Africa’s energy poverty and gender-inclusivity

FOR energy policies to be effective, it has to be inclusive because it is on record that African women shoulder the greatest challenge of energy poverty. This is seen from the dearth of clean cooking solutions to lack of access to reliable energy supply to preserve food and medicine.

This perspective of energy poverty as it affects women is often omitted in planning, but as records have shown lack of access to electricity to power critical medical infrastructure and provide refrigeration and storage for vaccines, medicines and other critical medical supplies has grave implications for Africa.

According to forecast, Nigeria, DR Congo, Uganda, Pakistan, Tanzania, Niger Republic and Sudan account for 50 percent of the total global population without access to energy by 2030. Women constitute a great bloc of the 640 million Africans (60% of her population) lacking access to electricity. This is a huge challenge for Africa to accelerate action and put the right policy framework in place to attain a sustainable energy future.

However, for the energy transition to be fair and just, it must include and empower the hardest hit by energy poverty and climate change – women and girls. According to Atiku M. Jafar, an energy and projects lawyer, the African energy industry can thus help improve the quality of life for women and unleash their potential with targeted policy responses.

Massive electrification: There is a direct link between electrification and women empowerment. Reliable access to electricity to power households will be a remarkable game-changer for women by accelerating opportunities for them, enabling productivity and social mobility as well as increasing financial autonomy and social participation. Electrification enables empowerment due to its direct link to education, employment and quality of life. Expanding electricity access and integrating renewables in the energy mix will therefore deepen sustainable technologies that support high-power household appliances just as mainstreaming gender into the electrification process at all fronts will catalyse a just, inclusive and sustainable energy transition.

The goal of sustainable electricity access can therefore be seen as a major component of a broad-based development strategy for socioeconomic development, gender inclusion and women empowerment. How can we close the gap on energy poverty and provide universal access? Simple! Ramping up generation capacity, expanding the grid, enhancing distribution infrastructure and deploying off-grid solutions in unserved and underserved areas.

Clean cooking solutions: Indoor air pollution is responsible for a staggering 3.8 million deaths every year (more deaths than malaria and HIV combined), most of which constitute women and children. 2.6 billion people making up about 1/3 of the world’s population lack access to clean technologies and fuels for cooking, thereby forcing women and girls to resort to wood, charcoal, dung and other traditional biomass fuels as cooking fuels, leading to significant exposure to indoor pollution and massive deforestation from felling trees to provide energy for cooking.

Deepening the penetration of LPG and accelerating action on clean cooking will help meet women’s energy needs, free up time for education, income generation and leisure. A clear ambition and effective deployment of scalable infrastructure is needed to provide affordable cooking solutions for the poor. Improved cookstoves and solar Pv-powered pressure cookers, for example, could provide stand-alone, clean and cost-effective cooking solutions without necessarily burdening the grid. Regardless of the progress being made in electricity access, women’s peculiar energy needs must be identified and addressed. The best way to do this is to include women in the energy policy formulation process, involve them in the design and rollout of clean cooking technologies and ensure that energy policy leaves no one behind.

Women can be reliable agents of energy prosperity and yet traditional gender roles keep them greatly excluded at all levels of the energy industry. Even as the energy transition is predicted to create 30 million jobs by 2030, the inclusivity gap will likely widen even more as the sub-sectors projected to drive this jobcreation such as electrical machinery equipment and construction are the ones with the least women representation.

Significant progress has been recorded in the number of women with engineering and other STEM qualifications over the years, and yet this does not translate into wider representation at the industry level. A 2020 study by BCG shows women to constitute only 22 percent of the global oil and gas workforce while a similar study in the same year by Mckinsey reveals that women occupy less than 8 percent of technical oil and gas jobs and 9 percent of senior management roles in the energy industry of Africa and the Middle East.

There are intrinsic inhibitors, in addition to deliberate traditional gender roles, that discriminate against women in the field and in the industry, in training opportunities, in compensation, etc.

To address this gap, entrenched beliefs in the industry about gender stereotypes and women’s abilities need to be unlearnt. In addition to barriers to entry and onboarding in the energy industry, the industry must do more to recognise and address those blockades that prevent women from thriving.

Women have broken barriers across the energy portfolio as clean energy entrepreneurs, engaging in productive use of energy and leveraging traditional and renewable energy sources to foster economic growth. The industry must not be male-dominated. We must challenge unpopular gender roles, mainstream gender dimensions as a key to unlocking talent and accelerating a just and inclusive development.

However, for the energy transition to be fair and just, it must include and empower the hardest hit by energy poverty and climate change – women and girls