Juno News - October 15, 2025John Robson discusses his new documentary, ‘In The Dark： Senegal As A Case Study In Energy Poverty'
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Summary
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.
Transcript
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It must have been arduous making a documentary like this, a lot of work.
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Talk a little bit about the process, if you wouldn't mind.
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I mean, one of the issues, and we didn't really know going in,
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is what the infrastructure in Senegal would be like.
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And in fact, not surprisingly, in a couple of major urban centres on the coast,
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Something like half the population has quite literally no access to electricity.
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And of course, they don't have blacktop highways and so forth.
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So, and you were never sure if anything was going to work, but it was, you know, even
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the difficulties were very revealing of the kind of conditions under which people are
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living, not just in Senegal, of course, but in a great deal of what we call the third
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And it, so much of it comes down to the fact that they don't have reliable energy.
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There aren't, there isn't power in the hospitals.
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if that's the right word for them. And there aren't schools with working lights and air
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conditioning. And so this perpetuates this cycle of poverty and indeed in many cases of hopelessness.
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And it's just so cruel that so many Western environmentalists who take absolutely for
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granted all the amenities that come with a very high standard of living powered by reliable,
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affordable energy would casually condemn these people to continue to live in those circumstances
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without, in most cases, ever having gone and looked at the consequences of what they're doing.
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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.
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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.
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And I don't remember them thinking that that was a very good thing to do.
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you know here was somebody from the west trying to keep them down in a sense and it's it's a form
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of green imperialism isn't it it absolutely is because you know we've got all this money and we
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say oh tut tut tut we shall not lend it to you to build a natural gas power plant you must have
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solar panels and now we did visit one village where they had a solar panel but they said you
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know at night the lights just go off and they're trapped indoors we don't dare go outside because
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the snakes and the scorpions and they don't have running water in their homes including
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they don't have toilets in their homes so this is what their life is like whereas barack obama of
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course flies around in airplanes and he has a mansion by the seaside and all the push-button