Productive sessions for the SETI collaborative at the Annual Meeting

EfD’s collaborative program Sustainable Energy Transition Initiative, SETI, had several activities at EfD’s Annual Meeting on September 22-26 in Kampala, Uganda. The question of how to achieve a sustainable energy transition is always high on the agenda in the EfD network and this year’s meeting was no exception.

All the collaborative programs were introduced already at the opening ceremony of this Annual Meeting. Marc Jeuland (Co-Leader of SETI from Duke University, USA) represented SETI on this occasion and made a short summary of the purpose and the activities of the collaborative.

Pam Jagger from the University of Michigan was one of the keynote speakers and talked about her experiences from working for many years with energy transition in Africa. She highlighted some things to remember for those who are active in research and policy interaction on the topic of energy. For instance, energy transition is not linear, the poor have a greater depth of energy poverty and we know very little about how to implement and scale interventions in a sustainable, cost-effective, and equitable way.

Planning for the future

SETI had a strategy meeting on the last day of the conference.

“This was an amazing opportunity to reunite with SETI fellows after two years of restrictions on traveling,” said Cristóbal Vásquez-Quezada, Project Coordinator at SETI.

“The researchers were very eager to provide ideas to improve the activities of our collaborative, proposing joint-research ideas, and brainstorming about funding opportunities. We also had the opportunity to meet members from the new EfD centers, Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania, and hear about their research and policy gaps!" indicated Marcela Jaime, Co-Leader of SETI in Universidad de Concepción (Chile).

Working on policy interaction

A peer learning workshop was held during the last day of the conference, where a team of researchers from the network worked in the implementation of the project Policy-research partnerships for pragmatic evaluation of climate change adaptation and development models in the ag-energy sector. With the participation of members from Chile, Ghana, India, Nigeria, Tanzania, and the USA (Duke University), the workshop was a fruitful activity for updating the team and analyzing the instruments to be introduced to policymakers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) during the following months.

The collaborative will also finalize surveys for policymakers and SMEs, the data collection for the countries involved in the project, and work on a white paper.