Gender equality in Africa’s energy transition

At ENERGIA, everything we do is underpinned by our commitment to support a just and inclusive energy transition. As part of this commitment, we both conduct our own research and consider what others are doing to establish an evidence-base for addressing gender equality in the energy sector.

This involves collecting and developing models and case studies to showcase what may help or hinder women’s empowerment in the energy sector, often in support of other actors. For example, ENERGIA recently supported the work of the Netherlands Enterprise Agency’s (RVO) Strengthening the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem for Clean Cooking (SEE Clean Cooking) programme by providing a report, which drew from the lessons learned and experiences of others across the globe on how best to ensure gender equality and social inclusion in the clean cooking sector.

We are cognizant that gender norms vary from one context to another, and we aim for action to always be based on the most current knowledge. In support of this goal, we regularly conduct analysis with our partners and in turn, develop action plans that detail actions and required resources needed to address key gender gaps we may have uncovered in the process. In addition, we sometimes receive requests from development programmes to aid in designing interventions to reduce gender inequality. For example, one of our partners working in Senegal, Energy 4 Impact, requested our support in their work on minigrids and how these may enhance female entrepreneurship and economic opportunities. Women in that programme are now earning income through the sale of energy products and services and by using minigrid electricity to process their crops, while being supported through training and mentoring in business and technical skills.

Energy, and particularly renewable energy, is one of the fastest growing areas for emerging technologies over the long term in Africa, and we can therefore expect to see many opportunities for job growth and entrepreneurship. As a wide range of technologies are invested in globally, women from various socioeconomic strata in Africa have the opportunity to play an active role in the transition and associated value chains, by becoming entrepreneurs, to be employed and to create wealth for themselves and for their families.

Access to energy — when it addresses women’s needs — is transformational in so many ways. One clear way in which African women play an active role in the energy transition is through their role as key decision makers when it comes to household purchases, which can be leveraged to drive clean energy access and encourage the uptake of renewables. Women’s access to clean energy can therefore lead to healthier environments, particularly when solid cooking fuels are replaced by cleaner options. By reducing the time burden of household chores such as cooking, fuelwood and water collection, energy access can also improve educational outcomes for women, and with respect to business ownership, modern energy can enable women to add value to their products, and in turn, improve incomes.

Beyond the household level, women are increasingly the backbone of product sales in renewable energy companies and are particularly adept at finding innovative ways to ensure that even low-income individuals can access energy technologies, including in remote or underserved areas. Bringing women into the energy sector diversifies innovation, creates access to new markets, and improves overall business performance, all while improving socio-economic outcomes for women.

One of the biggest challenges is financing — both for women entrepreneurs and energy users. Although financing initiatives for the energy transition have increased over the last decade, female energy entrepreneurs in Africa often run smaller, lower-revenue, and leaner (in terms of human resources) businesses compared to men. Many of the energy sector’s financing options do not take these gender differences into account and loans therefore tend to be out of reach for most women-run businesses. In many cases, the application processes for financial support are also onerous, and loans often have eligibility requirements that many small, women-led energy enterprises do not have. There is a similar mismatch in consumer financing, with many energy-poor women unable to afford clean energy solutions outright. Although prepaid clean energy solutions such as pay-as-you-go energy and microfinancing are popular, these can have hidden costs, such as opaque and high interest rates, or accessibility hurdles with respect to prepayment technology.

Although women are often the backbone of many energy companies in certain areas such as sales, very few women take up studies that qualify them for roles as managers, legal experts, engineers, technicians or senior policymakers in the energy sector. A wider challenge is therefore establishing adequate support for training and education for women, providing mentorships, creating and publicizing women’s career pathways in the sector and creating safe, supportive schooling and workplaces for women.

Energy policy has historically lagged behind research in addressing gender equality, with action and resourcing even more so. For instance, while many energy technologies have become available for purchase via mobile banking, little has been done to address the fact that women in some African countries, such as Tanzania, use mobile banking at much lower rates than men, highlighting the gap between knowledge and action.

In recent years, however, we have seen slow but steady improvements in policy–research alignment, with policy more quickly responding to research. For instance, based on research that highlighted the underrepresentation of women in utilities, in 2015, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) launched the Engendering Utilities programme to promote gender equality in male-dominated industries, including in the energy sector. This led to many positive outcomes that can be traced back to programme efforts, including an increase in the number of women participating in training programmes in Kenya’s electricity sector by 60% between 2014 and 2018, and a doubling of female applicants to Nigeria’s Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company. Elsewhere, the Energy2Equal programme from the International Finance Corporation has seen participating electricity companies increase their proportion of women in senior management positions. Such programmes represent practical responses to gaps in gender equality, as noted in wider research.

That said, in our work in the not-for-profit sector, we have sadly seen limited evidence to support the idea that traditional academic research and research from civil society organizations — particularly led by women from the global south and from a feminist world view — has directly influenced energy policy in Africa in a meaningful way. Major agencies such as the World Bank appear to more directly influence policy due to their significant financing infrastructure and convening power. Some issues that may be compounding this disconnect include the rather conceptual and philosophical use of gender language in academic work, which can be difficult for policymakers to interpret and use for policymaking. Another issue is a lack of prioritization of, and value placed on, research by women from the global south.

Cultural, political and economic factors tend to drive regional differences in research and policy on gender equality in the energy transition on the continent. In sub-Saharan Africa, much of the effort in this area has been supported by development partners, such as the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, USAID, the Austrian Development Agency, and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. Some governments, for instance that of Kenya, and regional bodies like the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), representing 12 African countries, are introducing policies to create enabling environments for gender equality in the energy sector. There are also social enterprises such as Solar Sisters, which works in Nigeria, Tanzania and Kenya, that support cohorts of women energy entrepreneurs. While these efforts are laudable, to really have a transformative impact, Africa needs more targeted, institutionalized efforts, and on a wider scale. Lessons can be learned from successful programmes and economic tools such as subsidies implemented elsewhere in the global south, for instance the Nepalese government’s inclusion of gender equality and social inclusion in electricity and wider energy policies and regulation.

It can often be difficult to identify clear ways in which academic research influences energy policy. However, academic research, compared to other research types such as civil society reports, introduces an independent and trusted voice, which is critical for policy makers to understand not only the scope of the problem and costs of inaction, but more importantly, the proven solutions for the challenges. Several academic research efforts have supported policy change in Africa, for instance the University of Cape Town’s work on ‘pro-poor electrification’ in South Africa in the late 1990s and 2000s, which proposed specific tariffs and policies that were ultimately implemented by the South African government. More recently, research from Loughborough University on modern energy cooking services has played a role in influencing several African and Asian countries to develop electric cooking strategies or roadmaps.

On the other hand, non-profit organizations often offer input from local voices and perspectives, as well as their advocacy experience, which academic work often lacks. Introducing local perspectives is important because policymakers want to develop and implement policies that are transformative for their constituents. This is the contribution we aim to make through our work at ENERGIA, for instance through past work with non-governmental organizations such as the Gender and Energy Network of Kenya and Practical Action, to build evidence on the case of gender equality in the energy sector. Together with the Kenyan Ministry of Energy, our colleagues conducted gender analysis to identify policy strengths, gaps, needs and priorities, and gender audits to showcase where women were (and were not) represented in the Ministry of Energy, as well as to highlight women’s experiences in the male-dominated government space. We used these insights to advocate for gender action plans and policies, and as a result, in 2019 the Kenyan government launched a Gender Policy in Energy, which is Africa’s first such policy.

An increasingly popular way of working to ensure change is in bringing together academia and civil society actors or non-profit organizations, to leverage each sector’s respective strengths. In South Africa, for example, universities such as University of Johannesburg and the University of Western Cape have worked with the Paraffin Safety Association of Southern Africa (a local non-profit) to conduct research on the adverse impacts of kerosene use, including deaths, accidental poisonings, burns, and property loss. Using this evidence, they successfully advocated changes in injury surveillance, kerosene stove designs, and government policy.

For advocacy workers, when talking to major funders or to governments with limited budgets and competing demands, the question is ‘where has this been done and has it worked?’. Evidence of results is needed to justify support, which researchers can offer. Researchers can help the non-profit sector by building the evidence base and developing methodologies for understanding gender equality in energy.

Conversely, those working in the non-profit sector, and especially local non-profit organizations, often have deep local knowledge of the cultural, social and economic barriers (as well as enabling factors) for action, and how to leverage specific contexts for greater gender impact. Increasingly, non-profit organizations also work at the intersection of various issues, which is reflective of realities on the ground where gender and energy are not isolated concerns, but intersect with wider challenges (for instance, surrounding water and food security, poverty and wealth creation, education and agriculture). Researchers could aim to build more evidence on such intersecting challenges to support the work of those in the non-profit and advocacy sector, as opposed to focusing on siloed problems. Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) work with the same communities or in the same countries for significant periods of time, and often have longitudinal data and a detailed understanding of how these communities are evolving. This knowledge is a resource that most researchers do not have, and which could be better taken advantage of in NGO–researcher partnerships.

Finally, the advocacy and non-profit sector has a lot to learn from those carrying out research on gender. In particular, there are a lot of feminist researchers (particularly of colour) considering issues of decolonization, intersectionality, systemic change, capitalism and patriarchy. However, throughout our experiences interacting with feminist gender researchers, questions of how these themes interact with energy are often absent, despite energy being a critical tool for gender empowerment and for patriarchal emancipation. Bringing feminist scholars together with those working on energy in the advocacy and non-profit space may help to better navigate gender dimensions of energy access.

As much as possible, do every step of your research with policy makers so that they co-shape your research questions and so that you are serving their needs. More broadly, research needs to be readily accessible and, in terms of language, able to clearly articulate the policy questions it intends to answer. Developing a strong evidence base and connecting this evidence to the non-profit sector and policy takes time, and national governments and multilateral development banks that fund infrastructure regularly face disruptions, leadership and direction changes. This means that changing established norms on gender equality in the energy space requires development partners in the non-profit sector committing to long term engagement with academia, civil society, and most importantly, women and girls, to ensure an equitable energy transition.