Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI)

EnDev’s overall strategy espouses on the importance of gender equality and social inclusion for equitable access to modern energy services. EnDev Nepal will ensure safeguarding against any form of exploitation and abuse to the project participants, community members, staff, volunteers, or anyone else impacted by our work. The project will take targeted approach for the most marginalized for their meaningful participation in the project and ensure that no one is left behind. EnDev will develop monitoring, evaluation and learning framework including appropriate sex disaggregated and gender sensitive indicators to strengthen accountability in terms of the progress and identify gaps that need to be addressed during implementation.

Objectives

Electricity

At the national level different policies and strategies are formulated in promoting the participation of women/marginalized community in meeting the energy needs and enhancing their decision-making skills. However, the findings from the gender analysis reflect that at the grassroot level women/marginalized community are just the beneficiaries for utilizing the energy services. To enhance the involvement of women/marginalized community in energy management, it still requires awareness/sensitization, capacity enhancement/skills training- electrical safety training as well as operational and technical trainings, followed by adequate legal provisions within the system. Productive Use Enterprise activities are low in low economic strata, marginalized/disadvantaged, disaster affected/displaced population in electrified area. The key approach of the project is to enhance energy-related income-generating activities for women/marginalized community’s entrepreneurship for their economic empowerment and capitalize their employment opportunities. Also, the project will apply gender-inclusive participation strategy in all stages of project design, development, and implementation.

In the initial stage of project design, national level sensitization workshop/consultation meeting with the policy makers will be organized to discuss on the existing GESI specific policies/action plans on clean and renewable energy along with its delivery mechanism, processes and measures to ensure its implementation. Followed by a sensitization workshop at the local level with the supplier/consumers of CREES/Micro & Mini Hydro projects to orient on the relevant GESI polices as well to assess the energy situation at the grassroot level. Appropriate gender analytic tools will be used to assess the problems and potential risks of unintended harm and to identify activities for implementation. The project activities will focus on income generating activities on the productive use of electricity with motivational scheme for women (subsidized tariff, seed money, technology support, zero interest etc.) for enterprise development linking them with market, financial services (MFI, cooperatives or Bank) as well as small and cottage industries.

Clean Cooking

Women are foreseen to play a key role in promotion and sustainable adoption of ICS and e-cooking because women spend most of their time cooking for males due to the prevalent gender roles. With EnDev Nepal’s vision to progressively venture into higher tier improved cooking solutions, women will benefit directly from reduced cooking time and drudgery which can enable them to take up capacity building activities or engage in other income generating activities. There are benefits achieved by the promotion of clean cooking solutions as women’s cooking time, exposure to indoor air pollution/ health hazards are reduced with clean cooking solutions.

EnDev’s experiences have shown that working with both men and women not only improve household dynamics but also support women to engage in earning activities, access resources such as credit and put their voice in community, market, and policy forums. In every aspect of the project cycle - from planning to evaluation - a thorough integration of gender transformative approach (e.g. women empowerment, men’s engagement in changing behaviors and social-cultural constraints, etc.) will be ensured. It has been explicit that physical drudgery is taking a huge toll on women’s health and affecting their ability to engage in earning, learning and social activities. EnDev will deliberately focus on reducing the drudgery and improving the health of women through building awareness, knowledge, and capability to understand the benefits of ICS and e-cooking, thereby helping in adoption. Beyond households, EnDev will engage women in stove supply chain and develop them as change agents for stove promotion and sustained use. EnDev will link women with credit access, value chain services and market linkages.