Powering health with energy in low-income and middle-income countries

Energy is central to human health, powering essential activities from cooking food, heating, and cooling in the home to operating equipment and refrigerating medicines and vaccines in health-care facilities. Despite progress in expanding access, many low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) still experience energy poverty, forcing billions of people to breathe contaminated air from cooking with biomass fuels and walk to health centres that have difficulty keeping lights on and electrical equipment running. The result is a heavy disease burden that exhibits the same inequity that characterises other poverty-related deprivations. In this paper, we introduce this Series on energy and health in LMICs by highlighting persistent disparities in energy access, use, quality, and reliability in LMICs; the associated disease burden; the salient opportunities to mitigate disease by providing clean, affordable, and reliable energy to households, communities, and health-care facilities; and the major policy, technological, and financial constraints that need to be overcome.