Supply side interventions

Engaging women in the supply of electricity and motive energy can also increase their welfare but the evidence is scarce. There is a clear need for rigorous studies to identify which design elements are key to obtaining benefits for women in the supply of energy interventions

Another channel for increasing women‘s welfare – including through empowerment and employment – is by engaging them in the supply of electricity and motive energy. For example, positive impacts on women have been reported for micro-hydro projects in Nepal, Peru, and Solomon Islands that deliberately sought to involve women in the management and construction of village energy grids. While these and similar examples are often cited, the evidence is generally qualitative, based on the retrospective or reflexive reports of key informants in the participating villages, and generally is not reported in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Thus, while the descriptive evidence in these case studies can be compelling, there is little basis for drawing generalized conclusions. Two of the most widely cited projects that were structured to give women responsibility for management and supply of energy are the multi-function platform in West Africa and solar energy Bangladesh.

The multi-function platform (MFP) is perhaps the most widely cited project to deliver motive energy that specifically benefits women, although there are other many other case studies of small projects to install mills with the aim of reducing women‘s workload in post-harvest operations (see Panjwani 2005). The MFP was first developed in Mali and has received almost universally positive reviews (e.g., Africa Recovery 1999, Anderson et al. 2005, Brew-Hammond and Crole-Rees 2004, Burn and Coche 2000, Denton 2004, UNDP 2010). For example, in a representative passage, Denton (2004) writes:

Women in rural areas, because of gender-ascribed roles, are often left to cater for the energy needs of their families. These needs involve doing intensive, physically demanding and repetitive chores from an agriculture, livestock and basic subsistence perspective. Hence rural women are not able to use their time to engage in productive activities or simply to rest. The MFP relieves them of these activities and puts them in a situation where they are beneficiaries of improved energy services and owners and managers of the technology. The technology is owned by a group of women or a women’s association trained in business management and development skills to provide energy services to both women and men. As a result, the MFP has successfully unleashed an entrepreneurial dynamic and changed the social and economic roles of women.

Although access to its management is not limited to the community, the nature of community life is such that, for now, the private sector has not responded to the challenges of managing the MFP in huge numbers. The fact remains that the platform has strong benefits particularly when social mobilization is achieved but in the absence of organizational skills and with limited resources, the community is not always able to exploit the gamut of potentially attractive benefits that the platform offers, particularly in other sectors.

This passage both describes the hoped for benefits of the MFP, and hints at its limitations, especially the difficulties of scaling up and sustaining the program. Nygaard (2009) argues that the features of the program that have made it popular with the international donor community are precisely those most difficult to implement in practice: management by women‘s associations, multi-functionality, and use of biofuel as a sustainable energy source. Based on project documents and internally- commissioned reviews, she concludes that the project as conceptualized has generally not been successful, although single-purpose engines run on conventional fuels and managed by the private sector show more promise. There is a clear need for rigorous, independent, quantitative assessment of the causal impacts of the MFP type interventions that continue to be implemented throughout Africa (e.g., UNDP 2008, Modi 2010).

A second frequently cited case is solar energy in Bangladesh, especially the Char Montaz project (Berthaud et al. 2004). As described by Mondal et al. (2010), there have been many projects to promote small-scale renewable energy in Bangladesh. As with the MFP in West Africa, these efforts have garnered support from international donors, but also like the MFP, they have faced challenges scaling up and sustaining operations as originally conceived by the project - including ensuring that the poor have access to project benefits and that women have a strong role in management (e.g., Wong 2009). For example, the Char Montaz project established a cooperative of women to construct and sell battery-powered lamps in connection with home solar systems but soon found that the market was limited. Several reviews of the first phase of the project suggested that the market could be expanded by offering credit (Berthaud et al. 2004, Mondal et al. 2010). According to World Bank (2010), ‖an assessment in 2009 revealed that the small cooperative has become a medium enterprise, serving most of the coastal areas and employing 170 people. The small island has become a bustling commercial area and communities acknowledge the women‘s cooperative as the initial spark for the modernization process.‖ As with the MFP, rigorous, independent assessment of the impacts of Char Montaz and other renewable energy projects modeled on that experience would be useful.