Why Gender and Energy?

Gender matters because…

 Women and men have different roles in the energy system: women bear the main burden of providing and using biomass energy for cooking. A situation made worse by fuel scarcity; and negative, health and safety impacts.

 Women bear the invisible burden of the human energy crisis - women's time and effort in water pumping, agricultural processing, and transport. They need modern and more efficient energy sources to improve their work and quality of life both within and outside the home.

 Women have less access than men to the credit, extension, land and training, necessary for improving energy access to support their livelihoods and income generation from micro-enterprises.

 Women and men have different kinds of knowledge and experience of energy, either through their traditional roles, their new non-traditional roles (especially in female-headed households), or increasingly as professionals in the energy sector.

 Since women experience poverty differently to men, they may need different energy policies to help them escape energy poverty: new energy technologies can even have unintended negative consequences for women, as has happened in the past with other new technologies e.g. in the Green Revolution.