BARCELONA, SPAIN--(Marketwired - May 05, 2016) - The Fuel Freedom Foundation and IESE Business School today launched an international education program to reduce energy poverty in developing countries, starting in Kenya, Africa.

According to the International Energy Agency, modern energy services are crucial to human well-being and to a country's economic development; and yet globally 1.2 billion people are without access to electricity and more than 2.7 billion people are without clean cooking facilities. More than 95 percent of these people are either in sub-Saharan African or developing Asia, and around 80 percent are in rural areas.

The Fuel Freedom Chair on Energy and Social Development at IESE Business School will bring together executives, policy makers and community leaders and apply proven business cases to implement solutions to energy poverty. Research will examine how best to provide and promote alternative energy sources for four critical areas of energy consumption in developing nations: power and electricity, transportation, agricultural fertilizer, and cooking fuels.

"The world is facing an extreme energy shortage," said U.S.-based Fuel Freedom Chairman Yossie Hollander at today's launch of the new program at IESE Business School's main campus in Barcelona, Spain. "The majority of the population globally does not have sufficient access to the energy they desperately need for cooking, transportation, fertilizers and electricity. Ending energy poverty has been an elusive target, until now."

This program has three key success factors built in:

• It starts with the challenges, needs, infrastructure and resources of the host country

• It brings relevant, scalable and proven solutions that have been successfully implemented elsewhere and can be applied to that specific country

• It focuses on empowering local investors, business leaders and policy makers who have the motivation and wherewithal to implement these solutions in their own country

EmPOWERing Africa: Reducing energy poverty in Africa

The initial phase of the Chair's program will focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. Labeled EmPOWERing Africa, this program was announced at the Clinton Global Initiative's (CGI) 2015 annual meeting in New York, and is included in CGI´s "Commitments to Action".

Working together with IESE's partner Strathmore University in Kenya, the program focuses on mapping the country's existing infrastructure and needs, and bringing together the most relevant case studies from around the world. The first education session will be delivered in the 2016/17 academic year to Kenya´s business leaders, policy makers and influencers at Strathmore's Business School in Nairobi.