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).

“The Millennium Development Goals, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2000, established a set of time bound and measurable goals for combating poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women. Even though energy is not mentioned as a separate goal, it is being recognized that addressing the energy and poverty linkage is going to be a critical factor in the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Energy services interface with people’s lives in many different ways, starting from the basic survival activities to increasing productivity, and enriching the quality of life. Energy, a ‘derived’ demand, provides a wide range of ‘services’ that can have a range of positive impact including enhancing the livelihoods of people, reducing poverty, enhancing the quality of health, water and sanitation services. This paper examines the hypothesis that improved energy services contribute towards the attainment of MDG1, which is targeted at reducing extreme poverty and hunger, specifically for women. The paper considers the various ways in which gender-and-energy interventions can contribute towards the achievement of MDG1 and examines available secondary literature to explore whether there is sufficient empirical evidence to support the hypothesis” – Soma Dutta, “Energy as a key variable in eradicating extreme poverty and hunger: A gender and energy perspective on empirical evidence on MDG #1”