For Africa’s Solar Sisters, Off-Grid Electricity is Power by Diane Toomey: Yale Environment 360
▻http://e360.yale.edu/feature/katherine_lucey_for_solar_sisters_in_africa_off_grid_electricity_is_power/2653
Solar Sister’s operations rely on selling inexpensive, off-the-grid solar energy systems to households to power lamps and recharge cell phones. Since 2010, Solar Sister has created a network of 401 businesswomen in three countries that have provided electricity to 54,000 people. (...)
e360: You say that energy poverty is a gender issue. How so?
Lucey: One of the insights I had while working in rural Africa is that at the household level women are really the managers of energy. They are the ones who walk to market to buy kerosene to pour into their kerosene lamps. They walk miles to collect wood or purchase charcoal. If what we want to do is disrupt that decision process and have the women make a cleaner, safer, more economical choice — to use renewable energy instead of toxic kerosene or burning wood or charcoal — we have to reach the women.