Focal area: Women’s entrepreneurship
-
When a dream comes true: Neha Shrestha and her story of beauty
Neha Shrestha is 22 years old. Thanks to the ENERGIA and Centre for Rural Technology Nepal Women’s Economic Empowerment project, she was able to pursue her dream. Now, she owns a beauty parlour shop in Sindhuli district, Nepal. Life goes really fast in some parts of the world. But not in the Sindhuli valley,…
-
Building the Evidence Base for Women’s Entrepreneurship in the Energy Sector
-
A life as Wonder Woman in Indonesia with Kopernik
Yoselvina Kune, also known as Mama Selvi, is a Christian priest living in Oekam village, a small village three hours away from Kupang, Indonesia. She is part of Kopernik’s Wonder Women Program, an initiative to empower women becoming sales agents of clean energy technologies, such as solar lights, water filters and cookstoves. By selling solar…
-
Solar powered electricity access: Implications for women’s empowerment in rural Kenya
-
“If we walk together, we can do it”
By Tjarda Muller and Melissa Ruggles On this International Women’s Day 2018, we celebrate women—and the need to further empower women—everywhere. Supporting women energy entrepreneurs is at the core of our Women’s Economic Empowerment Programme. Together with partners in six countries, we support over 4,000 women to become empowered entrepreneurs. Today, we share the story…
-
Reaching the last-mile: Women’s social and sustainable energy entrepreneurship
-
Scaling Sustainable Access Pathways for the Most Vulnerable and Hardest to Reach People
-
Wonder Woman of Waingapu: Born to be a Leader
As the only female staff working at RESCO, a renewable energy service company established under the Sumba Iconic Island platform, Jetty Arlinda Maro, 26, has to work twice as hard as her male colleagues to prove her capacity. Unlike those men, she is not only responsible for electrical installations, she is also the facilitator and…
-
Seizing on solar and women power in India
By Peyton Fleming/SEforALL Ajaita Shah talks at laser-fast clip, eager to get to her next thought. Her Indian solar company, Frontier Markets (FM), is moving even faster, eager to capitalize on one of the most untapped and challenging markets in the world. With solar costs plummeting and solar startups popping up everywhere, Shah’s six-year-old enterprise…
-
A cookstoves producer who never gives up
Daw Htay Htay, the owner of a cookstove production unit in the Pathein region of Myanmar, is finally more relaxed and contented. But life has been far from easy for this 57-year-old woman. She was her parents’ only child, and her mother died when Daw Htay Htay was very young. Her father, a ship docker,…
-
Fuelling women’s empowerment? An exploration of the linkages between gender, entrepreneurship and access to energy in the informal food sector
This interdisciplinary review paper explores linkages between access to energy, women’s empowerment and entrepreneurship. This will be discussed in the context of the informal food sector. Despite expectations that access to energy for productive uses empowers women by enabling them to generate an income, women in developing countries face a range of barriers when establishing…
-
Reaching the last mile in the extremely energy poor Asia-Pacific
At least 620 million people in the Asia-Pacific region lack access to electricity, and in South East Asia alone, more than 275 million people still rely on biomass for cooking. Especially in rural areas women bear the brunt of this energy poverty, which compounds the many challenges they face on a daily basis. Women’s engagement…