**5. Moving women and their families out of energy poverty**

There is no doubt that energy plays a major role in meeting women's practical and repro‐ ductive needs (such as cooking, food processing and water hauling), but it can also be seen as a component necessary to meet their productive and strategic needs (lighting to enable evening study, street lighting for safety in attending community meetings, power for wom‐ en's enterprise development). It is remarkable that the use of gender analysis in energy plan‐ ning is virtually unknown, whereas it has been successfully used for many years in the health, water and agricultural sectors. This is evidently because the gender component in energy poverty has not been fully recognized. Energy planners have usually equated wom‐ en's interest in energy with cooking, to the exclusion of other needs, particularly of needs related to productive activities and emancipatory goals. In addition, since the main focus of energy planning has been on fossil fuels to the exclusion of biomass fuels, even women's practical needs have hardly been addressed.

If gender aspects of the energy-poverty nexus are to be adequately dealt with, it is clear that two major transformations have to take place. Firstly, women have to be empowered to make choices about energy. Enabling choice is linked to issues of sustainable livelihoods and poverty alleviation, including access to income generating activities. However, there is more at stake than just improvements in women's financial resources. Women should be able to act upon the energy choices open to them, and their scope for this type of action is linked to decision-making within households. Such a shift in decision -making requires women's social and political empowerment.

Secondly, it also requires changes on the energy supply-side. It will require responsiveness by the energy sector in the provision of equipment using modern energy forms that reduce the drudgery of much of women's labour, and that at affordable prices.
