**3. Gender and energy**

This vicious cycle of energy poverty needs to be broken (figure3 and figure 4). Understand‐ ing the decision -making process within households when choosing energy services, which would appear at present to work against sustainable livelihoods, is important for designing effective interventions. A first step towards this should be a widespread acknowledgement among the development community that a lack of access to clean and affordable energy can, and should, be considered a core dimension of poverty. In this respect, it is therefore wel‐ come that the World Summit on Sustainable Development acknowledged that access to en‐

**Figure 4.** A virtuous circle to break out of energy poverty. Source: Institute for Development Studies (IDS) (2003)

ergy is needed to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

**Figure 3.** The vicious circle of energy poverty

88 New Developments in Renewable Energy

Gender refers to different social roles that women and men play, and the power relations between them. Gender relations influence how communities, households, and institutions are organized, how decisions are made, and how resources are used. To understand how gender shapes activities that affect the environment, it is necessary to examine women's and men's roles and responsibilities, access to and control over resources, knowledge of resour‐ ces and authority to make decisions about resource use. Therefore understanding women's and men's relationships to the environment plays an important role in developing solutions and meeting challenges for more sustainable use of energy resources. Ignoring gender dis‐ torts the understanding of human impacts on the environment as a whole.

From a gender perspective, 70% of the 1.3 people in developing countries living below the poverty threshold are women (Denton, 2001). Of the two billion people without access to modern energy services, most live in rural areas, where women head most of the poor households. Lack of modern fuels impacts more on women and girl child. Hundreds of mil‐ lions of women and girls spend between three - eight hours carrying fuelwood, dung and other traditional biofuels everyday. The immediate family energy use need is heat; when fuels become scarcer, girl children over boy children are withdrawn from school to support family energy needs. Girls who do not go to school cannot be literate. Illiterate women have more children, larger and poorer families that reinforces the cycle of poverty and underde‐ velopment. 2 million people die each year due to health and respiratory effects from indoor air pollution (MacDade, 2002).

For poor people the energy problem is "we do not have it". But worse for women, the ener‐ gy problem is lack of access, control, power relations and social dynamics. Men and women in a given society have different roles, needs and aspirations for energy. From a production point of view, the participation of women in the energy sector has largely been restricted to forestry and biomass management in rural areas. In urban areas women have remained vic‐ tims of environmental impacts of coal based electricity production that serves middle to high income groups. A few women are involved in the formulation of energy policy, and big energy projects have remained the preserve of men. Both rural and urban dwellers have little say and choice over domestic fuels that they use. In rural areas such say and choices is determined by woodfuel availability, and to some extend availability of cash to purchase fuel such as paraffin.
