Guinean students study under the lights of the Conakry airport parking lot in June. Though they are dim, the lights are among the few in the electricity-starved capital that are sure to be on in the evening. (Rebecca Blackwell/The Associated Press) Take a minute to read Rukmini Callimachi’s Associated Press dispatch from Conakry, Guinea, which you’ll see widely picked up by newspapers and news Web sites large and small today.
And be glad you can. The subjects of the article are students trying to prepare for exams in a country so poor and so misgoverned that four-fifths of the population has no access to electricity at all, and the rest get only sporadic service. In order to read and study in the dark of the evening, the article reports, flocks of children as young as seven are walking miles to one of the few places in the country where the lights are sure to be on: the parking lot of the Conakry airport, which stays open for an Air France flight that arrives around midnight.
The article caught The Lede’s attention not only because it transmutes what would be an ominous scene in an American suburb – a horde of kids milling around a parking lot at all hours – into one of resourcefulness and hope in Africa.
It also brought home how central a simple, taken-for-granted thing like reliable electricity is to the fortunes of countries around the world that are trying to lift themselves out of poverty.
The United Nations issued its annual report Thursday on how the 50 least developed countries are faring and what they need to make progress (highlights and links to pdf files here).
As Lisa Schlein reported for the Voice of America, the report’s authors make the case this year that there is no low-tech or no-tech route out of poverty, and that for countries like Guinea to truly prosper, they must find ways to catch up technologically with the rest of the world.
Ms. Schlein quotes Supachai Panitchpakdi, the secretary general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, saying that to do so, poor countries need greater investment in education, “and also the infrastructural investment, particularly in the areas which are really basic, like electricity.”
After all, he said, “With a lack of electricity, you cannot even think of doing any basic research work.”
(Or, in an advanced country like the United States, much of anything else either, as we are occasionally abruptly reminded.)
The scale of the need also comes home in the report’s statistical tables. In 2003, the latest year for which reasonably complete figures are available, the total amount of electricity used in Guinea averaged out to 89 kilowatt-hours per person. That’s not quite enough to light one 100-watt bulb for six weeks.
The figures for some other African nations are even tinier: 32 kilowatt-hours per person in Burkina Faso, 38 in Mali, 50 in Madagascar. The average for developed nations like the United States: 9,654.
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