**7. Gender, energy, poverty and sustainable livelihoods**

In most developing countries, the majority of informal sector enterprises are owned and op‐ erated by women, with women making up the largest proportion of the work force. Despite this, the contribution of women entrepreneurs to national economies is not explicit in na‐ tional statistics, leading to the development of policies that do not deal with the specific bar‐ riers faced by women linked to their gender-defined roles. Their enterprises tend to be concentrated in a relatively narrow range of activities: beer brewing, knitting, dressmaking, crocheting, cane work and retail trading. These activities tend to have disproportionately low rates of return compared to the activities undertaken by men. However, despite the low financial returns, women's enterprises provide important sources of household income, even in male-headed households. Women-headed enterprises are frequently located in the home, and these "cottage industries" tend to be overlooked by agencies because they are in the informal sector, which is diffuse and difficult to reach. When women are forced to close their enterprises, it is often for non -business reasons, and linked to factors associated with working from home. The low rates of return prevent inward investment, hindering innova‐ tion and expansion which are regarded as key factors in enterprise sustainability (Grosh & Somolekae, 1996). There is little research to explain what forces drive these start-ups and shutdowns, and how gender influences these processes. Women's access to resources (such as credit, land and education, which are recognised as key factors in microenterprise devel‐ opment) is significantly less than that of men. Generally, research in small and mediumscale enterprise sustainability indicates that a lack of working capital is one of the two most common causes of enterprise failure (Grosh & Somolekae, 1996). Although there are a num‐ ber of microcredit programmes targeting women, Bangladesh's Grameen Bank being the most well known, research is increasingly questioning whether women are able to fully uti‐ lize the credit, and what degree of control they retain over the loans once disbursed (Baden et al., 1994). Women's access to decision -making within the household and community is also restricted, reducing their ability to influence processes and resource allocation.

The role of energy in the sustainability of women's enterprises is also not well understood. In food processing enterprises it has been estimated that energy costs are 20 - 25% of the to‐ tal inputs, which would suggest that technological interventions could increase the scale and profitability of these businesses.

The types of enterprises that women are traditionally involved in are energy intensive and rely on biomass fuels. Even in rural areas, women may have to buy fuel wood to run enter‐ prises such as beer making (McCall, 2001). An important issue is what sort of mechanisms can assist women in gaining access to improved energy services. Grain mills, which are very popular with women, since they improve product quality as well as reducing women's la‐ bour, are typically only provided by the private sector, and are still absent in many rural lo‐ cations.

There are positive examples of women taking up energy technologies that have contributed to increasing their incomes. For example, women's groups in Ghana use LPG for fish preser‐ vation, giving them a better quality product than when using wood, and enabling them to reach export standards, and considerably improving their income (Mensah, 2001). Another example is the Multi -Functional Platform (Burn & Coche, 2001). The platform consists of a diesel engine mounted on a chassis to which a variety of end-use equipment can be attach‐ ed, such as grain mills, battery chargers, oil presses, welding machines and carpentry tools. In addition, the engine can be used to generate electricity for sale, which opens up the pros‐ pect of women becoming energy entrepreneurs and setting up their own electricity service companies.
