REGENDER Gender equality and energy as catalysts for entrepreneurial development in sub-Saharan Africa

In policy discourses, decentralised small-scale renewable energy systems (RES) have been proposed as a means of providing energy to the 1 billion people without access, promoting economic empowerment and reducing poverty.

The aim of this three-year project is to advance knowledge on the potential for RES in Africa to help stimulate socially inclusive energy access and entrepreneurship.

We achieve this by complementing existing conceptualisations of RES as socio-technical systems with cutting edge feminist geography perspective, empirically exploring (a) how the spatial organisation, technical functioning, and institutional setup of small-scale RES interact with highly contextual gender and class relations to shape local entrepreneurial opportunities and practices.

Based on context sensitive methodology using mixed methods, we (b) identify how RES can be arranged to transform local value chains and promote socially inclusive entrepreneurial opportunities for both men and women and (c) use findings to identify points of intervention in the planning, design, and operation of RES in order to develop concrete policy recommendations.

This project builds on a recent review of the field, a pilot study and developed methodology, and will contribute theoretical and empirical evidence, through comparative case studies of electrification projects in Rwanda.

Through ethnographic approaches and stakeholder co-innovation we intend to contribute to effective policy interventions on RES.