ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates why the issue of energy poverty deserves to be addressed as a key aspect of poverty and included in the global poverty dialogue of management education programmes. The seminal impact on the social well-being of the poor caused by the lack of sustainable access to cleaner sources of energy has long been underemphasised in poverty alleviation initiatives. For example, a review of 30 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) prepared for programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) found that 29 of the 30 papers examined agreed that the energy needs of the poor should be of utmost importance in the formulation of poverty reduction programmes. However, such energy access programmes should focus on ‘the role of energy in macroeconomic growth and its importance as a factor of production’ (Takada and Charles 2007:14). Less than one third of these PRSPs correlated the quality of energy access with health, gender equality and primary education needs (op cit 2007). While management educators surveyed agreed that poverty should be included in management education initiatives, energy was not among the suggested topics (Rosenbloom and Gudic´ 2010).
