Equity & Appliances
Energy-efficient and solar-powered appliances help alleviate the drudgery of tasks often allocated to women and girls. This frees up time for education and economic activities.
CLASP’s key stats on equity
- In a CLASP-supported policy brief, research found that decisions about what appliances to buy for a household are often gendered, with women having less influence than men.
- This CLASP-led report found that the solar lighting and appliances sector is serving a homogenous demographic, with the typical user being a man in his early forties.
- According to a CLASP-led report, women make up 23% of the workforce in solar lighting and appliance companies.
[Photo: CLASP]
How do energy-efficient appliances support equity?
Energy access and gender equity are inextricably linked. Women and girls are impacted in far greater numbers than men by energy poverty, financial poverty, and adverse climate change impacts. Due to cultural conventions and social norms, women and girls disproportionately shoulder the burden of energy poverty. For example, women are tasked with time and labor-intensive activities, like firewood gathering, water collection, and manual grain processing, often at the expense of education or other productive activities. Women are also often underrepresented in energy decision-making processes and community planning.
Delivering energy services with gender equity as a focus can reduce drudgery, generate income, and promote women’s empowerment. Empowering women through equal access to energy and decision-making on the appliances they choose for their families can have a significant impact on their community’s overall security and resilience.
CLASP’s mission to push for a clean energy transition dovetails with our organization’s commitment to ensuring that those most likely to be disadvantaged within their communities aren’t left behind.
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How does CLASP’s work support equity?
Our programs that intersect with equity prioritize energy-efficient appliances that empower women and girls by improving their health and livelihoods. CLASP programs and partnerships that have an impact on equity include:
Efficient appliances advancing equity
CLASP has identified the highest priority appliances, lighting, and equipment that are key to lowering emissions, improving lives, and building resilience to climate risks: these are the “Net Zero Heroes.” The following appliances have an impact on equity:
As an appliance more closely associated with prescribed gender norms, electric pressure cookers (EPCs) can improve the health of millions of women who otherwise breathe in harmful smoke while cooking and spend hours walking far distances for cooking fuel.
As a relatively low-cost appliance, efficient fans can help increase productivity and help those most at risk adapt to climate change. In the home, where women and children in many cultures spend more time than men, fans can reduce health risks from heat exposure.
Milling, Grain, and Spice Processing
Solar mills offer an affordable, sustainable alternative to diesel-powered mills with numerous benefits for the planet and farmers, especially women and girls.
By keeping perishable produce at cool temperatures, refrigerators not only reduce food waste and money loss, they also unlock time for women that they would otherwise spend collecting fuel, traveling to food markets, or cooking.
Solar water pumps (SWPs) are crucial in the push for gender equity. They can reduce the drudgery and time spent collecting water, generate income, increase productivity, and improve hygiene and sanitation.
Solar Mini-Grids
Solar mini-grids provide access to clean energy in electricity-constrained regions.
As an in-home appliance, televisions directly influence women’s empowerment and are associated with positive change in school enrolment, literacy, family planning, financial decisions, and health.