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Yemen

Solar Energy Programming - Operational Guideline

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Operational Guideline

Yemen, is now one of the world’s most energy insecure and poor country, with most of the country lacking sustainable access to energy. Even before the conflict, rural areas holding 75% of the national population had only 23% energy access rates. The ongoing conflict has made the situation dramatically worse, it is estimated that the access to electricity had dropped to below 10 percent due to extensive damage to the national grid and fuel shortage across the country. In general, energy supply in Yemen for many years has been very limited due to weak generation capacity, limited access, high electricity losses from the grid, and increasing demand. Energy access in Yemen has been heavily dependent on local diesel generators to meet the needs of social services, businesses, as well as irrigation pumping needs of farmers.

The collapse of electricity combined with price and the severe shortage of fuel needed to operate social services, businesses and household generators (for those who can afford them) has restricted most people access to basic social services such as healthcare, water supply, education, as well as lighting and the ability to power home electric appliances. Yemen is therefore left with the option of solar systems, serving better-off households, farmers, small to medium-sized enterprises; however, it is still used in smallscale.

Purpose of this operational guideline

Some attempts to support affected communities by improving the access to solar energy have been implemented by many humanitarian and development agencies. Implementing agencies can follow the learn-as-you-go’ approach, but this approach would be costly and time consuming, mainly in the conflict context, as most of the issues would have already been sorted out by someone else somewhere around the world or in Yemen.

UNDP-ERRY program have conducted a study to document good practices and lessons learned of solar energy application which includes details of targeted sectors, usages, cost effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability and disaggregated impacts identified including on gender and captured as compendium document.

UNDP realized that there is a need to have an operational guideline that will support solar programming in other agencies, private sector, and local communities. The objective is to overcome the operational bottle necks and improve the impact at the community level. This operational guideline attempts to lay out a comprehensive and efficient solar PV systems implementation support process into a single document. It captures international and national good practices and learning. The guideline also captures how to program, plan, and implement the solar energy application in the conflict context with the emphasis on needs, bottlenecks/challenges and constraints for service providers and end users, external environment and security situation.