4.5 leveraging investment

global awareness of how people living with disabilities experience energy access and economic development has gradually increased since the publication in 2019 of the United Nations flagship report, which signalled that less than half of households with people with disabilities have access to electricity, and that people with disabilities have greater risk from unclean combustion within the household and specific power requirements for assistive technologies.118 Beyond their energy needs, people with disabilities often are stigmatized, which for women may be compounded by norms around gender and social status.119 Disability is mentioned in the UNDP strategy note on sustainable energy but not linked to practical measures. It does not yet feature in the plans for the new Sustainable Energy Hub, though there is a stronger focus on the principle of leaving no one behind and reaching the last first.

The energy portfolio contains no outputs specifically focused on supporting people with disabilities. Rather, some projects are supplying electricity to facilities and services where people with disabilities are cited as users. Though the data do not allow a comparison of the number of disability services which UNDP has supported over time, an increase may be expected since the examples cited in the 2015 evaluation of disability-inclusive development at UNDP120 because of the expansion of schools and health facilities in the energy portfolio. Under the Solar for Health programme, for instance, UNDP is supporting energy for HIV treatment and care services in Zimbabwe and in gaza, State of Palestine, support is provided to hospitals for children with Down syndrome. Some interviewees spoke of purposively selecting schools that serve people with disabilities when more broadly targeting educational institutions, but for others this happened as a by-product. One country office, for example, has improved electrical supply to community and public sites that are already adapted for the needs of people with disability, but without a plan for targeting these groups.

The lack of plans to target people with disabilities is concerning because only 27 percent of the country offices surveyed believed these people can easily access UNDP energy projects, and only 7 percent believed that people with disabilities can convert energy access into long-term changes in their economic status. This reflects a general challenge in the energy sector, in which approaches to disability are still nascent. Conversely, UNDP non-energy disability projects have several useful components that could be combined with the energy interventions, such as livelihood and employment creation, policy reform, rights-based approaches and lessons from conflict contexts.

Finding 14. De-risking renewable energy investment. The DREI framework has provided UNDP with an analytical tool for demonstrating the financial benefits of renewable energy to government stakeholders and investors. It expanded the UNDP offer beyond its core policy and capacity-building work and has delivered to government partners an important tool to help achieve market readiness.

UNDP developed the DREI methodology in response to the observation that in many developing countries, financing costs for renewable energy remain high even as hardware costs fall, because of the higher risks of investing in these contexts. Prior to DREI, UNDP worked primarily on policy de-risking, supporting

118 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Disability and Development, Realization of the Sustainable Development

Goals by, for and with persons with disabilities. 2018. 119 Ibid. 120 UNDP Independent Evaluation Office, Evaluation of Disability-Inclusive Development at UNDP. 2016. http://web.undp.org/evaluation/ evaluations/thematic/disability.shtml. Accessed: 23 September 2021.