While access to energy is crucial for cooking, lighting, heating, clean water, and most income-earning activities, energy for many displaced people, including in refugee camps, is either non-existent or severely lacking in terms of availability, accessibility, and quality. This means that they often rely on solid fuels like firewood to cook, negatively impacting their health from the smoke, and the environment through the effects of deforestation. Lack of access to electricity means they resort to candles, kerosene lanterns or torches for lighting. To date, humanitarian programs have often focused on distributing firewood and solar lanterns that only meet basic energy needs. Addressing energy access sustainably and for the long term has been a considerable challenge. Local markets and energy enterprises can be used to deliver cleaner energy options, but there are barriers such as low affordability among the displaced or humanitarian, development and private sector actors’ lack of awareness of displaced communities energy needs.

To fill the capacity gap in the humanitarian sector, The United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) is offering the Energy Delivery Models (EDM) training programme to support the integration of energy access and sustainable delivery models of modern energy services into humanitarian and development programming. The EDM Training is based on the Energy Delivery Models Toolkit developed by IIED and CAFOD, a standard process for inclusive planning of energy planning for energy poor communities. It does so through a series of online learning modules, interactive workshops and one-on-one mentoring from energy experts. Through the EDM Training, participants develop the capacities to design people-centred, sustainable energy access programmes that contribute to local energy market development.  

The EDM Training is a contribution to the Global Platform for Action (GPA) on Sustainable Energy in Displacement Settings, the global initiative to promote actions that enable sustainable energy access in displacement settings, as laid out in the Global Plan of Action Framework Document, thereby ensuring Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 is inclusive of displacement situations.