Energy, Gender and Development: What are the Linkages? Where is the Evidence?

By G. Kohlin, Erin Sills, Subhrendu K. Pattanayak, Christopher Wilfong. 2011

214 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The objective of the report is to review the literature on the links between energy access, welfare, and gender in order to provide evidence on where gender considerations in the energy sector matter and how they might be addressed. Prepared as a background document for the 2012 World Development Report on gender equality and development, as well as a part of the social development department's ongoing work on gender and infrastructure, the report describes and evaluates the evidence on the links between gender and energy focusing on the following areas: increased access to wood fuel through planting of trees and forest management; improved cooking technologies; and access to electricity and motive energy. The report is intended to complement ongoing efforts to formulate a gender business plan for the sustainable development network of the World Bank. It focuses on reviewing the academic evidence and does not aim to offer specific operational recommendations which are better left for the gender business plan and other documents that follow up on the 2012 World Development Report. Focusing on the academic peer-reviewed literature, fairly inclusive screening criteria are applied when selecting the evidence to consider. Thus, much of this review is based on quantitative studies with samples that are relatively small, yet sufficient to support multivariate regressions to control for confounding effects. The main finding of this review is that energy interventions can have significant gender benefits which can be realized via careful design and targeting of interventions based on a context-specific understanding of energy scarcity and household decision-making. The Bank may also want to consider a program of rigorous impact evaluations and participatory monitoring of household energy projects.

Subfields: Energy Engineering and Power Technology, Pollution, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d51856d1676e67059b5b74807c0f55c125e371a4

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Citations in the corpus

Long-term Gains from Electrification in Rural India (2015, background): “One popular hypothesis on the benefits of household electrification is that by relieving the time burdens in collecting and preparing fuel, household electricity leads rural women to engage in market-based work (Dinkelman 2011; Kohlin et al. 2011).”
Gender Differences in Preferences, Intra-Household Externalities, and Low Demand for Improved Cookstoves (2013, background): “As a result, women (and the children for whom they care) disproportionately bear the health burden of traditional stove use (Köhlin et al., 2011; Smith et al., 2011).”
Who Adopts Improved Fuels and Cookstoves? A Systematic Review (2012, unknown): “Additionally, the unsustainable harvest of fuelwood degrades local forests (Hofstad et al. 2009; Köhlin et al. 2011), sometimes”
Long-Term Impacts of Household Electrification in Rural India (2013, background): “One popular hypothesis on the benefits of household electrification is that by relieving time burdens spent in collecting and preparing fuel, household electricity results in rural women engaging in marketbased work (Wu, Borghans and Dupuy 2009; Dinkelman 2011; Kohlin et al. 2011).”
The potential of agroforestry in the provision of sustainable woodfuel in sub-Saharan Africa (2014, background): “…energy sources has also led to the burning of cow dung and/or crop residues that would be better used as fertilizers to support food production [9], to the burning of wood from tree species that were traditionally avoided because of their more harmful smoke [10], to the use of more polluting…”
Access to modern energy: a review of barriers, drivers and impacts (2016, background): “Time allocation, fuel use and expenditures Rigorous evidence on the role of ICS on time allocation, female and children’s conditions is quite scarce (Kohlin et al., 2011).”