Gender, Energy and Development

Energy is often thought of as poles, wires, and transmission lines. However, the only reason for this infrastructure exists is that they provide some sort of service to industry, businesses, and households. The same can be said for gas pipelines, large storage tanks for liquid petroleum gas and other types of energy. People, businesses, and other organizations pay for all of these energy services. That is the only reason that they exist at all.

Fuelwood Collection S. India by  D Barnes

So it is somewhat surprising that gender is often overlooked in the provision of energy services in developing counries. Electricity certainly has an impact on women and girls in developing countries through making the home environment more livable, encouraging girls to attend school, and reducing household drudgery. Rural electrification and electricity access now is recognized as a significant priority in many developing countries, especially those in S. Asia and Africa. But while attention often is paid to the wires and poles, is there enough attention to appliances operated by women including fans, small refrigerators, spice grinders, rice cookers, toasters, and others?

Also somewhat overlooked in the energy development business is that women and girls also can be the main suppliers of household energy in developing countries. There have been numerous studies documenting that woman and to a lesser extent men spend much time collecting most of their cooking fuels from the local environment. This fuel collection is time consuming and diverts time from both income earning or other household activities. In addition, the literature on the adverse health impacts of indoor air pollution resulting from burning biomass fuels on open fires or low quality stoves has become very well documented during the last 20 years. Finally, cooking fuels in developing countries contribute about 1 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere every year, and yet there is barely a mention of household fuels in the climate change debate.

See more below the break.

Rural Electrification and Low Connection Costs

Village in Maharashtra India: by D. Barnes

Many developing countries still have very high connection costs.  This helps with the utility to recover costs of providing serive, but it also means that many people even in areas with electricity available may not be able to afford a connection to the electricity grid.  Reasearch from around the world indicates that those countries wth low new service connection costs or which provide financal assistance for such costs have much higher rates of connection by poorer households. 

Given that the benefits of rural electrification are quite high, should countries or utilities with high connection costs consider changing their policies?

For more information see short note on
Transformative Power.

There will be more to come on this topic in the future as we are just collecting collecting cost information from a large number of countries.  See new post added in 2013.