A Critique of Innovative Clean Energy Initiatives for Refugees

Reflecting on this week’s readings I thoroughly enjoyed going back to journalism basics, including the American Press Institute’s article “What Is Journalism.” As I’ve spent most of my collegiate and professional identifying as a journalist I’ve never thought much about what journalism was and only as something I simply did. I appreciated that the article gave a clear definition of journalism as well as tips on managing bias and ensuring the focus of a story.

In relating the readings to the practice of solutions journalism I came across an africa.com article by Joshua Masinde, “Innovative Clean Energy Initiatives for Refugees,” which made me think a lot about the importance of keeping the focus of the story in mind.

As refugees are isolated from the national grid they lack reliable access to renewable power. The Moving Energy Initiative (MEI) is a partnership between Energy 4 Impact, Chatham House Practical Action and the Norwegian Refugee Council to promote approaches with the private sector and market-oriented solutions to alleviate the power struggle and improve the lives of refugees and host communities.

The article highlighted in particular the Kakuma camp in northwestern Kenya that is home to 185,000 refugees. In the region, only 2.7 percent of the population had access to electricity and many refugees did not have any form of lighting at night. This not only creates an issue for those that have to rely on firewood for cooking, but also poses a threat to schools, healthcare facilities and businesses.

The article discusses MEI’s initiatives to address the lack of affordable access to energy in Kenya, Burkina Faso and Jordan through incorporating the private sector in the implementation of low carbon projects while establishing local market-based solutions for energy access, including a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) mechanism that allows refugees to pay for solar products over a period of time.

Masinde also references the report “Prices, Products and Priorities:Meeting Refugees’ Energy Needs in Burkina Faso and Kenya” which shows a willingness among refugees to pay for better energy supplies that would improve their lives.

Masinde’s article was an eye-opener for me. I never considered energy as one of the resources that were lacking in refugee camps, or the threat that not having access to energy poses. While Masinde’s article definitely brought attention to an important problem and highlighted an organization that is working on initiatives to address that problem, it did not go into deep enough detail about the initiatives themselves.

The article does address governmental failures in noting their inability to extend electricity coverage to refugee camps, but it does not address the shortcomings of MEI. One observation I made while reading the article is that it mostly discusses MEI’s private sector partners but does not discuss market-oriented solutions in as much depth.

This raised the question to me, is MEI as focused on consumer-based solutions as it is partnering with energy providers to create solutions or is it possible the author did not flush out the consumer-based solutions as much as he did the solutions created by energy providers? This question is still of particular interest to me as the article went into detail about the willingness of refugees to pay for the services they need as well as different employment opportunities available for refugees.

As previously stated, I was unaware of the energy access crisis in refugee camps. However, at first glance I would think that a willingness to pay for needed services and employment opportunities would make a development problem such as this ripe with consumer-based, market-oriented initiatives.

While I wanted to know more about MEI’s market-based solutions than what was listed in the article, I fought the urge to do more research while reading and instead went solely on the information provided in the article.

Going off only the information that was presented in the article made me think of the fact-checking tips from this week’s readings. I liked the idea of going back over the article and making sure every word presented was verified. I realized that in researching solutions to community problems and in turn writing solutions journalism articles, I want to make sure that I am addressing as many questions as possible that my reader may have. While it’s impossible to think of every possible question a reader may have, I do want to make sure I’ve flushed out all ideas and solutions that I’ve presented.