ENERGIA promotes gender mainstreaming in the energy sector and in the renewable energy transition. We work with a wide variety of organizations, including governments and businesses to achieve this.
What is gender mainstreaming?
Gender mainstreaming is a tool or a process to correct the imbalance between women and men in terms of opportunities, decision making and influence. It involves considering the different needs, priorities, and impacts on women and men in all areas, ensuring that gender disparities are addressed and reduced.
Gender mainstreaming in the energy sector
Men and women differ in the purposes for which they need and use energy, and so do their levels of access to it. Applying a gender lens to energy policies, programs and projects helps to identify and understand the different impacts. This then helps inform changes that are needed to create gender-sensitive approaches to policies and programs, to ensure women’s needs and the impacts on women are fully taken into account.
Applying a gender lens is also important for policies and practices within energy organizations, for example ensuring women have equal opportunities to progress within their roles and at senior levels, and on a practical level, providing dedicated bathrooms for men and women and allowances for maternity leave and child care.
What is a gender-responsive approach?
Taking a gender-responsive approach to initiatives involves conducting a full gender analysis: determining current best practices, developing a gender action plan to bridge any identified gaps, allocating adequate resources to activities to this, and monitoring to ensure progress.
ENERGIA takes the following steps to promote the development of gender-responsive policies and programs:
- Diagnose: We assess the likely implications of a specific project or program on women and men.
- Set goals: We agree on what that specific program or project should achieve from a gender perspective.
- Create a strategy: We design activities on how these gender goals can be met.
- Agreement: We then build consensus among stakeholders on the approach.
- Monitoring plan: Lastly, we develop a gender-sensitive monitoring strategy to record progress over time.
FInd out more about how ENERGIA contributes to the inclusion of a gender perspective in policies, projects and programs in this video with our Technical Advisor, Magi Matinga.
