Gender

[top] [end]1. Issue in Brief

A literature search for papers on the theme "Household Energy" finds most researchers equate the term with cooking and stoves, issues strongly identified with women. However, a number of researchers have taken a broader definition to encompass all the activities that take place within a household and the linkages to a much wider system of energy supply and demand. In addition, there are significant linkages between household energy and other sectors, for example, agriculture (agricultural residues as fuel source), health (lung and eye diseases, nutrition), education (children's opportunity for after-school study) and income generation (cottage industries). These linkages also demonstrate that it is not sufficient to consider only women when addressing household energy issues but that men also play a significant role in decision making on household energy.

But what is actually meant by saying 'Household Energy'? Household energy is usually taken to be synonymous with cooking and most development projects related to household energy have focused on the provision of improved cookstove designed to use less energy and improve health through reduced indoor air pollution. It is worth pointing out that it is not only the stove which influences these factors but also the location of the activity. Cooking can be inside or outside the building; for example, fuel efficiency is influence by wind and draught and health is affected by poor ventilation creating inefficient smoke and particulates dispersal. A number of solutions have been advocated to address these issues, including adding chimneys to existing designs through to complete new technologies, such as solar cookers, requiring the cook to change cooking practices and sometimes location.

Another issue to consider is the supply of energy in rural areas. In the former, there is a particularly heavy reliance of households on biomass as an energy carrier for process heat. In addition, there is a lack of access to reliable supplies of modern energy forms at affordable prices. For this reason energy sectors needs to think in broader terms of household energy as supplying energy services, rather than cooking and lighting fuels, which offer choice of fuels/energy form, better quality fuels with improved availability and prices that will be set to enable all households to meet their basic needs. Equipment and household, in particular the kitchen, design are important issues, but neglected areas, influencing energy use and women's work efficiency and health.

[top] [end]2.Trends and History

In the traditional societies of developing countries household energy is fully equated with women. In households where there are adult men and women, the gendered division of labour generally allocates to women the responsibility for household energy provision related to their spheres of influence in the household, in particular activities centred around the kitchen. However, men become involved in places where fuel has to be collected from long distances, fuel is purchased or there are social restrictions on women leaving their homes. Collection of fuel is only one part of a more complex system of household energy management identifies an interconnected sub-system of six components: kitchen, fuel, device equipment, cooking, vessels and food. Men and women play very distinct roles in carrying out the activities and decision making around these six components. Understanding these roles is important for designing effective and sustainable interventions.

Another issue to be addressed here is the issue of poverty. Poverty is one of the world's most fundamental issues. Moving people out of poverty forms a cornerstone of much international development policy. The way poverty is conceptualised has changed in recent years. Initially it was defined very much in economic terms; people with an income of less than $1 a day are considered to be living in extreme poverty. However, as research into poverty has shown that there are more dimensions of poverty than low cash incomes. How is energy seen in the new approaches to poverty alleviation? Energy is recognised one of the most essential inputs for sustaining people's livelihoods. At the most basic level, energy provides cooked food, boiled water and warmth. However, energy has never been widely accepted within development circles as a basic need, as have water and food.

It has long been established that poor people mostly use biomass as their energy carrier and that in many areas there is an increasing shortage in supply, which adds to the burden of the women whose responsibility it is to collect. However, despite the fact that around two billion people still use biomass fuels (World Bank 1996), and the fact that these are also the two million poorest people on earth, there has been little attempt until recently to analyse the energy-poverty nexus in depth.

The energy-poverty nexus has distinct gender characteristics. Within households, where there are adult men and women, the gendered division of labour generally allocates to women the responsibility for household energy provision related to their spheres of influence in the household, in particular activities centred around the kitchen. They are often supported in this work by girls and sometimes boys, who can be kept out of school thereby damaging their own future livelihood choices. Men become involved in places where large quantities and pieces of wood need to be transported over long distances.

Women's access to decision-making within the household and community is restricted, limiting their ability to influence processes and resource allocation on many issues including energy. Therefore, key questions around household energy become: who chooses which energy carrier?; how is it used?; and who benefits from this use? Of the approximately 1.3 billion people living in poverty, it is estimated that 70% are women, many of whom live in female-headed households in rural areas. Since women generally have less access to resources and decision-making than men, many poor female-headed households can be expected to be living in extreme energy poverty. It is not only the supply of energy which will be constrained, but also the important services for the household which will be affected, such as clean water provision. Their lack of resources makes them vulnerable to changes outside of their control e.g. drought.

Men and women have different ways of adopting strategies for addressing their poverty, men are more easily able to migrate while women stay put managing the household and creating informal sector business they can run from home. Therefore, the energy strategies that are intended to assist people to move out of poverty must take these gender aspects into account.

[top] [end]3. Current Best Practice

Over the last decades many projects have been carried out which aim to change the current status of women and secure sustainable energy efficiency in developing countries. There has been a change of emphasis since the 1980s in the way household energy has been perceived by the international development agencies and hence projects they have funded. Initially household energy was considered to be synonymous with cooking and hence stoves. Since women were responsible for cooking, providing them with new stoves was considered as addressing household energy. However, based on experience of stove dissemination (and one has to say many failures), the view began to emerge that a technical focus of improving efficiency, while appreciated by women, was not enough. Women wanted multiple benefits in stoves, such as time saving. Once this was recognised the next step was then to involve women in the design, testing, building and dissemination of stoves. There were also attempts at wood fuel production, for example, through community forestry projects. In the 1990's, the view began to emerge that household energy is more than cooking and improving biomass supply, for example, the health impacts of biomass fuels are receiving increasing attention. At a global level, development agencies now are very much focused on addressing poverty. Therefore, for those working in the field of household energy, it has become a challenge to demonstrate the linkages between addressing household energy issues and moving people out of poverty.

One of the projects that was launched in January 2005, and is supported under grant agreement EIE/04/198/SO7.39677 under "Intelligent Energy - Europe" Programme of the European Community is the TIE-ENERGIA project. The project runs until June 2007 (30 months) and is implemented by ETC Foundation and Eco. Consortium members include KuSiNi and Practical Action - East Africa. The acronym TIE-ENERGIA stands for "Turning Information into Empowerment: Strengthening Gender and Energy Networking in Africa". The overall aim of the project is to ensure that gender is integrated into energy issues in Africa by strengthening the human and institutional capacity within and beyond the Africa Gender and Energy Network. The Coordinator of the project, ETC Foundation (ETC) in the Netherlands hosts the International ENERGIA Secretariat and has the mandate of International Focal Point within the Network. As the ENERGIA Network is an informal network, ETC provides the legal and fiduciary entity within which the Network's activities are funded and managed. You can find more in Hedon Household Energy Network here

Other projects that have been carried out by the International Network on Gender and Sustainable Energy are about solar cooking. sparknet. Solar Cookers International's (SCI) staff are preparing a survey to learn more about the quantity and quality of information available within the fields of solar cooking and solar pasteurisation and to determine the gaps, if any, in this information. The survey has several questions that deal with the impacts of solar cooking on women in terms of health, safety, social and economic aspects. Certain questions in the survey allow for detailed responses and are ideal for bringing in gender-related information (http://www.solarcooking.org or contact Kevin Porter at info@...). SCI has begun a series of interviews with solar cooking activists from around the world in a series, "Calling All Solar Cookers" found at http://solarcooking.org/media/broadcast This a great opportunity to give publicity to exciting work on solar cookers by women. (Please get in touch with Tom Sponheim, SCI's webmaster by e-mail on webmaster@... )

Sparknet is an interdisciplinary interactive knowledge network in Southern and East Africa involved in energy for low-income households in rural areas. Launched in January 2002, the network has twelve member organisations from nine countries, and is the first of its kind in the region. Four of the members are also partners of ENERGIA - Makerere University in Uganda, Technology and Development Group of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, Tanzania Traditional Energy development and environment Organisation (TaTEDO) and Intermediate Technology Group, Kenya. The project is funded by the European Union's Fifth Framework Programme and has three thematic areas of focus: household energy and health, household energy and gender and household energy and forestry. The first phase of the project, which is until December 2004, will compare and contrast the household energy situation in each country so as to highlight policy options and innovation opportunities. The website will be updated regularly as the project develops.

The United Nations agencies are engaged in approaches to move people out of poverty from the particular agency's own mandate and where energy is specifically considered, what role energy will play in helping the agency meet its particular objectives. Household energy, where it is specifically mentioned, tends to be equated with stoves although agencies have been addressing the other end-users of energy end-use in the household under other guises, for example, income generation. UNEP is keen to promote the use of renewable energy and have a programme to improve women's knowledge of the options, thereby enabling them to make the informed choices. Promoting sustainable biomass supply through community management of natural resources, and thereby improving household energy supply will directly benefit women. In this context, UNEP has supported such a project in the Lake Chad basin in West Africa.

The United Nations Fund for Women (UNIFEM) promotes economic security of women and empowering them to enjoy secure livelihoods. Household energy has featured in a number of ways in their work. For example, supporting improved stoves projects in Senegal and a biogas project in Yemen. To support economic empowerment they have produced a number of food cycle sources books, which include labour saving technologies in the household which can also be used for income generation, for example, crop dryers. A companion series of energy and environment sources books included 'Electricity in the Household and Micro-Enterprises' Clancy and Redeby 2000.

The World Health Organisation's (WHO) interest in household energy has arisen from the threat to the health of the poor, particularly women and children, due to indoor pollution and smoke from biomass fuels. WHO is supporting a research programme which is collecting gender differentiated data on the health impacts of smoke.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), as part of its remit, is involved in monitoring biomass fuel supplies and biomass energy conversion technologies. Households are identified as one of the key stakeholder groups in the biomass supply chain, both as producers and users. The Regional Wood Energy Development Programme in Asia (RWEDP), which finished in December 2001, recognised that gender issues are important in both the supply and demand sides of biomass energy. RWEDP has played an active part in raising awareness of gender issues linked to biomass energy, holding workshops, training courses and producing useful supporting literature. More recently, the FAO was involved in organising a workshop on the productive uses of renewable energy (Anon 2002). The household was clearly identified as a location where productive activities took place and electricity for example could contribute to income generation through lighting and powering equipment. There is a need to move beyond the light bulb, which the high profile of solar panels seems to create a fixation on.

Energy and environment is one of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'s six themes. Rural energy services and low emission technologies are seen as particularly important for meeting women's household and economic energy needs. At the project level, UNDP has been involved with supporting income generation activities for women through the increased availability of environmentally sustainable renewable energy systems (see for example, the multifunctional platform in Mali described in Burn and Coche 2001). In 1999, a Women and Energy Project was started, with funding from SIDA, which focused on Southern Africa and aimed to prepare case study material on lessons learnt related to sustainable energy projects that had benefited women. In addition, support was to be given to initiate pilot projects which provided income generation activities to women. National consultations were held in 10 Southern African countries in preparation for a regional workshop which was held in June 1999.

The World Bank aims to mainstream gender into all its programmes. Two programmes which deal with energy that have specifically addressed gender issues are the Asia Alternative Energy Programme (ASTAE) and the Energy Sector Management Programme (ESMAP). The ASTAE Programme completed in 2002 the Energy, Poverty and Gender (EnPoGen) project which was to increase the impact of the Programme's alternative energy projects on poverty alleviation and gender equity in rural areas of Asia (Heijndermans 2002). The project aimed to identify and quantify the linkages between access to electricity, poverty alleviation and gender equity. Part of the outcome has been the start of refining a methodology for measuring social benefits (the so-called intangible impacts) of projects and to translate them into monetary terms which are more familiar to the engineers and economists of the energy sector. The underlying idea is that this will make it easier for these professionals to adopt social benefits as outcomes in energy projects. At the same time, community needs identified through participatory approaches are to be translated into the language of planners and implementers.

ESMAP has a track record of household energy projects and had begun to support gender in energy in the 1980s. However, a major impetus to mainstreaming gender in the energy sector came in 1999 when a gender facility was set-up within ESMAP. Efficiency in project delivery to the poor and gender equity in benefits accruing from interventions funded by ESMAP are two primary goals. As of 2003, ESMAP's work on gender, household energy and poverty alleviation divides between income generation and reducing indoor air pollution. For example, a project in Bangladesh for women to become energy entrepreneurs making fluorescent lights has multiple benefits for women. It provides some women with income and so helps to address poverty issues in their households. In addition, the women entrepreneurs' status increases in the household and the community. All households have the opportunity to use the lights, replacing kerosene with electricity, saving money [see endnote 4], enhanced safety, and bringing improvements in quality of life.

While many of the bilateral agencies (eg DGIS and SIDA) support household energy projects through the multilateral agencies, DFID still funds directly some initiatives through its Knowledge and Research (KaR) Programme. Work supported in the past was the traditional approach of equating household energy with stoves. However, with the adoption of the livelihoods approach, the multidimensional aspects of household energy are now appearing and, while stoves are rightly not forgotten, other energy end-uses are now under consideration. DFID has also commissioned a paper on the gender-energy-poverty nexus (Clancy et al 2003). The paper sees addressing household energy (when broadly defined) as a key issue in poverty alleviation and women's empowerment.

GTZ has a long tradition of working on household energy. The Household Energy Programme was set up in 1983 and began with a traditional stoves approach. However, building on field experience and realising the low priority biomass fuels received from policy makers, the Programme began to broaden out from technical solutions into a more integrated and participatory approach. Household energy is to be integrated into other sectors, such as health and food security, or where household energy is the starting point to integrate other sector components into the project (Anon 1997). In 1998, GTZ began to implement a project (known as ProBEC) in six SADC countries to support local, national and regional initiatives aimed at improving the energy situation for poor urban and rural households and small businesses using biomass energy. A case study was carried out in Namibia in November 2001 to demonstrate how gender aspects can be successfully integrated into different levels in the biomass energy sector. As a consequence of taking a gender approach, household energy programmes can be more efficient and effective, as well as increasing gender equity in participation and benefit.

[top] [end]4. Areas of Research

[top] [end]Gender, Energy and Health

Combustion of traditional biomass fuels and coal exposes low-income households to serious health hazards. WHO estimates that around three million deaths a year occur in the South related to indoor air pollution from biomass combustion for cooking and space heating. Since household energy provision and use for household survival needs is women's responsibility, it is not unreasonable to expect that biomass use affects women's health disproportionately to men's.

Alternative fuels are promoted to reduce the negative health impacts of biomass fuels, resulting in reduction in air pollution, enhanced health, saving of time and improved safety. Rural electrification has been promoted in a number of countries as bringing these benefits and other benefits. However, electricity is expensive for cooking many traditional types of food and for space heating. The health benefits electricity brings in practice do not appear to be linked to cooking but to other energy end-uses in the household. Women do see the benefits of electric stoves and would like to make them a priority purchase. However, studies in South Africa show that appliances for lighting, entertainment and refrigeration are usually the first purchases in newly electrified areas (Mathee and de Wet 2001).

[top] [end]Gender, Household Energy and Privatisation of the Energy Sector

The energy sector in developing countries is not immune from transformations that are taking place in the global economy, which are intended to bring about increased efficiency and lower costs, as well as increasing access. There are two particular changes taking place that are likely to have specific consequences for poor people: privatisation and commercialisation.

Privatisation in the energy sector involves the sale of state energy companies, particularly the electricity utilities, to the private sector, as well as the opening up of the market for the private sector to provide other energy services. These trends bring with them wholly new concerns that need to be studied: particularly, how the private sector will respond to the demand from the rural poor for household energy services. Will the poor be seen as a mass market needing creative financing programmes to facilitate access to energy services, or will they be regarded as too high a risk, providing too low a profit margin? Private sector electricity suppliers might consider themselves under no obligation to implement schemes with a high social value (for example, lifeline tariffs sufficient to light one or two lamps) that many public utilities have addressed. Since a disproportionate number of poor households are headed by women, then women (at least in this group) might consider that the market also does not benefit them. It is, as yet, not clear whether privatisation will result in more, or less, access for the rural poor to modern energy forms, although emerging evidence from India is not positive (Sinha forthcoming 2003)

Commercialisation is a process of reducing public expenditure that also aims to reduce the market inefficiencies induced by subsidies. For the energy sector, it has meant the removal of direct subsidies on fuels and appliances, and a shift towards market-based solutions in the provision of energy services. This has increased the cost of household energy, particularly for lighting. Kerosene is the preferred option in non-electrified households. Petroleum supply is in both public and private ownership, although generally governments still control kerosene prices. Women are able to buy this lighting fuel in small quantities, to match their cash flows, at reasonable prices. Although many households would like to have access to electricity for lighting and LPG for cooking, the method of payment does not always match the cash flow in low-income households.

[top] [end]Gender, energy and climate change

The lack of information and knowledge regarding gender issues in energy and climate change, as well as the need for more information in most of the fields of action is a fact that needs attention. Climate change is likely to affect food production and floods will threaten houses. Both endanger human security and it is the poor and vulnerable groups who will be most at risk since they have the least access to resources to respond to the threats posed by unstable and shifting weather patterns. Women feature strongly in the groups most at risk since they form the majority amongst low-income earners and they play a key role in food security for the family. It is estimated that 59% of the world's food production (80% in some parts of Africa) is by women (Denton 2000). At present, we are in a period of uncertainty since no one knows with any degree of certainty what the effects of climate change are likely to be on food production. However, if the negative scenarios of increased crop failures become real, then the fear is that women's low incomes and role as food provider could become negatively re-enforcing and increase their vulnerability and stress. Women will not be able to afford to buy nutritious food to replace failed crops. In addition, their own calorie intake will be reduced even further (in many cultures women eat last and eat least) reducing their own energy levels on which so much of household survival tasks depend on. In addition, the sorts of crops that will grow under new weather patterns may require longer cooking; hence, food preparation could be more energy expensive. Agricultural residues output could also fall, affecting both animal feed and household energy supplies (including reduced dung production through lower food intake levels for animals. Any reduction in biomass availability can threaten a household's capacity to boil water which in turn increases the transmission of water borne diseases.

[top] [end]5. Resources and web links

[top] [end]6. Organisations / People

[top] [end]8. Documents for further reading

[top] [end]Sources

This article is based upon two articles written by Dr. Joy Clancy for Sparknet, and adapted by HEDON members

Categories: Leading Issues| Gender

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