It is known that Renewable Energy is the need for future, and the structural unconscious bias in energy sector have for long kept women at bay. We, as a group, should come together and drive the attitudinal change by recognizing the contribution of women across the RE value chain. It becomes quite imperative to integrate Decentralized RE Livelihood Application in day-to-day activities of women. We see women as enablers of change, so the transition from non- conventional energy technologies to Decentralised Renewable Applications may start right from their households, their kitchen, their agricultural lands, their businesses and improving the quality of their lives.
The Ministry of New & Renewable Energy (MNRE) observed the second day of its programme “New Frontiers: A Programme on Renewable Energy to celebrate Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav on 17.02.2022. The Ministry organized an online session on “Women in Renewable Energy (RE): Call for Action” to acknowledge the role of women entrepreneurs and leaders in the Renewable Energy Space.
The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy celebrated International Women’s Day with all the concerned women stakeholders in the Renewable Energy (RE) Space to acknowledge and encourage the contribution of women in the energy sector. The event was chaired by Secretary, MNRE and was conducted in a hybrid mode for all women stakeholders from the Ministry, Public Sector Undertakings, Industries, Not-for-Profit Organizations, etc.
Website Link - https://www.barefootcollegetilonia.org/
“We are a community-based grassroots organization working to make marginalized communities sustainable and self-sufficient since 1972. We believe in the Gandhian philosophy that knowledge, skills and wisdom found in the villages should be used for their own development.”
- Solar Mamas
They are middle aged illiterate women-many grandmothers- who live in non- electrified villages and who are rooted in their villages. They have been selected by their communities to be trained in India in 6 months to be solar engineers with financial support under ITEC from the Ministry of External Affairs Government of India. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy(MNRE) has also been training illiterate rural women from non electrified villages since 2000.
The first Solar Mama was selected in 2000. Since then 1600 solar mamas have been trained from 96 countries solar electrifying 60,000 houses saving 45 million litres of kerosene from polluting the environment.
Since 2000, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has been supporting the training illiterate and semi-literate rural women in solar lighting for remote, inaccessible hilly tribal desert areas of the country.
300 out of total 688 women have been trained as barefoot women solar engineers and master trainers from 17 States with financial support of the MNRE in 13 batches from 2009 to 2019.
They have solar electrified 25,951 houses in 688 villages in 17 States. Total 1709, the first generation of rural illiterate women trained for solar lighting of 70,000 non electrified houses in 1146 villages of 95 countries in the last two decades. It saves 5 Litre of kerosene per house per month and preventing carbon emmissions in the environment.
The barefoot community model empowers the rural women selected by the community to fabricate, install, repair and maintain solar technology systems without the help of any paper qualified solar engineer from outside.
- Introducing Solar Energy to Women Worldwide
Capacity Building for women on Solar LED Lights and other RE products is being conducted by Barefoot College, therefore, training women in Repairing and Installation. The workshops have been conducted in more than 96 countries
MNRE has supported for training of 293 women as the master trainers to train international women come at the Barefoot College for 6 month under the ITEC Programme.
Global Participation of women in Renewable Energy
Host this video - https://youtu.be/FhzHg62wsqk
MOSONiE Socio Economic Foundation is a Non-Profit Organization led by a group of young and passionate women committed to work for the marginalized and underserved community in Northeast India. The organization is registered as Section 8 Company based at Pillangkata, Ri Bhoi, Meghalaya. MOSONiE SEF has five dedicated founders striving towards as a change maker in the society, dynamic team who are strong and ambitious with work ethics.
The objective of the initiative is:
The small Eri spinning machine can be easily accommodated at home and works on both state electricity supply and solar power. This spinning machine fits well in the lives of women who also have the responsibility of household work and child care.
Women-Led Climate and Clean Energy Solutions for Prosperity in Rural India
AREAS - Association of Renewable Energy Agencies of States (AREAS) has been formed and registered as a society on 27 August 2014 under Society Registration Act 1860. Ministry of New & Renewable Energy (MNRE) is the nodal agency at the central level for promotion of grid-connected and off-grid renewable energy in the country.
http://www.areas.org.in/NRDC - The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is an international environmental organization, founded in 1970, with more than 3 million members and supporters. Working in India for over 13 years, NRDC focuses on developing and implementing climate change and clean energy solutions.
http://www.nrdc.org/SEWA - Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) is a member-based organization of poor, self-employed women workers in India. SEWA is spread across 14 states of India with deep penetration at grassroots level in villages. SEWA organizes the women into self-help groups and cooperatives based on their respective trades and then channelizes information, awareness, health interventions, trainings for skill development, financial support (e.g. savings, insurance, credit, and pension), and market linkages to enable members to become self-sustainable in their trades, including salt production. SEWA’s twin goals are “Full Employment” and “Self-Reliance.”
http://www.sewa.org
NRDC has been working with Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) to advance the adoption of clean energy solutions on the ground since 2014. NRDC and SEWA partnered together with women “agariyas” to transition salt production away from expensive and polluting diesel and toward more efficient, solar and solar-hybrid water pumps in the Little Rann of Kutch (LRK) in Gujarat. What started as a technical test-case of 14 solar and solar-diesel hybrid pumps has scaled to over 2,000 pumps till now. The goal is to further expand to 15,000 pumps in the coming years. NRDC has supported SEWA in building a business case for scaling the use of solar pumps for salt farming.
“The Hariyali Green Villages initiative aims to enhance accessibility and affordability of clean energy technologies and improve livelihood opportunities at the household level in rural India. Each Green Village, or Hariyali Gram, includes a suite of clean energy and environment friendly technologies such as Light-emitting Diode (LED) bulbs and energy efficient fans for lighting and thermal comfort, biogas plants for clean cooking, solar-powered water pumps for irrigation, and cool roofs to reduce heat stress in the houses. With the objective of scaling up to 100 villages by 2025, NRDC, SEWA and partners have effectively demonstrated these solutions in more than 10 villages in 2021-22 and benefitted over 300 families”
Link to website: https://sustainplus.org/
Sustain Plus Energy Foundation, is conceived and cofounded by Social Alpha, Selco Foundation and Collectives for Integrated Livelihoods Initiatives (CInI), and is a leading effort to transform the fabric of climate action in India.
With its focus on enabling gender conscious/positive/balanced solutions wherever possible, Sustain Plus has enabled over 68,000 women to become direct users or owners/entrepreneurs of DRE solutions. Notable among these, are the large-scale programs on DRE solutions for solar irrigation, e-mobility, clean cooking, waste management (biogas), livestock management, drinking water access, and solar based power backup systems for health and education – indicating some of the most critical areas of demand and ‘energy gaps’.
Hearing from the Fields:
District Keonjhar, Odisha
Implementation Partner: CInI
Solution: Sub-HP solar irrigation pump
Nuagaon is a tribal dominated village in the Harichandanpur block of Keonjhar district in Orissa. The women members in this village and surrounding villages have been anchoring the ‘Lakhpati Kisan’ program. Unlike previous years, in this year’s winter, the barren lands on the banks of the rivulets in the block are covered with green patches. On a closer look, women farmers are growing chilies, bitter gourd and cauliflowers in three fourth of an acre. For these first-generation vegetable growers, the transition has happened from homemade manual sprinklers to solar enabled sub-hp pumps. This leapfrogging is also visible in the area under cultivation. “Earlier I used to plant 100 saplings, but now I am able to plant 1500 saplings of chilli” says one farmer didi. The portable sub-HP solar pumps are capable of irrigating small, fragmented land areas of ~0.70 4 of 7 acres of land. With this pump, in the last season a woman farmer generated an incremental income of INR 60,000 from the cultivation of chili. More than 200 farmers in the block have also benefitted similarly through the access and use of sub-HP solar pumps, which has been designed by Khethworks, a technology start-up.
District Ramgarh, Jharkhand
Implementation Partner: CInI Selco India
Solution: Solar powered tailoring
In the garment industry in India, it is common to find small tailoring clusters in rural areas as individual or institutional set ups. These clusters work on bulk orders from garment companies and manufacturers who outsource their tailoring needs to them and serves as a critical employment avenue. Maganpur is one such village in Ramgarh district, Jharkhand. The people in this village are traditionally tailors and it is also their only source of income and livelihood. Nearly 300 families in the village are landless and completely dependent on tailoring as an occupation. They use motorised sewing machines which are powered by electricity from the grid. However, electricity supply is predictably poor and erratic, and due to frequent interruptions, the tailors are not able to complete their orders in time, which are for markets in Kolkata and Cuttack.
Shahanaz Khatoon, a seasoned tailor in Maganpur, was one of the users of the hybrid machine, and was able to earn an additional income of Rs. 12,000 due to the increased productivity and reliability of power supply. Based on the promising success of the 50 units installed in the first phase, another 100 units are planned for implementation.
Link to website: https://dharmalife.in/
Livelihood based Solar Dryer intervention
Rural Livelihoods in Uttarakhand are primarily subsistence oriented and largely dependent on agriculture, livestock and forest linkages. Drying agricultural produce is an important step in upscaling produce and offers a simple and sustainable process for creation of new product lines for the farmers. Solar Dryers, which take much less time (2-3 days) for drying one batch and produce uniform drying is therefore a viable alternative.
Gajam India Private Limited (GIPL) partnered with Badri Kedar Swayatt Sahkarita, Chamoli (BKSRC) for upscaling their produce through drying. Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) and Farmer Co-operatives have emerged as aggregation points for small farmers through which they can avail economies of scale and better bargaining power. It also provides for ownership control and profit sharing with its members i.e. small farmers. BKSRC’s main activities are food processing, farming and cultivation, and marketing of agri products.
The cooperative has approximately 200 farmers, most of whom are women.
Crops such as kutki, rosemary, lemongrass, kapoor kachri, turmeric, parsley and jatamasi have been dried by the Co-operative in the solar dryer. The dryer has generated very good results as dried products are uniformly dried and do not lose their colour or fragrance. The most profitable dried crop is rosemary, followed by lemongrass. While the fresh produce of these products has a very low market value, the dried product fetches up to 12 times its market value. Since buyers are very particular of the dried product quality, the solar dryer proved very useful.
Rural entrepreneurship in Renewable Energy
In the highly conservative ghunghat culture of Rajasthan, Suman Beriwal shines as a beacon of progressiveness in her village. She was excited to join the IGEN Access II project as her village gets an average of 10 – 12 hours of electricity every day with frequent and long power cuts. She would now be able to help poor family’s tide over their lighting requirements during long power cuts. During the training she learnt about many other useful solar products like fan, fridge, streetlight, irrigation.
Suman Didi has promoted solar lights to ~50 households. People want to use the solar lights at home during cooking and studying, in their shops and also when they go out to their fields for irrigation early in the morning, Their current solutions – battery powered torch and kerosene lamps are unable to provide them strong light over long distances.
Karuna Devi is a Dharma Life entrepreneur from Gaya, Bihar. She has four children, and her husband owns a small carpentry shop in the village. Karuna Devi adopted and personally uses all solar products that she promotes. This way, she herself first develops trust on the product and promotes it once she is confident of its benefits. She visited 20 - 30 households and sold solar lights to around 8 households. The credit period of 14 days which she could extend to the villagers was a big help as most villagers paid an initial amount to book the product. Once they had used the product for some time, they paid the remaining amount with more confidence in the product. She is now a firm believer in renewable energy products and believes that given the irregular electricity supply, solar products are gold for any village.
Link to Website - https://renewpower.in/corporate-social-responsibility/
“ReNew, one of India’s largest clean energy companies, recognize the fact that women are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Therefore, it is imperative that they are at the heart of finding solutions as well. Our women for climate program intend to engage women to fight climate change in both rural and urban India.”
-Project SURYA by ReNew Power: Women for Climate
In partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) has been initiated in Gujarat in June 2022 to help underprivileged and extremely low-paid agariya women from the physically challenging and traditional salt pan industry who work in a very harsh Rann of Kutch marshes, and help them leapfrog into the modern clean energy industry by training them as solar panel and solar pump technicians—and into the frontline in the battle against climate change.
The program was launched in June 2022, with about 60 women at Dhokawada, Patan and will eventually see around 1,000 women (agariya workers) trained in these new clean transition roles/supporting roles at renewable facilities in Gujarat and will be supported by the Government of India’s National Skill Development Corporation. This program can be potentially scaled up with those in different lower-income-generation traditional livelihoods in other parts of the country to tens of thousands of women and even more, supporting them in income generation in a more organized sector, boosting empowerment and enabling India’s clean energy transition.
Salt farming in India is very hard work and women must brave the extreme temperature of the barren Thar desert/marshes where the Rann of Kutch is located, where they have to set up huts, dig wells, and pump-up brine, which they sift through a series of pans, eventually crystallising salt. Apart from the pumping, all elements of the process are completed by manually. These agariya women who usually live for six to seven months in makeshift shacks besides its salt pans, generally work without a contract, and the pay is very poor and are stuck in a cycle of debt and poverty. In fact, in 8-to-10 months they manage to save only around Rs 10,000 while, on average, a solar panel technician-for which some of these SEWA sisters are going to be trained—can earn an average of INR 12000-18,000 a month.
-Women Climate Champions by ReNew Power
In partnership with UNDP and IIT Delhi, ReNew Power is working on a business impact accelerator program for women climate entrepreneurs who would be solving the most complex climate and energy related issues. The first cohort of 6 climate entrepreneurs covers areas such as energy efficiency, storage, electrodes, circularity, sea water desalination. The goal is to continue this program year on year and ensure a cadre of women climate entrepreneurs to contribute to India’s climate action agenda.
-Clean Cooking program by ReNew, Power
Most women in rural India rely on traditional cookstoves which use massive amounts of firewood for cooking. These cookstoves not only increase the cooking time thereby reducing productive hours for a woman but also emit large quantities of carbon which impacts a woman’s respiratory health. In Dhar region of Madhya Pradesh, we have recently launched an improved cookstove initiative which will see us impact 10,000 families predominantly relying on firewood as their primary fuel. The improved cookstove uses the principles of efficient design and combustion and is built to ensure reduction in usage of firewood which not only reduces carbon emissions but also improves women’s health. The project has a potential to reduce 30,000 tCO2e per year.
Link to Website - https://www.ceew.in/impacts/women-in-sustainability
“ Women in Sustainability (WiS), an initiative of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), was launched on the World Environment Day in 2017, with support from the United Nations. The purpose was to reinforce the idea of gender diversity in the workplace, not just in numbers but also in the quality of involvement of women in key areas of research, implementation and leadership in sustainability public policy. WiS hopes to nurture and expand the conversation around affirmative action through collaborative partnerships with like-minded institutions to foster enabling work environments for women in the sustainability sector. Our approach focuses on interventions at an institutional and sectoral level, networking and constant monitoring and evaluation.”
-UK-India Pledge of Progress campaign
WiS has helped co-develop the UN Gender and Energy Compact in 2021, sensitised young researchers on the International Gender Day through a special social media awareness campaign and celebrated the ‘International Day of the Girl Child’ with the British High Commission. On this occasion, CEEW signed the UK-India Pledge of Progress campaign, a joint commitment to promote gender equality, take practical steps to tackle gender challenges and break down gender norms, and together build a gender-equal society.
-Training & Networking of Women Stakeholders in Energy
In April 2022, Dean Rachel Kyte, Fletcher School hosted for a session on building one’s space in sustainability and public policy. This session was a valuable opportunity for young researchers to learn from her journey that demonstrates bold leadership, inclusivity, and commitment to sustainable development.
In May 2022, WiS engaged with other regional/thematic/national networks of women in energy, in the annual meeting organised by the Global Women’s Network for the Energy Transition. It also participated in the first ever ‘Women Energize Women’ conference, a project by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Germany, implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and the German Renewable Energy Federation (BEE).
-Powering Livelihood, CEEW-Villgro Initiative
“Powering Livelihoods, a CEEW-Villgro initiative, aims to boost India’s rural economy by scaling up the penetration of clean energy-powered appliances for livelihoods especially amongst women. The initiative is supporting 14 enterprises to undertake large-scale commercial deployment for their solutions through an integrated gendered lens and use the evidence generated to catalyse the sector. Realising the role women play in the economy and the available opportunities in the DRE sector to improve their livelihood and make the space gender-inclusive, they have integrated gender-lens in each of their programme activity utilizing the following framework.
Build the fundamentals - Building internal organisation capacity to recognise women’s differentiated need and respond to them of all the programme enterprise, associated ecosystem partners and internal team itself.
Act as a partner: Enterprise Support - Supporting programme enterprises to keep women as the central focal point in their business expansion working together with them to pilot some new pivotal gender forward business strategies.
Be a market accelerator - unlocking new unexplored market segments, catalysing integrated value chain for women users and collecting sex-disaggregated evidence both at the enterprise and programme level, using it to advocate new collaborations and partnerships on greater adoption of DRE livelihoods equipment amongst women.”
-Women Demo Champion Model
End-users and demo champions of Multipro food processing machine, Neetu Tandon (left) and Narenderpal Kaur, attend a training session provided by the Powering Livelihoods team in Yamunanagar. They have pilot ‘Women Demo Champion’ model with a belief that successful end-users are the best vehicle for endorsing any technology. They identified successful women end-users and trained them to conduct demonstrations for other potential adopters. By tapping into their personal networks and through word of mouth, these women demo champions help inch closer to the goal — seeing more women experience livelihood benefits through clean energy technologies.
-DRE assessment Events for Women in Rajasthan
They have also identified women-dominated value chains and carried out a needs assessment for DRE technologies. To reach more potential women users in these value chains, they supported their partners in various states (such as Prerna Ojas in Uttar Pradesh) and enterprises (Devidayal Solar in Rajasthan for the dairy and food processing value chains) in conducting successful hyperlocal events. Such events are attended by hundreds of women and with interest garnered, advance bookings for different technologies are made on the spot. This has resulted in successful adoption by women
Women from Udaipur's Gogunda district attend the hyper-local event organised by DD Solar and supported by Powering Livelihoods
-Unlocking Finance for women-led Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs)
The programme has also helped unlock end-user financing, a major bottleneck, especially for women. Powering Livelihoods has extended a risk guarantee to Samunnati, a financier in the agri-value chain, to extend financing to women-led Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs). As a result, Raheja Solar Food Processing installed 36 solar dryers across six FPOs in Andhra Pradesh’s YSR and Anantapur districts.
Link to Website - https://www.herofutureenergies.com/
“HFE has targeted to attain 30% gender ratio by 2030 and ensures equal employment opportunities to women with flexible work-life-balance, maternity leave support etc. As a part of CSR initiatives, HFE is supporting a skill development centre in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh. HFE aims to improve lives of women in rural India through skill centres which organize trainings across our plant locations.”
-Ensuring Women Employment Opportunities by ensuring 30% gender ratio by 2030
-Skill Development Centre in Madhya Pradesh
HFE is supporting a skill development centre in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh. HFE aims to improve lives of women in rural India through skill centres which organize trainings across our plant locations
