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

Popular posts from this blog

Disturbing vignettes (a series) - Sept 26: the brutalising effect of war

Some thoughts on the White Saviour Complex of development consultancies

Year 2014: Buddhist era 2557-2558