Second Class Citizens: Gender, energy & climate change in South Africa

The summary is below and the full report is attached in pdf.

Second Class Citizens: Gender, energy & climate change in South Africa

Access to energy is central to reducing poverty and hunger, improving health, increasing literacy, supporting small business development and income generation and improving the lives of women and children. If ordinary women find it difficult to gain access to energy, they are likely to be poorer with
greater drudgery in the home. In turn, this impacts the entire country, as these women are less economically active with less time to earn an income, and fewer ways to spend the money they do have. Forty percent of South Africa’s 48 million people are poor, and more than half of poor people are female.

Official unemployment figures hover at around 25%, but since this statistics does not count those who have given up looking for work, real unemployment may be double this.

South Africa is, by world standards, relatively rich. We are classified as an upper-middle income country with a gross domestic product of R667 billion and can produce up to 38 000 megawatts (MW) of 4 electricity. However, these benefits accrue mainly to mining houses, large industry, and upper and middle class consumers. Meanwhile, as the world’s 12th largest emitter of greenhouse gases, our development path means we are a disproportionate contributor to climate change. Poor South Africans see little of the economic benefits, but are most vulnerable to the impacts climate change will bring.

According to a study conducted by lobby group Citizens United for Renewable Energies and Sustainability, approximately 2.5 million households still have no access to electricity, while 4 million 6 households do not use electricity for cooking. This could mean that 20 million people still rely on dirty,
polluting fuels, if an average household size of five people is assumed.

Clearly, simply increasing electricity capacity will not be enough to solve South Africa’s problems of poverty and unemployment. Neither will increasing access to electricity without examining affordability. Yet these two priorities, in large part, have been the focus of energy policy in recent years.

South Africa has a legal duty not only to consider women’s needs and desires when making policy, but to actively ensure its policy is gender-inclusive. This means that policy must seek to enhance the status of women and eradicate gender inequality. This duty arises from an imperative given by the Constitution, the highest law in the land, which states that:

“The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.”

To promote equality, which includes “the full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms”, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken. Policy may not unfairly discriminate, even indirectly, against people on the basis of gender. Policy may also promote equality between groups of people.

The reality is that South African policy makers have not found it easy to mainstream gender concerns within energy policy. Policy makers and pressure groups are accustomed to considering energy in terms of megawatts and macro-economics – rather than in terms of the impact on ordinary people. We have
given too much space to experts and elites, and not enough to consumers who do not use technocratic jargon. Social justice considerations have been sidelined.

Energy policy which is presented in a jargon-heavy way makes it difficult for citizens to engage in the policy process. The Integrated Resource Plan 2010 (IRP 2010), an attempt to forecast South Africa’s energy needs for the next 20 years, is probably the most extreme example of this trend. While in theory
everyone can participate in public consultation workshops, in practice workshops which are held only in a few major centres or at awkward dates become exclusionary. In addition, public consultations are often not publicised appropriately.

Women themselves have only engaged in energy policy to a limited extent. There are relatively few female professionals in this industry, and, despite a few key female leaders, decision-making processes are still male dominated. Many civil society organisations have, likewise, engaged with policy makers in
terms of the broad, overarching technical issues that energy policy is concerned with, rather than on the human scale.

In order to begin to understand what it means to include gender as a reference point for energy, we have to re-examine our own thinking on energy. For this reason, this paper first examines the existing ways that energy and gender are connected in South Africa, before analysing the policy landscape for energy.
In many households, energy is a woman’s responsibility. She needs energy to cook and heat water, and she is responsible for fetching wood or buying prepaid electricity. The price of energy, and the ease of access, is directly relevant to her life. Gender-blind policy risks leaving an important group of consumers behind.

Official policy blindness is not inevitable. The 1998 White Paper on Energy, which represented the first attempt to tackle energy policy by a democratic government in South Africa, explicitly recognised that women are important consumers of energy who, up until now, have been overlooked.

This initial commitment to a gender-mainstreaming of energy policy has been progressively watered down in succeeding energy policy documents. One way in which government has sought to tackle women’s energy poverty has been to increase access to grid electricity in South Africa. Yet this has not proved a panacea, since the poorest households simply cannot afford electricity for cooking and heating – their major energy needs.

It is easy to criticise, but solutions can be harder to find. So we offer the following:

• greater participation of women in drawing up energy policy;
• greater representation of women in energy decision-making positions;
• focus on people’s needs;
• better housing;
• broader access to electricity;
• renewable energy such as biogas digestors, particularly for off-grid consumers; and
• subsidies or finance to ensure these measures are affordable.

A gendered energy policy would consider the likely effect of its recommendations on residential consumers, and how these effects may be improved. This could be achieved through the implementation of a strategy to create a greater numbers of jobs – such as renewable energy manufacturing – or perhaps through strategies which would save women money, such as energy
efficiency in the home.

South Africa’s energy policy is failing millions of women. It is critical that their needs are communicated to policy makers and that when new policy is drawn up, it is gender sensitive.