Empowering women through entrepreneurship and reaching the last mile


I spent three days last week  in Nairobi, Kenya at the Advisory Group Meeting of ENERGIA, the international network on gender and sustainable energy.  ENERGIA, led by its beautiful and energetic head, Sheila Operaocha, has transformed itself from a network of organisations (mainly NGOs working with women and renewable energy technologies) interested in mainstreaming gender into energy projects and programmes and empowering  poor women, to a 15 million euro programme intent on providing energy services to poor women, through fostering women’s entrepreneurship in the energy services sector.   The goal of  empowering women  and going to the last mile to address energy poverty is still part of the network’s vision, but this fifth phase programme is a  huge step up  (up?) from what it was doing before, and the organisations delivering the programme ( Solar Sisters, Kopernic etc)  are much better described as social entrepreneurs rather than NGOs.  Interestingly Practical Action (who I and some of my closest friends worked for when it was ITDG) is also one of the partners, and it was with some sense of déjà vu that I participated in the field trip that they organised. 

"Lydia"
We visited three women briquette manufacturers, who form part of Practical Action’s Women Energy Entrepreneurs (WEE) project that is supported by ENERGIA.   The first woman we visited (whose name I have forgotten, but let’s call her Lydia) lives in one of Nairobi’s underserved settlements, and makes briquettes that she makes with her own hands for her own use and for selling to neighbours.  
Lydia's briquettes
briquette ingredients











The second, Rose, is part of a self-help group and we met two articulate young men who were also members of the group.  The group makes briquettes using a manual press and uses the premises of a children’s home to store their raw materials and manufacture their product.  They hope to save money to buy an electrically operated  machine so they can make better quality briquettes for sale.  
Rose

Mixing the ingredients

The manual press - stages of use

The manual press - stages of use
The manual press - stages of use

The manual press - stages of use

Rose's briquettes

Josephine
The third woman, Josephine began life as a journalist, but investigating renewable energy technologies as part of her journalistic career, she decided to branch out to making briquettes herself and has invested in an electrically operated machine. She manufactures in her back yard, and employees two people.   

Josephine's machine
Woman worker 
Joesphine's briquettes
Clearly, the three women are on a rising scale of ‘successful entrepreneurship’.  Josephine, at the higher end of the scale, produces briquettes  that are the most sophisticated, and expensive.  Her customers are institutions (schools, hospitals) and business people (e.g. poultry farmers who buy them for providing heat to the hatcheries and for the chicks). Josephine is already beginning to think of new innovative products, such as briquettes infused with aromatic essences that can be used in the heating of homes, or with citronella for repelling mosquitos.   Rose and her self-help group also sell  to institutions and if they do graduate to using an electronic machine, it is likely that their production will increase, the quality of their briquettes will improve and they will be able to command a higher price and sell to a more sophisticated institutional market.  At the bottom of the scale is Lydia, the only one of the three that is supplying to poor women.

There is a tension in this project between strengthening women as briquetting entrepreneurs, and providing quality energy products to poor women.  As far as I could see, poor women in urban areas cannot afford Josephine’s briquettes and will have to limit themselves to buying from entrepreneurs like  Lydia.  If Lydia becomes more economically empowered and improves her business, she will most likely move away from selling to the women in her neighbourhood, and look for institutional buyers.   So unless Practical Action develops an alternate strategy of production and marketing briquettes this type of individual entrepreneurship while empowering individual women, is unlikely challenge  existing inequalities of energy service provision.

Of course this maybe a problem confined to ‘briquettes’.   The distribution of solar lanterns, using women as distributors,  may create less tension between empowerment of the woman entrepreneur (in this case the distributor) and the energy user.  However, the dual goals of entrepreneurship and reaching the poor need to be closely monitored, because there is enough  experience to show that the market on its own is not always the best way of achieving equity. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Will change come through red gates?

Image
My former schoolmates are pre-ordering their copy of a coffee-table book entitled Through the Red Gates, a celebratory volume of 125 years of Ladies College, the school we attended on Flower Road, which celebrates this landmark event in 2025.   Some former schoolmates (and others) are also agonising at the possibility that the gates to the country’s governance might turn red with a Malimawa/NPP/Anura Kumara Dissanayake victory in the Presidential election next week.   The fear of a NPP/AKD victory takes several forms: it evokes the spectre of violence of the JVP (the main party in the NPP) forgetting that JVP are not the only perpetrators of terror. The political space, since 1 971 at least, has been seeped in violence - the JVP of the 1980s was particularly vicious, but s uccessive state regimes have unleashed state violence and given head to extra-judicial violent e lements that were equally virulent.   As Lionel Bopage has said in a recent interview , the violenc...
Read more

Some thoughts on the White Saviour Complex of development consultancies

Image
photo taken from  https://e11e99.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/identity-in-a-post-colonial-world/ I am sharing some thoughts that I picked  randomly from a relatively progressive Christian facebook page (Sojourners)that I follow, mainly to help me counter the rather misinformed opinions of my true believer Christian friends (brown not white).  The article is called , 6 HARMFUL CONSEQUENCES OF THE WHITE SAVIOR COMPLEX, BY RYAN KUJA  and is so relevant to the northern development consultancy space that many of my (white) friends and colleagues occupy (and that I too sometimes venture into) that I thought to use it to write a blog post that I can share with that community.   R yan Kuja confesses that he was "never a missionary in the standard sense of the word, never proselytized or attempted to save souls"  but admits that "the engine driving [him] was the white saviour complex..... The other Westerners [he] worked with believed [they] had it al...
Read more

Year 2014: Buddhist era 2557-2558

Image
There was an interesting debate among colleagues that was triggered by the simple fact that I shared the official government calendar for 2014.  The Calendar has, as it has had in the previous year, and possibly many years prior to that,  the sub title -  Buddhist Era 2557-2558. This triggered a discussion on whether it was appropriate to have that on the calendar or not.  The argument against seemed to be based on it being seen as an imposition by the State of Buddhism, into areas that are perceived as secular and non-religious. [Though of course, as was pointed out,  the Gregorian Calendar is not really secular at all, based on the fact that it counts the years from the birth of Christ!] What was interesting was that we were having this debate at all.  Obviously, the current context has made us all ultra sensitive to certain issues, and the whole question of a state religion led some of us to be uncomfortable, others to be resentful (not overtly ma...
Read more