How to energize women

Abstract

Lack of access to modern energy services represents a pressing problem in the developing world, not least for women. Many poor women spend much of their time on menial work that could be performed much more easily if energy were available, and safety concerns often prevent women from going out at night where there are no streetlights. Children suffer too—more than 50 percent of the developing world’s children attend primary schools that lack electricity, and this can lead to markedly worse educational outcomes. Access to modern energy services might be improved through, among other approaches, establishing small-scale hydroelectric projects, facilitating the use of home solar systems, or providing grid electricity (which itself might be produced either with conventional fuels or through renewable means). Three authors—Kalpana Sharma of India (2014), Dipak Gyawali of Nepal, and Corinne Hart of the United States (2014)—discuss which methods of expanding energy access show most promise for improving the lives of the developing world’s poor women and children.

Throughout the developing world, it is typically a woman who “mans” the front lines of energy. It is she who fetches water, often from hours away, carrying it on her back for lack of pumps and pipes; she who processes grains and vegetables several times a day so that her family can eat; and she who toils in the unending drudgery of keeping the household, its children, and its clothing clean. What she wants from energy is straightforward—she doesn’t care about power simulation analyses, arcane optimization models, or tender bid arbitrations. She wants electricity on demand to help her perform her household chores. She wants it at a stable voltage and stable frequency, and at a low cost per kilowatt-hour. She also wants the ability, somewhere close by, to bang on the table of the person who fails to provide these things, just as she might do at the store where she buys her vegetables. Put another way, she wants to exert democratic control over the vital energy resources that are critical to her family’s everyday wellbeing.

Electricity, once considered a luxury in the developing world, has become a necessity and a human right. Without electricity, nations and individuals cannot reach their economic potential. Basic life-saving drugs can’t be stored at local health facilities. Citizens can’t get information about the crucial political decisions made in national capitals or engage their representatives through the Internet or mobile phones. Electricity helps determine the extent to which one exercises one’s citizenship and fulfills the obligations it entails.

Expanding electricity access presents challenges, but the biggest challenge is not how to generate electricity to begin with. Rather, it is how to democratize it. In the 20th century, many clever methods for generating (and to a certain extent storing) electricity were devised. Electricity can now be obtained not only from burning fossil fuels but also from hydro, tidal, geothermal, solar, biomass, waste, and nuclear sources. To be sure, each of these energy sources has its problems. But most if not all of these problems can be overcome in time, even if the solutions will require ingenuity and carry a cost.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that, in a debilitating legacy of the past century, electricity is often delivered by highly unresponsive institutions. In much of the Global South—including my own nation of Nepal, which sits on a Himalayan gold mine of hydropower but whose national grid undergoes some 12 hours of power cuts each day—electricity is delivered by vertically integrated monopolies that exhibit great rigidity and remain insensitive to consumer interests. Such institutions care more about exercising control than delivering service and in the most depraved cases create electricity scarcity so as to maximize control. The prime focus of many of these bodies is new construction, not overall management. Their mindset leads them to ignore the very issues that are meaningful to consumers—distribution, demand management, and end-use creativity. And the centralized schemes that politicians, hydrocrats, and contractors promote are often supported by so many hidden and not-so-hidden subsidies (not to mention riddled with so many kickback opportunities) that they fail to provide the economies of scale they promise.

Quality of electricity service is often poor. In addition to power cuts, customers face fluctuations in frequency and voltage that reduce the life spans of domestic appliances such as electric pumps and televisions. Technical losses of electricity from inefficient equipment and haphazard expansion of power lines are unacceptably high in much of the Global South, but even worse, electricity is stolen (often in connivance with utility staff) at a scale that would bankrupt any company without state support. Honest consumers pay for these losses through higher charges for service or through higher taxes. As individuals, customers are incapable of challenging the electricity behemoth in whose favor all the cards are stacked.

Successful rural development projects have shown that it is possible to overcome such problems—as long as vertically integrated monopolies are unbundled into generation, transmission, and distribution entities, the last of these vital to ensuring more responsive democratic oversight at the grassroots level. The unbundled companies hold each other in check. Accountability improves because poor consumers, who are incapable of exercising influence at the generation and transmission levels, find their influence maximized at the distribution level.

Separating distribution from other elements of the electricity business is an important structural reform that contributes to the democratization of electricity grids. So is assigning to municipalities, village committees, or local cooperatives the bulk of responsibility for managing distribution. Another important reform is holding public hearings when prices are established and plans to expand distribution are made. Only with reforms such as these are the rural poor—many of them women who run households in the absence of men who have migrated to find work—able to demand the improved electricity access that is their right. Only then can they take responsibility for ensuring that electricity reduces their drudgery and improves their lives.

Wherever such reforms have been instituted—such as across rural Nepal, where more than 200 community associations of electricity users have emerged (National Association of Community Electricity Users Nepal, 2014)—villagers have benefitted from technologies like lift irrigation which allows double or even triple cropping in commercial agriculture. Electric chaff cutting decreases by half the amount of domestic labor (usually performed by women) that is required for livestock rearing. Internet access allows children to get better educations and small farmers to find out where they can sell their vegetables at the best price.

In many places, democratization represents a difficult battle against the forces of history. But Nepal has experienced some successes. Diptara Thamsuhang is chairperson of the Small Farmer Agriculture Cooperative of Baluwadi, a village in Jhapa District. Of this cooperative’s 462 members, 73 are women—but the executive committee is composed almost entirely of women. Diptara and others manage electricity distribution in the village, buying power in bulk from the Nepal Electricity Authority and then retailing it, and they have also installed many biogas units. The cooperative earns a significant profit from its electricity sales, and this allows it to run a sustainable microcredit program that finances small agro-processing concerns.

Meena Khadga is chairperson of the Community Child Development and Women Empowerment Center in Katari, a village in Udayapur District. The center manages electricity distribution for 532 households, and maintains a policy of training and employing only women for meter reading, wiring, and repairs. The center is planning to invest the profit it earns from its electricity business in a small hydroelectric plant. The surplus energy that is generated will fund campaigns for child health, among other things.

Progress such as this would not be possible if Nepal’s electricity monopoly had not been partially reformed in 2003 through a set of by-laws on community electricity; it was only these institutional changes that made Diptara and Meena masters of their own electric destinies. If these women were still atomized consumers, beholden to diktats from distant managers, the initiatives in which they are involved would be unthinkable.

Unresponsive power institutions are a bad legacy of the 20th century. And they are the biggest obstacle to improved electricity access for the developing world’s poor people—whether women, children, or men.