Juno News - John Robson discusses his new documentary, ‘In The Dark： Senegal As A Case Study In Energy Poverty'

In this episode of The Third World, we speak to the director of the documentary 'The Third World' about the lack of reliable, affordable electricity in the third world, and how this perpetuates a cycle of poverty and hopelessness.

00:00:00.000 It must have been arduous making a documentary like this, a lot of work.

00:00:03.880 Talk a little bit about the process, if you wouldn't mind.

00:00:06.440 It certainly was an interesting adventure.

00:00:08.880 I mean, one of the issues, and we didn't really know going in,

00:00:11.660 is what the infrastructure in Senegal would be like.

00:00:14.520 And in fact, not surprisingly, in a couple of major urban centres on the coast,

00:00:19.160 it's pretty good.

00:00:20.280 But further inland, it's absolutely hopeless.

00:00:22.420 Something like half the population has quite literally no access to electricity.

00:00:26.100 And of course, they don't have blacktop highways and so forth.

00:00:29.860 So, and you were never sure if anything was going to work, but it was, you know, even

00:00:36.620 the difficulties were very revealing of the kind of conditions under which people are

00:00:39.780 living, not just in Senegal, of course, but in a great deal of what we call the third

00:00:44.100 world, particularly in Africa.

00:00:46.300 And it, so much of it comes down to the fact that they don't have reliable energy.

00:00:51.320 There aren't, there isn't machinery.

00:00:53.880 So much of the labor is done by hand.

00:00:56.700 There aren't, there isn't power in the hospitals.

00:00:59.160 if that's the right word for them. And there aren't schools with working lights and air

00:01:03.180 conditioning. And so this perpetuates this cycle of poverty and indeed in many cases of hopelessness.

00:01:08.800 And it's just so cruel that so many Western environmentalists who take absolutely for

00:01:14.200 granted all the amenities that come with a very high standard of living powered by reliable,

00:01:18.840 affordable energy would casually condemn these people to continue to live in those circumstances

00:01:23.940 without, in most cases, ever having gone and looked at the consequences of what they're doing.

00:01:29.160 Yeah, I'm reminded if you go back to Barack Obama's time in office where he would talk about climate change to the African people.

00:01:39.080 You can't have refrigeration, you can't have air conditioning here, you can't have cars and all these other toys because climate change.

00:01:51.940 And I don't remember them thinking that that was a very good thing to do.

00:01:55.860 you know here was somebody from the west trying to keep them down in a sense and it's it's a form 0.98

00:02:02.880 of green imperialism isn't it it absolutely is because you know we've got all this money and we

00:02:09.080 say oh tut tut tut we shall not lend it to you to build a natural gas power plant you must have

00:02:14.060 solar panels and now we did visit one village where they had a solar panel but they said you

00:02:18.960 know at night the lights just go off and they're trapped indoors we don't dare go outside because

00:02:23.080 the snakes and the scorpions and they don't have running water in their homes including

00:02:27.480 they don't have toilets in their homes so this is what their life is like whereas barack obama of

00:02:31.960 course flies around in airplanes and he has a mansion by the seaside and all the push-button

00:02:38.200 luxuries.

Juno News - October 15, 2025

John Robson discusses his new documentary, ‘In The Dark： Senegal As A Case Study In Energy Poverty'

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