Sec. 3. Findings
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/bill/113/hr/2548/rh/section-3·A research copy — for the controlling text, always check the official state or federal source. Not legal advice.
Congress finds that— 589,000,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa, or 68 percent of the population, did not have access to electricity, as of 2010; in sub-Saharan Africa, electricity services are highly unreliable and they are at least twice as expensive for those with electricity access compared to other emerging markets; lack of access to electricity services disproportionally affects women and girls, who often shoulder the burden of seeking sources of heat and light such as dung, wood or charcoal and are often more exposed to the associated negative health impacts.
Women and girls also face an increased risk of assault from walking long distances to gather fuel sources; access to electricity creates opportunities, including entrepreneurship, for people to work their way out of poverty; a lack of electricity contributes to the high use of inefficient and often highly polluting fuel sources for indoor cooking, heating, and lighting that produce toxic fumes resulting in more than 3,000,000 annual premature deaths from respiratory disease, more annual deaths than from HIV/AIDS and malaria in sub-Saharan Africa; electricity access is crucial for the cold storage of vaccines and anti-retroviral and other lifesaving medical drugs, as well as the operation of modern lifesaving medical equipment; electricity access can be used to improve food security by enabling post-harvest processing, pumping, irrigation, dry grain storage, milling, refrigeration, and other uses; reliable electricity access can provide improved lighting options and information and communication technologies, including Internet access and mobile phone charging, that can greatly improve health, social, and education outcomes, as well as economic and commercial possibilities; sub-Saharan Africa’s consumer base of nearly one billion people is rapidly growing and will create increasing demand for United States goods, services, and technologies, but the current electricity deficit in sub-Saharan Africa limits this demand by restricting economic growth on the continent; approximately 30 African countries face endemic power shortages, and nearly 70 percent of surveyed African businesses cite unreliable power as a major constraint to growth; the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s work in the energy sector shows high projected economic rates of return that translate to sustainable economic growth and that the highest returns are projected when infrastructure improvements are coupled with significant legislative, regulatory, institutional, and policy reforms; in many countries, weak governance capacity, regulatory bottlenecks, legal constraints, and lack of transparency and accountability can stifle the ability of private investment to assist in the generation and distribution of electricity; and without new policies and more effective investments in electricity sector capacity to increase and expand electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa, over 70 percent of the rural population, and 48 percent of the total population, will potentially remain without access to electricity by 2030.