On her first official visit to Africa, UNEP Goodwill Ambassador and
iconic face of fashion, Gisele Bündchen, went to the grassroots level in
Kenya to experience the reality of energy poverty and to see how
Kenyans are transforming their lives by accessing sustainable energy.
“Energy affects everything. Children can study at night when they have
access to electricity. If we can bring electricity to everyone, we can
help people to survive,” she told a press conference at the UN
Environment Programme’s (UNEP) headquarters in Nairobi.
“It’s unjust if people do not have access to electricity.
Energy for all is achievable. Just 2% of global investment is needed,”
she added, speaking a week before the global launch of the International
Year of Sustainable Energy for All (IYSEA).
Ms. Bündchen’s visit to Kenya took her to Kibera, East Africa’s largest
slum, to look at biogas centers (turning human waste into power), to
Kisumu, in western Kenya, where she took part in collecting firewood and
learned about fuel-efficient cook stoves and to the Mount Kenya area
where micro-hydro power is bringing electricity to over 2,000
households.
While gains have been made in accessing electricity in the past two
decades, huge gaps still remain. One in every five people on the planet
do not have access to electricity. In Sub-Saharan Africa some 70 percent
of the population have no electricity, while in Kenya only 18 percent
of households have power.
Access to adequate fuels for cooking is also a major challenge, with
many families still dependent on wood which produces toxic smoke,
impacting the health of women and children. Around half the world’s
population cook on open indoor fires and each year over 2.5 million
people die prematurely as a result of breathing in emissions from these
cook stoves, primarily from a substance called black carbon, also known
as soot.
Many more are blighted by ill health, such as chronic bronchitis.
Meanwhile, black carbon is emerging as an important climate change
pollutant and is also implicated in crop damage.
“We don’t hear about this and yet the solutions are so simple,” added
Ms. Bündchen, who has recently been named the ‘world’s greenest
celebrity’.
“When we come out of our bubbles and travel, you experience
what I did in Kenya and it’s amazing how we can change our viewpoints
You ask what can we do in our daily lives to make change. Everybody can
help in a different way,” she said.
“She speaks for the issues and she speaks from the heart. We were lucky
to get her as a Goodwill Ambassador. It’s important to go out and meet
people, which is part of making someone a great ambassador who can in
turn communicate to millions of people that, for example, sustainable
energy for all is possible—that it is one powerful way of motivating and
catalyzing positive change in the run-up to Rio+20 in June this year,”
said UN Under Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director Achim
Steiner.
“We need to change our way of thinking and not think globally but
locally. In Africa two thirds of the population still do not have access
to energy. There are solutions at the local and community levels. I
have a dream that with photovoltaic energy we can build grids up from
the bottom and that one day we will see rural areas generating
electricity and selling energy to the cities,” he added.
Kenya is increasingly developing its geothermal, wind, solar and hydro
power resources at the local level.
UNEP has worked to realize and to accelerate the use of renewable
energies within the overall theme of a Green Economy, with a special
emphasis on Africa, and Kenya in particular.
The UN’s new office
facility in Nairobi, which Ms. Bündchen visited and which houses UNEP
and UN-HABITAT, has 6,000 square meters of solar panels and generates as
much electricity as its 1,200 occupants consume.
Ms. Bündchen’s visit, which was organized by Practical Action in
partnership with UNEP, was designed to raise the profile of the IYSEA
and highlight the importance of energy access globally.
“As a UNEP Ambassador, Gisele recognises that no issue is more relevant to the future of the global economy, the prosperity and well-being of the world’s poorest people, and the preservation of our planet, than sustainable energy. Her passion, credibility and commitment to energy access will draw significant attention to this pressing development issue and help to ensure that in two decades times, every women, man and child has access to the power to challenge work their way out of poverty,” said Margaret Gardner, Director at Practical Action.
Practical action, a non-governmental organization headquartered in the United Kingdom, works with poor communities to provide them with small-scale solutions to overcome their poverty.
Ms. Bündchen became a UNEP Goodwill Ambassador in 2009.
Source: UNEP
