Workshop on addressing gender concerns into energy ends

A five-day training workshop with the theme, “Mainstreaming Gender Concerns into Energy Projects” has taken place at Dodowa.
The workshop which was organised by ENERGIA Africa, the international network on gender and sustainable energy, brought together the Ghana Regional Appropriate Technology Industrial Service (GRATIS) Foundation, Gender and Energy Network Ghana, the National Focal Point for the Gender and Energy Network of Ghana (GEDA, Gh) and the Ministry of Energy.
The workshop was aimed at exposing the participants to the importance of gender issues in energy planning and policy formulation.
Addressing the ceremony, the National Focal Person for Gender and Energy Network Ghana, Mrs Sabiana Anokye Mensah, said the objective of the workshop was to strengthen the capacity of project developers and managers to integrate gender into the design and implementation of energy projects.
She said the process would involve training and equipping practitioners with analytical and conceptual skills to enable them understand the gender and energy link, as well as providing them with practical tools to use during various stages of the project.
She indicated that the training would involve participants coming back to the workshop with information on the energy projects that they were working on.
"A key priority for the training workshop is getting the right participants who are defined as practitioners from government, non-governmental organisations and the private sector, working on energy projects that recognise the need to address gender issues in their work and want to know how to do this", she said.
Mrs Anokye Mensah explained that upon completion, at least 30 project developers and managers would have been trained in the integration of gender in energy projects and would have finalised action plans tailored to suit their own energy projects.
The Deputy Director-General of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Dr Rose Emma Mamaa Entsua-Mensah, stated that the key challenge facing the African energy sector was the provision of modern energy services to over 60 per cent of its population to facilitate economic development and poverty reduction.
According to her, a significant proportion of the African population lived in rural and peri-urban areas, where access to modern energy was lowest and its improvement most costly.
Dr Entsua-Mensah said this form of energy poverty was becoming common among the rapidly growing proportion of the urban population and that the poor bore the brunt of energy poverty due to their limited flexibility in adapting to changing modern energy provision service conditions, since they lacked purchasing power.
“Most of these people rely predominantly on traditional biomass fuels, whereby wood fuel still accounts for about 65 per cent of the total primary energy consumption in the region which are, generally increasingly difficult to access”, she noted.
She was optimistic that the workshop would help to develop instruments, methodologies, tools and guidelines for mainstreaming gender into energy planning programmes and policies.
The President of Gender and Energy Network, Ghana, Mr Kwame Asamoah, said the workshop was designed to organise and train women to become energy technicians and make them capable of operating and maintaining equipment.
He encouraged Ghanaian women to link with up international agencies to improve themselves economically and technically, and also build their confidence and improve their marketing strategies.
Mr Asamoah commended ENERGIA for extending the programme to Ghana, and GRATIS Foundation for its productive collaboration in organising the workshop.
“The work ahead of us is enormous and we would encourage more professionals to join the network to enhance gender and energy networking in Ghana”, he said.


Picture: The National Focal Person for Gender and Energy Network, Mrs Sabina Anokye Mensah, talking to some of the participants during a break.