Abstract
More than 700 million people are still living in extreme poverty. The majority of these people live in rural areas of the developing world. One of the major pathways out of poverty for these areas is rural development. Agriculture is still considered to be the key sector for economic development. Rural electrification can provide major benefits to rural populations, since it can facilitate improvement in health, education and income. The financing of rural electrification activities is challenging and in order for such investments to be sustainable, sustainable economic activity in the area has to take place. Productive uses of energy related to agriculture are the ones that can have a major impact in the short-term and as such need to be strongly supported. Digital technologies can be viewed as an enabler of rural electrification, able to decrease costs and address technical and non-technical challenges. Products and services based on digital technologies have to be utilized in order to allow technological leap-frogging of the developing countries towards economic development and ultimately poverty alleviation.
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Kyriakarakos, G., Lampridi, M., Bochtis, D.D. (2021). Digital Technologies in the Context of Energy: Focus on the Developing World Agriculture. In: Bochtis, D.D., Pearson, S., Lampridi, M., Marinoudi, V., Pardalos, P.M. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies for Agriculture—Theme IV: Actions. Springer Optimization and Its Applications, vol 185. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84156-0_3
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