Empowering Women Through Energy Services

Nowadays, 1.6 billion people or 22.5 percent of all humankind still have no access to the basic energy service, and 2.8 billion still rely on burning traditional biomass fuels such as wood, dung and crop residues.

About 70 percent of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty are women.

Women in rural areas often spend long hours collecting fuel wood, leaving no time for productive and income-generating activities. Their health suffered from cooking over smoky fires. Their opportunities for education and income generation are limited by lack of modern energy services.

To alleviate such a condition, decision-makers in many developing countries often aspire to a one-size-fits-all style of national energy policy of grandeur based on high technologies and bought with national treasures. Perhaps they could learn from China's success story in reducing rural poverty over the last three decades by adopting a smart and pragmatic solution leveraging on the rich resources that were otherwise going to waste in rural communities, for producing biogas.

In China, by 2007, a total of 26.5 million biogas digesters were in operation providing biogas energy to 40 million households and benefiting 155 million people or about one-third of the rural population, 70 percent of which were women.

Through the use of biogas, people's living conditions and the environment have improved, forests are protected and the labor force has more time for agricultural production. The lives of women had been totally transformed by the biogas program before the electric grid could provide them with modern energy.

In today's oil and gas era, in developed economies, women are severely under-represented in energy decision-making processes at international, national and local levels as well as in the business sector. A most recent survey revealed that in the top 100 UK-headquartered energy firms, only 5 percent of executive board seats are currently held by women while 61 percent of leadership boards have no women present at all. The fossil fuels industries are still strongly dominated by men.

But on the other hand, gender diversity has also been increasingly recognized for the potential of women in enhancing leadership, organizational effectiveness, inspiration, people development, and efficient communication. Recent research has shown that companies with gender diversity scored higher marks in innovations and creativity at the executive level, and performed much better in communication with staff and clients, and enhancing stakeholders' trust at the working level. Indeed, there has been a loud voice calling for a reform in the oil and gas industry to ensure females hold 40 percent of energy company middle management positions and 30 percent of executive board seats by 2030.

In order to promote equal opportunities within the energy sector, gender mainstreaming should be incorporated into overall planning and decision-making procedures at the policy and executive level, the organization and program level, and at the implementation and project level.

Women have always been in a disadvantage position in this fossil fuel era and particularly in the oil and gas industries, having to pay extra effort to catch up with men. However, new technologies and future innovation can bring opportunities to women instead of having women to catch up with opportunities. In this new era of renewable energy, a leapfrog paradigm may enable women and men to start with equal footing and equal opportunity.

The author is deputy chairperson and secretary general of China Energy Fund Committee.

(Source: China Daily)