Keynote Remarks During the Global Village Energy Partnership's Side Event

I am delighted to be with you this evening, and am pleased to be joined by the distinguished representatives from the Netherlands, Russia, and the United Kingdom, as well as our friends from the World Bank and UNDP.

The United States was a founding partner of GVEP at its creation in 2002, and is fully committed to GVEP's goal of increasing access to modern energy services. Energy plays a vital role in enabling countries to meet their economic, social and political development objectives, as the discussions at this cycle of the CSD have so amply demonstrated.

Since 2002, GVEP has grown in size and scope, and now encompasses over 1,500 organizations from government, civil society, and the private sector. The U.S. Government strongly supports the public-private partnership model fundamental to GVEP. We believe that such partnerships are an important tool for nurturing linkages that will yield concrete results and help countries meet their development goals.

We are therefore very pleased to support the creation of GVEP International. That NGO will enable GVEP to better realize its energy-access and poverty-alleviation goals. GVEP International's mandate to provide technical and fundraising services to GVEP will enable the partnership to become more responsive to developing-country needs and to more directly support on-the-ground results.

In addition to serving on the Partnership Board of GVEP and providing direct financial support to GVEP International, the U.S. Government, particularly through USAID, has supported many GVEP-related activities. GVEP is one of the three pillars of our Presidential Clean Energy Initiative. Through U.S. support for GVEP and other related programs from 2002-2005, 19.1 million people have received increased access to modern energy services.

One such GVEP program supported by USAID is an innovative rural electrification program in Brazil. The program, known as "Lights for All" (Luz Para Todos), has provided electricity to over 1.5 million people to date, with an ultimate target of reaching over 12 million Brazilians.

As GVEP partners continue to work on closing the gap between those with and without access to modern energy services, it is important to monitor and evaluate programs effectively, in order to share and aggregate results and lessons learned among the various stakeholders.

We commend GVEP for spotlighting this issue here at CSD-15 through its Learning Center course focused on monitoring and evaluation of sustainable energy projects. With outreach to so many partner organizations, GVEP is in a unique position to initiate a dialogue and encourage best practices in monitoring and evaluation for energy access programs. We have used the CSD process as a stimulus to improve our own monitoring and reporting of U.S.-funded energy programs, and encourage others to do so as well.

We look forward to working with all of you in our continued support for GVEP and our overall goal of improving global access to modern energy services. Thank you.