During Phase 4, ENERGIA strengthened our advocacy capacity by working on two fronts:

1. By improving the advocacy skills and knowledge of network members and partners to influence social change.
2. By supporting national policy makers, stakeholders and other organisations to identify gender gaps in their projects and programs, and enforce gender-sensitive policies.

ENERGIA strengthened research efforts with the aim to deepen the understanding and knowledge of the interlinkages between gender and energy, as well as to show how these objectives serve other goals, such as empowerment, poverty reduction, security, education and environmental protection.

ENERGIA has always believed in the importance of creating a strong network that shares the same mission and values, in order to increase the effectiveness and impact of our actions and to voice our messages more broadly. At this time, ENERGIA Network was comprised of national networks in 22 countries (9 in Asia and 13 in Africa).

We continued to use awareness-raising as one of our main strategies for influencing stakeholders, practitioners, policy- and decision-makers and experts working in the energy sector. ENERGIA developed knowledge products, such as handbooks and manuals, and published publications on gender and energy, including our flagship publication, ENERGIA News.

ENERGIA’s work highlighted the urgency to link gender and energy access with other cross-sectoral objectives, such as poverty, education and environmental sustainability. Collaboration with partners and research institutions enhanced opportunities to raise awareness of the ways that energy and gender-sensitive policies can serve the achievement of multiple Millennium Development Goals. This awareness resulted in ENERGIA’s advocacy efforts to include energy in the next Sustainable Development Goals (The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development).

Women continued to be underrepresented in energy discussions and excluded from decision-making processes. One of the essential requirements for empowering women was to mainstream gender into the policies and programs of institutions engaged in the energy sector and to give a seat to organisations representing women and women themselves.

Gender audits provided in-depth analysis of energy planning, budgets and the institutional capacity of ministries to implement gender-mainstreaming strategies. These audits were carried out under the ‘Turning Information into Empowerment: Strengthening Gender and Energy Networking in Africa (TIE-ENERGIA)’ project implemented within the framework of ENERGIA Africa, with co-funding from the European Union, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and Directorate-General for International Cooperation (DGIS).