The climate debate became a dominant topic and provided a new opportunity to show how development goals were closely interlinked. Because of the burden on lower-income communities, this challenge required an integrated approach that ensured women’s voices were heard in national and international sustainable development conversations.

ENERGIA’s advocacy activities and awareness raising campaigns at the national level resulted in gender mainstreaming. Gender mainstreaming in the energy sector ensured the integration of a gender perspective into the preparation, design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation of policies, projects and programs, so that the energy needs of women and men could be equally addressed.

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.