Annual reports

Despite the progress that has been made, an estimated 1.3 billion people in the world were without electricity at the end of 2012. Furthermore, 2.6 billion people are still without modern cooking fuel and technology.

85% of these people are concentrated in the rural areas of poor countries, mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Source: International Energy Agency

Since the early 1990s, the EDF Group has been involved in promoting energy access in developing countries:

• as an electricity producer, by developing major infrastructures (such as the Nam Theun 2 dam in Laos);
• as an electricity distributor, through peri-urban electrification programmes (in Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and Morocco);
• as a rural electrification operator, through the creation of local companies with various partners in many African countries.
  

In addition to its industrial importance, the action taken by EDF to promote access to electricity in rural areas is also part of its social and environmental responsibility objectives. In addition to its financial contribution, one of EDF's aims is to promote the emergence and dissemination of a sustainable economic model: this has resulted in the development of decentralised services companies.

The Decentralised Services Company (DSC) model

In the late 1990s, EDF and the ADEME created a model to guarantee both the viability of rural electrification projects in the long term and their reproducibility: Decentralised Services Company .