In the effort to eliminate poverty in Enugu state, policies that address rural poverty must be central. The global rural poverty rate is higher than the urban poverty rate, and rural residents account for 80% of the extremely poor. Peter Mbah's programmes on revitalizing rural areas so that they are productive, sustainable and healthy places to learn, work and live can have a tremendous impact on the global poverty.
Dr. Mbah's quest in revitalizing rural areas to strengthen the connection between rural and urban economies can spur growth and diversify the farm and non-farm sectors to contribute to poverty reduction. Rural areas have the potential to become hubs of innovation and to drive the transformation of food systems and overall livelihoods.
He believed that the empowered rural economies can not only act as drivers of food security but also as springboards for national, regional, and global value chains and providers of quality environmental services. His administration will provide policies that encourage investments in rural infrastructure, such as multimodal transport networks, telecommunications, and energy should be priority areas in this regard.
Peter Mbah's vision in creating smart villages will bottom-up strategies to harness digital connectivity for renewable energy, mobility and in-service delivery in health and education. Creating dynamic opportunities and reducing poverty in rural areas is critical, especially in the rural areas of natural resources domiciled in vast untapped lands, where poverty is high and youth population are largely dominated.
His agenda on agro-allied industry policy report highlights that investing in agriculture---especially in the nonfarm sector ,already a booming segment of the rural economy----can make rural hubs of innovation. Spur job creation, and slow the tide of youth migration. For many years though, a key challenge to development in much of these rural areas has been a lack of reliable energy sources. To Peter Mbah's programmes on energy; Energy is crucial to ensuring durable rural growth and development. Almost 3 million Enugu people, mostly living in rural areas of various communities in the state, lack access to electricity. Securing access to reliable sources of energy is a necessary condition for fostering a dynamic rural economy.
Its difficult to imagine rapid and sustained reductions in rural poverty without it. Delivering power to remote rural areas using fossil fuels is often challenging and expensive, leaving many rural areas lacking consistent power. But, dynamic declines in the cost of generating power from renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are creating new opportunities to provide rural areas with cheap, reliable sources of power and electricity. Dr. Mbah believe that renewable technology will further improves and their production scales up, their prices will continue to fall further enabling installation of power sources in rural areas that are cheap, clean, and reliable.
Solar and wind are distributed energy sources, so they produce power where they are installed and eliminate the need for delivering fossil fuels to rural areas or building a web of rural transmission infrastructure that delivers centrally generated power. Sunshine and wind are also frequently abundant across the developing world, meaning there is great potential for smaller and medium-sized projects to harness this power whereit is needed. Such power can provide electricity to power machines that will drive more productive agriculture or industries, provide cold storage for medicines on their way to rural areas or produce on it's way from farms to markets, and keep the lights on after nightfall for additional time to study, cook food, or socialize.
Mbah's experience and uncommon sense in rural transformation dictate that access reliable electricity underpins improvements across a range of human development indicators including productivity, health, and education. All of these improvements together can help drive down poverty, and lift the rural impoverished out of deprivation. They must be pursued if we're to resolve the poverty problem.
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