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 (2014), and Corinne Hart of the United States—discuss which methods of expanding energy access show most promise for improving the lives of the developing world’s poor women and children.

The time allotted for achieving the Millennium Development Goals is set to elapse in 2015 and the world is looking to establish a new agenda for sustainable development through 2030. Energy will be a critical component of any such agenda. Without energy—sustainable, clean, and accessible energy—global health outcomes will fall short, climate change will continue to ravage the planet, and peace and security goals will go unmet. As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has often said, sustainable energy is the “golden thread” that weaves the global development agenda together.

One of the best ways in which public, private, and nonprofit organizations can expand energy access and contribute to a sustainable development agenda is to help create a global market for clean cooking solutions. Such solutions promise a cleaner energy future for billions of people. They can also empower women and girls as end users, household energy managers, and key market actors.

Women are already taking the lead in many communities to develop and implement solutions that will reduce their energy burdens and slow natural-resource depletion. Women are often champions of sustainable energy, eager to employ local knowledge to design new energy solutions. They represent a powerful force that must be leveraged if the vision of sustainable energy for all is to be fulfilled. Sustainable energy solutions cannot be designed without the full participation and input of women around the world—women who have firsthand experience of the global energy problem and a true understanding of what is required to make solutions work.

Global adoption of clean cooking solutions is a tremendously important step in addressing one of the world’s most dangerous health risks. Three billion people rely on wood, coal, charcoal, animal dung, and other solid fuels to cook their meals (World Health Organization, 2011). These fuels, when burned in open fires or traditional cookstoves, emit smoke that fills lungs in communities the world over. Prolonged, daily exposure to cooking smoke results in 4 million deaths and millions of injuries annually (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2010). Diseases and ailments such as pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, cancer, cataracts, and burns are all associated with the use of traditional fuels. In the developing world, only high blood pressure, alcohol, and tobacco claim more lives each year than household air pollution.

Traditional fuels are also a drain on women’s time and energy. Millions of women around the world work tirelessly every day to secure the energy needed to cook meals and light homes—to ensure that families are warm, safe, and nourished. For as much as three to four hours a day in some instances, women walk long distances in search of firewood. They carry heavy loads once they find fuel. In conflict zones and other dangerous areas, women face an increased risk of gender-based violence when out collecting fuel. In homes where fuel is purchased, up to 40 percent of total income can go toward fuel (Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, 2012).

To save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and protect the environment from the black soot that contributes to climate change, former US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton launched the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves in 2010. The alliance is an independent, public-private partnership made up of more than 900 organizations working to create a global market for clean cookstoves and fuels. It is one of the primary organizations contributing to Sustainable Energy for All, a UN initiative launched in 2011 that sets goals in sustainable energy access for governments, companies, and nonprofit groups worldwide.

For decades prior to the creation of the alliance, many well-intentioned corporate, nonprofit, and national initiatives to distribute cookstoves had existed. But there had been no single global entity tasked with spearheading the work in research, standards, testing, finance, advocacy, fundraising, and awareness that is necessary to scale up adoption of clean cooking solutions. Perhaps one of the biggest shortcomings in previous efforts was a failure to fully integrate women in the clean cooking value chain and to implement gender-sensitive approaches. Women, as users of cookstoves, are a critical part of the sector’s effort to achieve scale. And women entrepreneurs, by leveraging their personal networks to stimulate demand and using their firsthand experience to promote solutions, can catalyze the market.

If design and manufacturing groups don’t understand the needs of women and their families, it will remain difficult to achieve goals related to the sustained adoption of clean cookstoves and fuels. The issues involved are often as straightforward as how many burners a cookstove should have, how durable it must be, and how much it should weigh. It is also important to understand that women and men often view energy issues differently. For example, some surveys have found that men tend to emphasize the cost savings of energy solutions whereas women tend to emphasize time savings and health benefits. The best approach is to include women—as stakeholders and decision makers—throughout the cookstove value chain. Women should be involved in design, production, financing, and distribution so their strengths can be tapped to unleash the opportunity inherent in the sector.

The alliance has created a three-pronged gender and empowerment strategy. The strategy is to build evidence supporting the case that women must be involved in the value chain; to share, test, and analyze best practices through strategic pilot and case studies; and to spur effective implementation of programs through the creation of practical tools and training for practitioners. The overall aim is for both the women who work in the cookstove value chain and the women who use clean cooking solutions to be empowered to improve their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of their families, communities, countries, and ultimately the world.

Energy poverty is among the most grinding forms of poverty. It hampers people’s ability to heat and light their homes, cook their food, and get from one place to another. Without improvements in energy access, sustainable development will remain out of reach for billions of people. Energy poverty entails a myriad of challenges, but the cooking crisis is paramount among them. As hundreds of millions of people move out of poverty and into the global middle class, gaining access to better jobs and services, they cannot continue cooking as their ancestors have done throughout human history. The health and environmental stakes are too high.

The clean cooking sector has never been better positioned to implement targeted efforts that focus on empowering and including women in the energy solutions that so deeply affect their lives. A wide variety of stakeholders now has a substantial opportunity to increase the success rate of clean cooking initiatives and achieve the co-benefits inherent in access to clean cooking solutions: better health, a cleaner environment, safer access to energy, and more opportunities for improved livelihoods and income generation.

Women in the developing world invest 90 percent of their earnings back into their households (Plan, 2009). Therefore, an empowered woman—both in the economy and at home—is a catalytic force for establishing the kind of world that ought to be left to future generations.