A brief conceptual approach
Dr. Rene Orellana Halkyer
La Paz, Boivia, Enero de 2018
Access to energy and poverty eradication
Electricity changes the lives of families in various dimensions, more so in the case of rural families that depend on different sources of energy for their daily chores. In this regard, access to electricity creates meaningful changes in the life of women and children and thus affects the following dimensions: education, home-based food production, health and water services.
Women, for example, benefit directly when both technical support and access to improved production techniques better home-based enterprises. Examples of improved agricultural, food processing, trade, and sewing among others have greatly improved many lives throughout the globe. To this end, businesses and other private entrepreneurship lead by women from their households can be further strengthened through the implementation of renewable energy and thus, access to electricity must be a prominent factor in multilateral and state side policy.
No less significant, access to electricity has true impacts on rural women’s time use, greatly diversifying their private productive activities and their home chores. Gaining quality time, due to electric accessibility, allows women to develop other income-generating opportunities. On the other hand, access to electricity through solar energy sources allows women to improve their in-home environment, air quality and improved livestock conditions.
We must not disregard that the impacts of reliable electricity on women and girls’ health is also remarkable. Women and girls health in particular are susceptible to poor indoor air quality, due to the use of fuelwood, kerosene and other carbon-based fuels, when cooking for example. Therefore, reductions in indoor air pollution benefit the health situation of women and all the family. The World Health Organization estimates that respiratory diseases from indoor air pollution are one of the top four leading causes of death in developing countries (WHO 2004).
Access to light and electricity enhance educational processes for it allows the accessibility to technological devices such as computers, television, mobile phones and of course access to internet. On the other hand, time dedicated to study can be increased, improving school student performance. Electricity and the use of internet through technological devices facilitate connecting students with global peers and broaden the educational tools available. It is also important to pay attention to the fact that access to energy could also increase years of completed schooling in children.
The improvement of the ability of children to study, the performance of students, the increase in average study time, as well as the enhancement of technologies of communication and information broaden the educational tools and when combined with solar energy systems, they not only provide a much-needed source of energy but also provide a clean means of producing it locally.
Improvement of Water and Sanitation Services through Energy Access
The use of energy for water and sanitation services in household is also noteworthy. When energy is attainable and manageable at the household level there is a possibility to improve water and sanitation services as well as irrigation using electricity to pump and distribute water from subsurface water and water tanks and deposits. The use of pumps facilitates women, girls and children to reduce the time dedicated to bring water to households when sources are far. On the other side it facilitates irrigation of the small-scale farms near the houses.
Addressing water and sanitation problems through small-scale renewable energy systems improves water for drinking and irrigation and contributes to increase coverage which is a target set in the Bolivian National Determined Contribution of Climate Change.
There is an evident vacuum of information and researches regarding the impacts of access to electricity in women and girls lives in Bolivia. Not to mention the emptiness of research of the linkage of renewable energy opportunities and advantages and the empowerment of women with an approach to climate change and adaptive capacity building. Thus, this is fertile terrain to explore and assess in order to contribute to develop policies at the national level.
In summary, energy access facilitates the use of different tools of education, information, and influences significantly in the creation of conditions that allow innovation, development of entrepreneurships initiatives, and generation of opportunities for household business, improved health conditions, and the development of household water supply systems. All of them are proficiencies, competences as well as social and economic assets that support adaptive capabilities to climate change. Thus, there is a linkage between renewable energy access/management, gender empowerment and joint mitigation/adaptation actions.
Hence, developing capacities regarding education, entrepreneurship, health and production empower women and girls to face the challenges of a difficult context of poverty aggravated by climate change.
Conceptual Framework. Building a Renewable Energy Gender Approach
There is a strong relationship between climate change, energy, poverty and gender. As stated above, energy is a central factor for facilitating educational opportunities, improving livelihoods, health of families and fostering production processes.
The lack of access to energy reinforces gender barriers. Understanding “gender barriers” as constraints that limit the opportunities of women and girls to improve their educational, productive, and living conditions as well as the limitation of exerting leadership based on limited access to services which help in promoting general wellbeing.
To address women and poverty linked to the shortage of services, mainly electricity, there can be implemented projects that allow improving modern energy services that can facilitate women empowerment.
Incorporating gender perspectives into energy projects, policy and planning is then strategic in order to generate multidimensional incidence in poverty eradication processes.
The lack of availability of electricity services in rural areas affect significantly the role and functions of women and girls in the household livelihood, it aggravates the constraints to develop entrepreneurships, private business, time to study, and affect the health of women due to the fact that instead of using electricity women use kerosene or wood carbon fuel. The poverty of women is aggravated by this context of scarcity of services. Which can be named as ‘energy poverty’. This concept has arisen from the definition of poverty itself and is part of a World Bank study called: Listening to the Voices of the Poor. The WB links this concept to the concept of multi-dimensional poverty. (World Bank, 2016).
Poverty is understood as a lack of diverse resources that imply an integral physical deprivation. This notion could then be understood as part of Multidimensional Poverty Index as advocated in the 2010 Human Development Report (UNDP, 2016. Page 19), which links poverty to different circumstances of shortages overlapped that affect households in rural areas, these deprivations aggravate health, education and living standards particularly of women and girls who have a special role in families.
This approach goes beyond a focus of income as a central indicator of poverty, associating women energy poverty to poor health, low education, low levels of knowledge and understanding of information, constraints and limited skills for using ICTs, limitations in the access to water and sanitation services, little availability of time for education and entrepreneurship. This will have incidence in inadequate livelihoods, bad housing conditions and social gender exclusion.
We understand the concept of “Energy access” as a process of “Making modern energy available and affordable. Over the years, energy access and energy poverty have been defined in many ways. These definitions converge in highlighting the role that modern energy services can play in reducing poverty... “(UNDP, 2013. Pages 5, 6)
We understand the concept of “Energy Poverty” in the context of multidimensional approach of poverty, where it implies “the lack of access to resources, denial of opportunities and choice in access to energy that is adequate, safe and reliable for economic and human development. Access is then a function of availability and affordability, where energy is considered available if the household is within the economic connection and supply range of the energy network or supplier and affordable when the household is able to pay the up-front connection cost (or first cost) and energy usage costs.” (UNDP, 2013. Pages 5, 6)
Regarding Energy Access and the availability of electricity in such conditions that allow a minimum in order to facilitate different services and guarantee the development of capacities that will allow to strengthen the adaptation potentials to climate change, we will use the concept of “Minimum energy access thresholds” which definition is built upon the following criteria: “…the International Energy Agency proposed 100 kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity and 100 kilograms of oil equivalent of modern fuels per person per year as a minimum threshold for defining energy access. The high-level Advisory Group on Energy and Climate Change states that access must be reliable, affordable (the cost to end-users compatible with their income levels and no higher than the cost of traditional fuels), sustainable and, where feasible, from low greenhouse gas-emitting energy sources. At the same time, it contends that expanding energy access must go beyond meeting the basic needs: it should aim to create improved conditions for economic take-off, contribute to attaining the MDGs and enable the poorest to escape poverty.” (UNDP, 2013. Pages 5 y 6)
Regarding the issue of gender equity, it is important to state that nevertheless the fact that poverty is a burden for all poor populations, women and girls suffer particular impacts of deprivation, and in this case, the lack of electricity at their households. (Danielsen 2012, cited by UNDP, 2013. Page 6). The “Gender Energy Poverty” implies then, not only the scarcity or deprivation of certain services which are fundamental for human development but also the incidence of this deprivation in terms of educational, economic and health constraints.
Energy poverty per se, does not have the same implications on man and women, but reveals differences of incidence in the case of women and girls that is called “gender disparities” (Danielsen 2012. Ibid). The effects of energy poverty on women and girls are harsh, far reaching and include the physical and time effects of drudgery in travelling long distances for fuel-wood, health effects of indoor pollution and decreased school attendance (Danielsen 2012). (Idem)
On the other side the access of women and girls to a “minimum energy threshold” could allow them to transform significantly their lives developing capacities for facing the negative impacts of climate change which are linked to the deterioration of their food productive resources as well as to their vulnerable ecosystems.
The main characteristic of this social transformation is linked to human development which scope has been described in the above paragraph. Of course, the incidence also involves in general terms poverty eradication and building livelihood security. Energy security entails then building adaptive capacities and building “climate and social resilient household systems”.
Thus, building human development and livelihood security by providing electricity generated by renewable energy sources reduces vulnerability introducing practices and technologies that empowers household, at the same time generates incremental and transformational adjustments. (IPCC, 2014. Page 86)
Whenever these changes are promoted by national policies, transformational processes involve:
1. Changes in laws and regulations.
2. Changes at the institutional level including the empowerment of local governments and regulators.
3. Changes at the behavioral dimension, including changes in attitudes and social practices. In general terms behavioral shifts vis a vis education, knowledge works views, social construction of expectations on the basis of the access to ICTs and empowerment of the leadership of women and girls
4. Adjustments and modification at the practical, political and personal attributes. That is national policies, social and technical innovations.
We could insert then in this short effort of theoretical approach and conceptual framework the concept of “transformation”, understood as a change or process of multiple changes in the fundamental attributes of natural and human systems (IPCC, 2014. Page 88), changes that develop capacities and strengthen potentials of household families as well as communities for adapting to climate change, eradicating poverty and contributing to integral development.
“Differences in vulnerability and exposure arise from non-climatic factors and from multidimensional inequalities often produced by uneven development processes...” (IPCC, 2014. Page 40). The gender energy poverty increases exposure and vulnerability of women and girls with their household constituting a non-climatic factor that aggravates climate vulnerability. On the contrary, gender energy empowerment decreases vulnerability and develop adaptive capacities generating conditions for building climate resilient households.
Inequities and gender energy poverty make as we have said more vulnerable women and girls. “These differences shape differential risks from climate change. People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally or otherwise marginalized are especially vulnerable to climate change and also to some adaptation and mitigation responses (medium evidence, high agreement). This heightened vulnerability is rarely due to a single cause. Rather, it is the product of intersecting social processes that result in inequalities in socio-economic status and income, as well as in exposure. Such social processes include, for example, discrimination on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age and (dis)ability”. (IPCC, 2014. Page 50).
Empowerment of women in the context of a situation of deprivation of services (in this case electricity) could be achieved by implementing small-scale energy projects using off-grid renewable energy technologies where women’s leadership can serve to build or improve water supply household systems, contribute to income-generating opportunities and the overall economic empowerment of women including different productive entrepreneurship, improvement of educational opportunities and educational performance specially for girls and children.
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