Mainstreaming gender in energy design practice: Insights from companies operating in sub-Saharan Africa's energy sector

Abstract

There are several readily available and freely accessible toolkits, handbooks, and manuals aiming to support gender mainstreaming in energy projects. However, with most of them targeting rural areas, their applicability by energy companies operating in urban environments is limited. This paper aims to shed light on the how energy companies operating in informal urban settlements in sub-Saharan Africa integrate gender mainstreaming into their practices, with a focus on their design processes, methods and tools. To address this knowledge gap we adopted an explorative, inductive and qualitative research based on reviewing existing gender-energy nexus supports (toolkits, handbooks, and manuals) and conducting semi-structured interviews with 15 private companies offering energy solutions in informal urban settlements in Sub-Saharan Africa. These companies focus on solutions to domestic energy needs (cooking, lighting, water heating, refrigeration, space cooling, space heating, washing, tool powering) and productive use of energy to support small entrepreneurship. The interview questions were defined to collect: 1) gender considerations in the design of energy solutions for informal urban settlements; 2) methods and expertise involved in the design of energy solutions; and 3) specifics of designing for informal urban areas. The results show that: 1] The interviewed companies are not familiar with and do not use any of the readily available supports on gender mainstreaming in energy projects; 2] They do not follow any step-by-step gender inclusion strategy but try to be impartial about considering gender through familiar and established methods used along the design process; 3] They seek for better understanding of how to integrate gender in their business practices and require specific support to do so.