television in the remote indigenous community of 357 inhabitants, Sao Joao de Pirabas, Brazil.  In 1996, the television was a relatively new appliance in the newly electrified community and anthropologist Raul Reis set out to answer the questions, “What has been the role of television in the way that rural Brazilian communities construct their own interpretation of reality? And what kinds of cultural changes (if any) can be attributed to systematic and pervasive television viewing?”   Reis’s study is particularly useful to this paper since the television is usually one of the first appliances that people who receive electricity buy, and it is usually the harbinger of many more changes in the community.   Neville Williams, founder of the Solar Electric Light Fund which services remote areas, observed that families in Nepal bought black-and-white television sets before they could use them in anticipation of their community’s electrification project.

Reis found that the introduction of the television in this community decreased the social capital between residents.  Citizens now spend nights inside watching addictive soap operas instead of what they use to do, which involved playing outside or chatting with neighbors.  One resident said that she now ‘barely talks to her neighbor’ because she just does not ‘have time for that anymore.’  Staying at home to watch television has also decreased attendance at parties, church services, and town meetings.  

What citizens have seen on television has also started to impact their lives.  Young people have begun moving to the closest city to earn money to be able to buy nice clothes and mimic what they see on programs.  Those who move to the city usually get married later in life and have fewer children than those who stay in the village. Even young people who remain in the village go to the city to buy new clothes.  One woman of the village referred to the necessity of her shopping trips in the closest city by saying ‘the fact that I live here doesn’t mean I have to dress like a hillbilly.’   The television has also caused citizens to become more preoccupied with their appearance and cleanliness.   One citizen of the Brazilian village thinks that the television is ‘corrupting’ the youth as it shows them a variety of skills, including how to steal.

Personal Experiences and the Jon Frum Cult

The author’s observations closely parallel my own experiences while living for six months in remote communities of the Ecuadorian cloud and rainforests during the fall of 1998.  The people I encountered in an Ecuadorian cloudforest town also longed for what they saw on television programs.  After we cooked dinner with wood as a heat source in a kitchen with carbon-stained walls, we moved into a nearby smoky bedroom and watched “Knight Rider” and “Beverly Hills 90210.”  They asked me, “Do people in the U.S. really have cars that they can turn on with their voices?”  Everything about the character’s lives in these shows was so dramatically different from the life they lead sifting through the remains of burnt wood to find useful pieces of charcoal to sell for 50 cents a bag that they could not discern reality from fiction.   They were immediately attracted to the material items they saw on the television and wanted them for themselves.

I also recognized trends similar to those identified by Reis in the Secoya village of San Pablo in Ecuador.  The young people not only moved out of San Pablo to the nearest city to make money, but they also began marrying mestizos, people of mixed European and indigenous descent, that they met there.  As the young moved out and did not return, the town’s population of 350 began dwindling and the number of people who spoke Pai-Coca, the Secoya language, diminished.  Trades that were traditionally passed on from father to son died as well; the town’s shaman had no one to take over his position since his son was converted to Christianity by Protestant missionaries and now operates an ecotourism business that brings tourists to the village.  Ironically, the only person interested in the shaman’s wisdom and tradition was a man from North America who had come to live and study with the Secoyas.

Like the people I encountered in Ecuador and the village Reis studied, exposure to material goods created an obsession among the indigenous people of a group of Pacific Islands called the New Hebrideans.  Three hundred thousand U.S. troops and the Red Cross were stationed in these islands during World War II (WWII) and exposed locals to modern electrical devices for the first time.  After the troops’ departure from the islands, a cult called Jon Frum appeared and has persisted until today.  Cult members tote a replica of the Red Cross flag and believe that a Westerner named Jon Frum will come to their island one year on February 15th to deliver modern goods from the developed world around them just as the troops did decades ago.   These people’s exposure to modern electrical devices irreparably changed their culture from one of self-sufficiency to dependency and pining for what they do not have.

Qualifying the Change

Although the aforementioned experiences with electrification seem to have only brought negative change into the lives of villagers, it is important to recognize the fact that electrification projects do bring many notable changes to communities that almost unequivocally could be considered beneficial.  Often introduction of alternative cooking methods through electric ranges, gas-fired burners, and solar cookers improves the lives of women as they are relieved of firewood collection and indoor air quality improves. Other examples like the University of Colorado EWB project that provides light for a medical center in Rwanda seem to have little controversy.

However, these beneficial projects often lead to other, unintended electrical advances in the community.  Once there is a source of electrical generation like a diesel generator or photovoltaic panel, it is easy to plug in other appliances into the system or supplement the system with more electrical generation because some of the needed infrastructure like batteries and an inverter, converting direct current into alternating current that most electrical devices use, exist.  Also, when citizens have seen the changes that electricity can bring, they are often apt to want more of the amenities it provides. 

Whether or not the results of electrification are considered beneficial or detrimental to the community depends on what one considers “good” and “bad.”   If one compares the changes brought about by the advent of the television with a baseline scenario, it is evident that the introduction of the television in the Brazilian town Reis studied encouraged consumerism, which some people may argue is beneficial in its stimulation of the country’s economy. Also, moving to the city encouraged these Brazilian village members to have fewer children as they were introduced to birth control methods and realized the financial burdens of having children.  Villagers who have moved into a city also had access to doctors and schools that teach the country’s official language.  Since they were earning money for the first time, their annual income increased.  These changes would make the aforementioned economic indicators – population growth rate, literacy, life expectancy, and per capita GNP – more closely resemble the statistics of developed countries.  Most people would consider these changes improvements when cast in this light.

Neville Williams, solar energy advocate and founder of SELF, sees social and societal benefits of electricity projects that extend beyond the economic, standard of living indicators. He claims that these projects prevent peasants from rebelling against the governments that routinely ignore their pleas for public works.  He explains how rural people are easily mobilized by charismatic leaders of militant groups like the Shining Path in Peru and JVP, a Singhalese Marxist movement in Sri Lanka, by saying, “Because people have little access to information, with few newspapers – and no TV because of no electricity – they begin to feel isolated and left behind by a world they can’t be part of and don’t understand.”   He sees his work electrifying communities as a type of ‘responsible capitalism’ that allows peasants to “[stay] on their land, as opposed to joining a peasant revolution or moving to a city, where they will end up in squatter shacks and in slums.”   He also thinks this development prevents unnecessary deaths as those without electricity’s amenities like Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis try to illegally immigrate to Europe and “wash up on the beaches of the Mediterranean.”

Other people, like author Francis Moore Lappé, do not see the benefits Williams enumerates and do not use economic indicators as a measure of the merit of changes because of the negative changes rising living standards can bring.  Lappé notes that these “dubious measures of well-being” can bring “worsening pollution, longer commute hours, deteriorating health, and ever-more contaminated water.”    These critics of electrification projects contend that this new change decreases global diversity by lowering populations of indigenous people as it encourages them to move to the city.  The loss of these people means a decline in knowledge about local flora and fauna.  Furthermore, their disappearance means there is less cultural diversity in the world.  As they become entrenched in a capitalistic society and begin buying products they once made, they replace their unique skills with the traits needed to survive in today’s modern world.  As a race, we lose hunter-gatherer and subsistence living survival skills and knowledge. As homo sapiens’ collective knowledge base decreases, we are less fit to adapt to change, brought about by political or climatic factors.

Finally, the most pressing question that should be addressed when deciding if the change experienced by a remote community is worth initiating is whether or not the change increases the happiness of the people.  Gifford Pinchot, a respected conservationist and grandson of the first Chief Forester of the U.S. Forest Service, noticed while he was living with Shuar in the rainforests of Ecuador that these people were among the happiest he had seen because they had tremendous amounts of free time.  The men would hunt until noon each day and then return to their small farms where the women were doing some agricultural work.  The rest of the day for both sexes consisted of chatting and playing games.  When compared with the eight hour work days and ten days of vacation per year that most Americans receive, this amount of leisure time seems incredible.  Pinchot contends that the Shuar were so happy not only because of the amount of free time they had, but also because of the rich relationships they developed with the people around them.  When compared with the lonely, rude crowd he encountered shopping on 5th Avenue in New York City just days before Christmas, he realized that having access to consumer products does not bring happiness.  He also recognized a trend in places that had recently developed in newly electrified communities around the world.  The elders of the community mourned the way their lives had been prior to the development changes.  

Pinchot’s observations parallel the findings of a research team who studied 65 countries and found that people in Nigeria were the happiest.  The countries that followed Nigeria were Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, and Puerto Rico.   The per capita GNP of Nigeria is $1000, which is tiny in comparison to $40,000, the average annual income of a U.S. citizen.  This discrepancy and the results of the happiness survey suggest that the changes brought about by electrification, which brings consumerism, do not always benefit the people of a country.  Despite the economic indicators that attempt to measure the quality of life of a people, the only true measure of a person’s quality of life is his or her day-to-day happiness. 

A Proposed Solution

These anecdotes and studies show that not all electrification projects are totally beneficial or detrimental.  How, then, should decisions be made by aid organizations, who attempt to improve the lives of the people they serve, about which communities to electrify?  In order to assess the merit of electrification projects and avoid unintended changes that could lower the quality of life of the people served, I propose that the directors of organizations like EWB, USAID, SELF, the World Bank, and similar organizations consider the project as a whole and ponder all of its possible implications by answering the following questions before making their decision about whether or not to pursue a project.

1.  Does or will the project erode the community’s culture by introducing devices like televisions that will induce consumerism?

If the answer to this question is yes, then I propose that the project not be pursued.  This response implies a judgment about globalization.  Consumerism leads to globalization as remote areas are exposed to products from companies based thousands of miles away.  The most successful corporations of capitalistic economies penetrate every remote area of the globe until their product is sold everywhere.  The only thing other than rice that the Secoya I lived with depended on each week was a delivery of Coke-a-Cola.  As the world begins to use fewer and fewer locally-made products and buys only mass-produced goods from a small number of companies, they become linked to a global marketplace.  In the U.S. just ten corporations ring in over half of all food and beverage revenue.   Soon, not only the fashion and food of remote places resemble that of the rest of the world, but also the appliances and automobiles sold in that area are the same as well.  It is not difficult to see how this situation occurs since the people in developing regions are exposed to products from companies like Coke-a-Cola and McDonald’s, the world’s top spenders on advertising, through aggressive advertising campaigns on television and billboards that show how these products change the lives of people in developed countries.  However, this advertising produces a homogenized world with little character and few regional nuances.   Author Francis Moore Lappé likens this phenomenon to communism.  She “sees us all becoming the same – like the frightening images of gray, uniform communism.”  

Ironically, from a capitalistic standpoint, this domination of the market by a few firms like is detrimental to the capitalistic system overall.  This type of market works on the principle that competition will provide the consumer with the best good for the lowest price.  Without competing interests like local businesses, Lappé notes that “it destroys the conditions necessary for [the company] to serve us.”   Even a capitalistic economist would agree that globalization is detrimental to society overall.  

2.  Will the project encourage local migration out of a village?

If the answer to this question is yes, then promoting the project would decrease cultural diversity and should not be pursued.  Implicit in this response is a value judgment about the importance of maintaining a world full of people with different beliefs and languages.  This pluralism occasionally leads to conflict, but is essential to maintain because of the benefits it brings to humanity.  Beyond stimulating the average person’s creativity and intellect by knowing that there are a variety of people on Earth who overcome survival challenges in distinct ways, cultural diversity keeps the human race fit to survive future adversity, which may come in a variety of forms through economic collapse, global warming or cooling, war, and disease outbreak.  Just as a monoculture instead of a variety of crops planted in the same field is more susceptible to invasion from insect predators, the homogenized human race is more vulnerable in a globalized world where diversity of opinion, tradition, and thinking cease to exist.

3.  Can the project improve the chance of the survival of the culture it is introduced into? 

In the rare instance that an electrification project can actually increase the survival of a people’s traditional ways, it should be supported.  Neville Williams observed that electrification saved the Masai in Tanzania from the encroachment of civilization.  They used their television, radios, mobile phones, and computers to ward off interests that tired to take over their land.  He notes that “Masai warriors could be seen walking around with a spear in one hand and a cell phone in the other.”   This author also observed an Indian farmer, who was able to stay on his farm and earn enough money to survive instead of moving to the nearest city by “trading stocks on the Bombay stock exchange using a solar-powered computer.”   A Nepalese community that had lost some of its young members to the nearby city 8,000 feet below was able to retain its members with the introduction of electric pumps that allowed them to irrigate their crops better and produce better harvests.  This application of electricity also improved the quality of life for the town’s young people since these people found themselves in abject poverty when they moved to the city because their lack of urban job skills.  Communities should be educated about how to maintain their culture by using technology to protect their way of life.   If these uses of electricity were fostered, then perhaps electrification could help maintain global diversity instead of destroy it.

4.  Can the project be contained to prevent the spread of electricity for other uses?

If the project allows villagers to connect into the electrical generating equipment or use the battery backup and inverter to power personal devices, then it is likely that the use of electricity in the community will become widespread. Therefore, if the answer to this question is yes, then organization directors should seriously consider what the ramifications of this spread of electrical devices will do to the culture and disposition of the people.  If the overall impact of these new devices will be negative, then the project should be abandoned.

5.  Will the project lead to a significant overall improvement in the quality of life for the people?

Simple technological advances like harnessing the methane in animal feces to power a stove and avoid laborious firewood collection and incorporating a solar thermal system which heats water for bathing and washing can revolutionize the lives of people with seemingly few side effects.   However, not all electrification projects serve the immediate needs of a community.  While in the cloudforest of Ecuador, a family I stayed with had recently received electricity and spent their savings on a full-sized refrigerator.  When I opened the door, I saw that they kept absolutely nothing inside.  They had fallen victim to an advertisement, which told them that they should have this appliance since most people in developed worlds do.  However, they had lived their entire lives without one and did not know how to change their life to utilize it.  This experience showed me that electrification projects that serve urgent, specific, and isolated needs should take priority over projects which simply serve to electrify an area ubiquitously. 

6.  Is there a history of civil unrest because of a sentiment of abandonment by the government?

If a community is angry because they have been denied public works projects like electrification by the government, then perhaps projects for these types of villages should have priority as Neville Williams suggests.  Electrifying these places could help dissolve the formation or support of a guerilla group and prevent citizens from trying to illegally immigrate as they connected to the rest of the world.  Electrification in these types of areas could even help citizens feel more empowered and avoid governmental abuses as they take advantage of the global network that is newly accessible to them.  The Zapatistas, a militant guerilla group dedicated to land reform in Chiapas, Mexico, have begun fighting without guns by using the Internet to show international supporters videotaped governmental abuses of their human rights.

7.  Can the implementing organization monitor the results of the project to ensure that the project’s initial goals are attained?

This question is tricky because it is likely that retrospective studies of electrification projects are going to show a variety of results as people’s opinions of the projects vary.  It is not plausible that a negative report would allow a project to be undone since a community like the island people of the New Hebrideans who have been exposed to the conveniences that electricity provides is not likely to accept a “de-electrification” project.  However, I contend that these surveys are essential to help guide the direction of the organization’s future projects.  In a rare case when the satisfaction of recently electrified residents was studied, one hundred percent of the 67 interviewed customers said they were ‘happy with their solar products.’   However, the customers could have been satisfied with the operation of the product instead of the changes it had initiated in their life.  If more detailed surveys that address the societal changes brought about by electricity were conducted more often, they could help organizations assess the merit of future projects.

Although these proposed questions for organizations’ directors may seem obvious, they are currently not addressed before electrification projects are pursued.  These questions should serve as a guide for not only project directors, but also for all U.S. citizens since their tax dollars fund both USAID and the World Bank.  Donors to non-profits like EWB and SELF should consider the projects these groups support especially carefully.

The Upshot

Weighing the pros and cons of electrification projects is not easy given the plethora of changes initiated by them.  However, it is a process that organizations (and individuals, like myself) dedicated to this cause must undertake.  Without this conscientious effort to evaluate projects, the best of intentions could be misdirected.   Although a remote community under consideration for a project may soon be electrified by a large utility company trying to extend their service range or domestic development projects, this inevitability does not provide justification for the introduction of these projects by organizations with the mission of bettering the community.  In order to determine if the community is being “bettered” and the project should be pursued, individuals should give careful consideration to the questions I have posed in this essay.