Sector Brief: Household Energy Services, 2013

Shujog summarizes the market size, growth, trends, challenges, and social impact of Impact Enterprises in the household energy services sector in Southeast Asia, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This report is supported by Rockefeller Foundation.

Summary

Access to energy is a basic need for lighting and cooking, a need that is unmet for one quarter of the world’s population. More than 600 million people in Asia alone live outside the reach of public electricity utilities, relying on unhealthy, expensive, and environmentally expensive and unsafe energy sources such as kerosene lamps for their lighting needs. In parallel, more than 2 billion people in Asia rely on burning wood, coal or other biomass for their cooking needs, and spend more than 20 per cent of their income on procuring the fuel for cooking. The market for providing households access to modern, improved and affordable energy services to replace reliance on biomass and fossil fuels represents a considerable business opportunity and a tremendous opportunity for positive social impact on a vast number of people in Asia.