Practical Action  has adopted the “simple approach” of finding out what people are doing and helping them to do it better. It focuses its efforts, skills and resources and aims to tackle the underlying causes of poverty and ensure a better life for people. The International Development Charity, Practical Action, has predicted a rather gloomy outlook for more than 1.5 billion of the world's poorest people, condemning them to a life of continued poverty if they were denied access to basic energy services such as lighting, heating and cooking gas.

Practical Action's Poor People's Energy Outlook report, PPEO in short, said that this would mean that the stipulated Millennium Development goals would not be attained by 2015. The inaugural report, which is supported by the United Nations Development Program, called for an end to energy discrimination between the developed and developing world. More than three billion people, the report said, still relied on biomass and coal for cooking, with no access to electricity. This was in stark contrast to the developed world where energy was being often being squandered. 

The PPEO report suggested a way out by proposing the concept of Total Energy Access, which would ensure that minimum standards of energy services for people in the developing countries were met.

Simon Trace, CEO of Practical Action, condemned energy apartheid and said that issue needed to be addressed, "Development is not possible without energy access for poor people. This is a prerequisite for human development and poverty reduction. The Poor People's Energy Outlook proposes a framework for action to fight this injustice.”

The proposals made by Practical Action would ensure that every house would have 300 lumens of lighting, 0.3kg of charcoal per person per day, a minimum daytime indoor temperature of 12 degrees Celsius and a maximum indoor temperature of 30 degrees Celsius.

By doing this, families wouldn't freeze in their home, could cook without suffering from the after-effects of smoke inhalation, could be active after dark, could preserve food and medicines, and have access to electronic information. All this would help them to slowly emerge from the shells of poverty and lead a better life.

The report also argued that such a state could not be attained with the formal energy sector working in isolation. The ecosystem of energy access service providers needed to widen and deepen to include international agencies, governments, small and medium scale enterprises, universities, NGOs, community groups, financiers and more. 

Justifying the need for collective action, the report cited the example of sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 70 per cent of the population was still without access to electricity, and that figure would only be reduced to 67 percent by 2015 unless collective action was taken. And, of course, the energy issue went beyond just electricity, for lack of energy for cooking would mean an increase in mortality rates due to indoor smoke caused by traditional cook stoves.

The report by Practical Action was published in the wake of the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook , which this year placed a special emphasis on energy poverty and published a chapter on how to make energy access universal in advance of the main report.

Practical Action welcomed the importance that energy poverty had been given by the world body and said that it clearly indicated that the International Energy Agency had at last woken up to the fact that energy poverty need to be tackled on a war footing and had also realized the importance of greater investment in energy access from developed countries and the establishment of a globally agreed set of minimum standards for energy access.

Trace appreciated the efforts of Practical Action and said, "Practical Action is an organization that puts poor people at the heart of all of its work, involving them in every step of their development and our report seeks to explore the issue of energy access in more detail and acts as a call to action for the creation of a coalition to tackle the issue from all sides."

Practical Action is an international development charity with a difference, working together with some of the world's poorest women, men and children, helping to alleviate poverty in the developing world through the innovative use of technology. It won the Ashden Award for Light and Power in 2007 for its micro-hydro work in Peru, bringing electricity to over 30,000 people living in remote Andean villages.