Analysis of Rural Electrification in Latin America: Sustainability and local job creation

摘要

The processes of rural electrification by means of renewable energies have changed thoroughly in the latest years. Fordecades, these processes have been labelled as aid by the sources of international help, or as an attempt to create a barrier to internal or external migration. These mitigation approaches to relieve poverty have failed due to the lack of real interest in generating sustainable and equitable development in disperse and held back rural communities.Later, the concept of sustainability replaced that of aid. But the sustainability of the rural electrification processes was left in the hands of market drives, at least in the projects financed by multilateral credit organisms. The notion was that a "genuine"market was to be generated so that the rural electrification be carried out by enterprises interested in developing this market indetermined areas. Several of these models have been given a chance at implementation in Latin America and other regions inthe third world.The concept of sustainability must be closely related to that of local socioeconomic development. Rural electrification must bea vector for social development. It is in this context that it cannot depend exclusively on the market and its actors, but it mustbe immersed within rural development planning.Productive uses in projects with multilateral financing take up a limited role nowadays. This is owing not to the inherentbarriers to this type of applications as much as to the concept of the current approaches that the multilateral agencies and themajority of the local governments hold.When the goal to be achieved is sustainable rural development, the concept of poverty mitigation only involves a subgroup ofsustainability conditions, leaving out one of the most important conditions to attain that goal: the generation of local work.