Re: Ebola outbreak: call to send in military to West Africa to help curb epidemic
Only for the countries where ebola is out of control - Liberia to start:
Also, essential would be home entertainment services. The internet and television must be up and fully functional. For those persons without those services, another group of essential personnel could deliver donated books, games, and other types of entertainment.
I think that you are overestimating the availability of such services based on this info:
In mid-2011, Liberia has possibly the lowest rate of access to public electricity in the world. While the average rate of access to electricity in Sub-Saharan
Africa is 28.5 percent, and in neighboring Sierra Leone and C?te d?Ivoire 6 percent and 43.7 percent, respectively, Liberia?s rate of access to publicly provided electricity is close to zero. An urban access rate can only be derived for Monrovia: of an estimated 210,619 households, 1,217 are supplied with public electricity (as of late 2010), corresponding to 0.58 percent of Monrovia?s population. With the exception of a very limited municipal mini-grid in Gbarnga, Bong County, no publicly supplied electricity service is available outside of Monrovia.
The root cause of this situation is Liberia?s civil war. In 2003, at the end of 14 years of warfare, Liberia?s power sector emerged seriously damaged. By 2005
what remained had been destroyed by looting. This included the complete destruction of the hydropower plant at Mt. Coffee and Liberia?s entire transmission and distribution network. Operations of the Liberia Electricity Corporation (LEC) ceased completely. As a result, Liberia faces the challenging task of fully reconstructing its power system.
In early 2010 the high costs of electricity and low
quality of energy services in general imposed a
significant barrier to Liberia?s long-term economic
development. Over 80 percent of Liberia?s household energy requirements are met using thermal energy for cooking, and both urban and rural households rely almost exclusively on charcoal and firewood.
For lighting, households expend a significant amount of their income on inferior sources such as candles, flashlights, small battery-operated LED lamps, and kerosene or oil lanterns. Production activities, notably agriculture, rely primarily on human power. Some households have small generators of 500
to 900 watts to serve larger processing loads such as rice mills.
While the electricity services available in Liberia are poor, the cost of these services is nevertheless high in comparison with other Sub-Saharan African countries.
In April 2010 the price of electricity from the grid was US $0.43 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), possibly the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa. People without access to public electricity pay even more: the use of dry-cell
batteries costs US $74.01/kWh, car batteries US $8.43/
kWh, candles US $8.27/kWh, generators US $3.96/kWh, and kerosene for lighting US $1.53/kWh.
