Dr. Sesan Temilade
Dr Temilade Sesan is an international development consultant with expertise in the areas of energy, health, agriculture and gender. Her doctoral thesis, titled “What’s Cooking? Participatory and Market Approaches to Stove Development in Nigeria and Kenya”, investigated international development efforts to promote a particular technology – improved cookstoves – which sits at the nexus of the sustainable development objectives of energy poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation.
Dr Sesan’s research brings together a range of development themes, including appropriate technology development, participatory development, women’s empowerment, and livelihoods improvement. Her research into improved stove development constituted a platform for exploring the potential that such sustainable energy technologies – including biogas, biofuel and solar energy technologies – have to alleviate poverty, and the barriers that have limited their dissemination via market platforms to date. Her work in this area regularly brings her in contact with national- and state-level policy makers, civil society organisations, academia, and representatives of small- and medium-scale businesses in the field of energy. Her experience working with various stakeholders in the energy and environment sectors provides her with a grounded knowledge of the social and political factors that are crucial to the success of projects aimed at alleviating poverty and promoting development in the Nigerian context.
Dr Sesan has disseminated her research findings to global audiences via numerous presentations made at conferences in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. She has also published articles investigating the links between energy poverty and development in the practitioners’ journal “Boiling Point” and the academic journals “Energy Policy”, “World Development”, “Progress in Development Studies” and “Community Development Journal.” She currently works as an independent consultant in Nigeria, with a client list that includes Heinrich Boell Stiftung Nigeria, Search and Groom Youth for Development Centre, Nigeria, the Power Holding Company of Nigeria, and the World Bank. She also teaches a module on renewable energy policies and markets at the Centre for Petroleum, Energy Economics and Law, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.