Sustainable development will need to be the driving force and the dominant criteria of development projects. The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg South Africa in 2002 sought to overcome obstacles to achieving sustainable development and to generate initiatives that would deliver result and improve people's lives while protecting the environment. At the time of Rio, sustainable development was mainly about protecting nature. Having realised the poor people in developing countries are more dependent on their natural environment, in contrast to Rio, the WSSD concentrates on poverty eradication. Studies and projects around the world have shown that the sustainable energy service can play an important role in poverty alleviation. Focusing on rural energy supply in developing countries has been the main stream of development aid of donor countries. Over the past 10 years, the international aid agencies have been supporting a wide variety of PV rural electrification projects in developing countries. However, as a result of political interests, electrification programmes seldom last as long as they should, due to the lack of attention paid to their sustainability. This work presents an evaluation of the sustainability of PV rural electrification projects in developing countries. It examines and analyses a case study of an existing project through a methodology, systemic sustainability approach, having sustainability at the core. The paper also adopts the methodology and specific indicators of gauging the sustainability into the evaluation of PV rural electrification programmes.
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