The Principles of ENERGIA

The mission of ENERGIA is to empower women and to engender energy for sustainable development.

To empower women means to:

• Help provide women, and particularly poor women, with more options and better choices of energy for household use;
• Help provide women, and particularly poor women, with energy for income earning activities, existing and new;
• Reduce health risks to women from the collection and use of traditional energy sources;
• Facilitate women's access to credit and banking facilities and the means of producing energy for community level energy supply;
• Increase the amount of information available to women on energy technologies and resources, to help them make informed choices;
• Stimulate the provision of training of women in technologies, and in the marketing and business skills necessary for them to become effective energy entrepreneurs;
• Help women contribute to and participate more effectively in energy policy and planning processes by a variety of means; and
• Raise awareness of the importance of energy in women's lives, among all development practitioners.

To engender energy means to:

• Increase the awareness of all professionals in the energy sector of the benefits from and the need to mainstream the gender approach, so that it becomes integral and inherent in every energy planning decision and not a separate activity;
• Consciously seek advice both from women and from men in planning energy, and to identify, explain and respond to the differences in their advice; and
• Increase the participation of women and improve their status relative to men in the energy sector at all levels, and in particular to support and encourage the professional development of women in this area.

Sustainable Development

• development that promotes the health of both the environment and the people;
• development that furthers social and economic equity (between men and women, between societal groups, between North and South);
• development that is self-sustaining and ongoing financially and otherwise; and
• development that works towards poverty alleviation and ensures sustainable livelihoods of women as well as of men.

Gender Approach

• but a full recognition of men's and women's different needs for energy, based on consultation which consciously seeks advice from both men and women;
• also recognition of the potential of men and of women to participate in energy supply;
• and recognition of the need to tackle institutional barriers which limit women's participation in energy planning and production and in their access to energy for a variety of end-uses.