Renewing Urgency for Gender-Focused Energy Access Investments
By Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll) and Co-Chair of UN-Energy
This article forms part of a series from contributors to GenderSmart’s Gender and Climate Investment Working Group. For many, Gender and Climate Investing is a new field, but there is already a lot of great work and experience to share. By showcasing powerful examples from across the investment ecosystem, Working Group contributors are using their voices in the lead up to February’s GenderSmart Investing Summit and beyond to highlight the important role a combined gender and climate lens can play in delivering a just, green economy transition. Through this series, we hope to inspire the adoption of this approach across the financial system.
We face compounding challenges in accelerating movement on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in this ‘Decade of Action’ as called for by the United Nations. Affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all, established in SDG7, is essential to combatting the current pandemic and delivering all other SDGs by 2030, including curtailing climate change and achieving gender equality.
Well before COVID-19 spread across the globe, there was wide recognition that a lack of energy access disproportionately affects women and girls: from the inadequate light that prevents a child from doing her homework to power cuts that impede the growth of women-owned businesses and health impacts from a lifetime of cooking with inefficient fuels.
These inequalities are further exacerbated by climate change as gendered tasks such as collecting water become more difficult, and extreme weather events aggravate vulnerabilities such as gender-based violence. Disparities in employment and unpaid labor are also on the rise, now at a faster rate due to COVID-19. Telling examples of these compounding vulnerabilities can be found globally, where an astounding 72 percent of domestic workers, the majority of which are women, have lost their jobs due to COVID-19 or in the United States, where 100 percent of December 2020 job losses were attributed to women.
Governments and the international development community now have a once in a generation opportunity to prioritize clean energy investments in recovery plans and stimulus packages. These investments would underpin economic growth without jeopardizing the climate, and they would bring about new economic and social opportunities for women.
In this current context, female-led energy access initiatives and those focused on providing women with sustainable energy are in urgent need of support. Yet the latest data shows energy initiatives with a gender-specific focus are receiving woeful financial support. This was a major finding in Sustainable Energy for All’s (SEforALL) Energizing Finance: Understanding the Landscape 2020.
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The report, which tracks energy finance commitments in 20 high-impact countries with the largest energy access deficits, includes a special chapter dedicated to finance for gender-focused energy access. Our research shows that while finance for energy projects with a specific gender equality objective increased over the last decade, it remains a small share (9 percent) of over 15 billion in official development assistance (ODA) to the energy sector in 2018. Finance for energy projects with a gender equality objective is also highly concentrated amongst a few donors — 93 percent of total finance reported is from only 10 government agencies.
A major reason finance is not being committed to these initiatives is that donors do not have a clear roadmap for planning and reporting the concrete outcomes of investments in gender equity in energy access. As a global pandemic exacerbates gender inequalities, we must address this roadblock to finance for promising initiatives, quickly and at scale, to improve women’s livelihoods.
Energizing Finance: Understanding the Landscape 2020 proposes a novel three-step methodology that project implementers can adopt to enhance the transparency and appeal of financing energy access projects with a gender equity objective:
On top of this improved tracking methodology for gender equity impacts, there needs to be immediate action from a wider mix of organizations to support gender-focused energy access initiatives based on improved recognition of the far-reaching social and economic impacts of energy access. With the amount of gender-focused investments at such low levels within recorded energy sector development finance, the need to improve is great. A starting point would be for the energy sector-focused ODA to have an equal or greater focus on gender as all other sectors. In 2018, 42% of ODA across sectors was dedicated to gender equality as either a significant or principal objective. This ambition must be matched and increased as investments flow to the sustainable energy transition.
Investing in women-led businesses and organizations that apply a transformative gender lens to their work will have resounding impacts for a just, sustainable energy transition, our climate change solutions, and our ability to recover better from the COVID-19 pandemic.
We can still achieve our goals if we act with the urgency and ambition that this moment calls for. Now more than ever, we need swift and gender-focused finance to reinforce the critical role of energy access in growing economies, enabling livelihoods for women and men equally, and ensuring a just and sustainable transition of our energy systems.
GenderSmart is committed to highlighting great work that is underway to address the climate emergency with a climate and gender lens. If you haven't already, please let us know what you are up to, and we'll be sure to amplify it. Image credit: SEforAll