International Workshop on Gender and Energy - Summary

Introduction

Energy has always been conceived as too technical by women and this is not related only to Nepalese women but is a rather universal issue. When we look at the presence of women in the Nepalese energy sector, we have to start from the very beginning and look at the basic awareness of energy topics in women. Still today, there are cases in newly electrified places, where women died from electric shock as they lacked basic awareness‚

This article summarises some of the main themes that were discussed during the Ibg agenda-gender energy.pdf|nternational Workshop on Gender and Energy - Electricity Access and the Changing Social Position of Women in Nepal on March 28, 2018 in Nepal.

Women in the Nepalese energy sector 

As compared to men, access to energy has different implications for women. The way women used energy is different than that of a man. Hence, there is a need to include gender perspectives while designing energy policies and we can now see more examples of energy policies that do so. However, when we talk about gender perspective in energy access, it has been mostly limited to access to cooking energy and does not include other aspects like access to electricity. Even, when we look at access to electricity, there is a general belief that if you invest in electrification projects, the benefits will trickle down equally to both men and women. However, there is a lack of gender divided data to support this hypothesis.

Basic Awareness about Safety

In newly electrified areas, the women lack the basic awareness about electricity and there are even cases of women dying from electricity shock. All these can be prevented if awareness campaings are conducted in newly electrified areas.

Policy

There has been recent changes in the policy sector of Nepal. The Energy Strategy 2012 has two agenda for addressing women.

Gender violence

For more on gender violence, refer to this article

Access to Electricity and Social Issues

With access to electricity, the people have access to cell phone and other electrical appliances and what does this mean for the society? There are several indirect impacts of electrification on the soicety and soical issues such as intercaste marriages, early age marriage, increasing rate of divorce has to be looked at.

Previously arranged marriage was the prevalent form of marriage in rural Nepal. With the access to electricity, the people have access to cellphones and othe electricial appliances. Withiin this timeframe, the increasing cases of intercaste marriage, early age marriage and divorce rate is also obsereved. 

Conclusion

This paper summarized the points discussed in the conference. For a detailed information, please be a look out for the Exploring Factors that Enhance and Restrict Women’s Empowerment through Electrification (EFEWEE) program. This program is implemented jointly by TERI and ENERGIA.