A coalition initiated by ENERGIA,  Global Women’s Network for the Energy Transition (GWNET) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and supported by the Governments of  Iceland, Ecuador, Nepal, Kenya and Sweden launched a Gender and Energy Compact to catalyze action towards gender equality and women’s empowerment to accelerate a just, inclusive and sustainable energy transition.

With more than 2.6 billion people without access to clean cooking technologies as of 2019, ENERGIA focused its advocacy activities on ensuring that this theme would be considered in the international political agenda. Major efforts are needed to bridge this gap and immediate action is required to scale up universal access to clean cooking technologies and services.

With support from our Empowering Women, Engendering Energy (EWEE) program, ENERGIA partner, Senegal-based Energy for Impact, supported the country’s Ministry of Energy to include gender in its long-term action plan for the energy sector, the Senegalese Rural Electrification Action Plan (LPDSE).

With support of our Empowering Women, Engendering Energy (EWEE) program, ENERGIA partner Practical Action supported activities undertaken by Kenya’s Ministry of Energy to develop, finalize and launch the National Gender Policy for the Ministry of Energy. This policy is the first national Gender Policy in the energy sector ever.

ENERGIA’s participation in the Multi-Stakeholder Technical Advisory Group on Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7-TAG) offered the opportunity to advocate for gender inclusion in the first review of progress towards SDG7.

At the national level, ENERGIA supported partners to engage in the development of the SEforALL Action Agenda and Investment Prospectus, especially in lobbying to integrate gender mainstreaming and women empowerment strategies in SEforALL’s energy access investments and interventions.

ENERGIA successfully influenced key development actors to integrate a gender perspective in documents, frameworks, international reports, projects and promoted gender-inclusive energy planning policies. We also raised awareness of the urgency to support, promote and facilitate women’s entrepreneurship and economic empowerment in the energy sector.

As in the energy sector, the integration of gender and social justice themes into climate-change related policies and programs was slow and limited, as was the participation of civil society organisations in the formal climate change negotiations. Already in 2005, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) undertook an in-depth discussion on how best to ‘engender’ the climate change debate.

The Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-15) provided an important opportunity to disseminate the outputs of ENERGIA and its partners’ efforts to mainstream gender in projects and policies. These dissemination activities strengthened ENERGIA’s position both in Africa and globally, showing how gender-specific impacts could be duplicated through gender-sensitive projects and policies.

The “Turning Information into Empowerment: Strengthening Gender and Energy Networking in Africa” (TIE-ENERGIA) project, launched in January 2005 with co-funding from the Directorate General of International Co-operation of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), was implemented across twelve countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to generate strategies and tools to mainstream gender in energy policies and projects.