Gender
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Although development organizations agree that reliable access to energy and energy services—one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals—is likely to have profound and perhaps disproportionate impacts on women, few studies have directly empirically estimated the impact of energy access on women's empowerment. This is a result of both a relative dearth of energy access evaluations in general and a lack of clarity on how to quantify gender impacts of development projects. Here we present an evaluation of the impacts of the Solar Market Garden—a distributed photovoltaic irrigation project—on the level and structure of women's empowerment in Benin, West Africa. We use a quasi-experimental design (matched-pair villages) to estimate changes in empowerment for project beneficiaries after one year of Solar Market Garden production relative to non-beneficiaries in both treatment and comparison villages (n = 771). To create an empowerment metric, we constructed a set of general questions based on existing theories of empowerment, and then used latent variable analysis to understand the underlying structure of empowerment locally. We repeated this analysis at follow-up to understand whether the structure of empowerment had changed over time, and then measured changes in both the levels and likelihood of empowerment over time. We show that the Solar Market Garden significantly positively impacted women's empowerment, particularly through the domain of economic independence. In addition to providing rigorous evidence for the impact of a rural renewable energy project on women's empowerment, our work lays out a methodology that can be used in the future to benchmark the gender impacts of energy projects.

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Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Environmental Research Letters
Authors
Jennifer Burney
Jennifer Burney
Halimatou Alaofè
Rosamond L. Naylor
Rosamond L. Naylor
Douglas Taren
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Stanford University
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Graduate student

Kaitlin Shilling has spent most of her career working in the non-governmental sector, and specifically in post-crisis development, which she is now studying in more depth at Stanford University. Just prior to returning to the ivory tower, Ms. Shilling spent over a year and a half working for DAI, a development consulting company, on two USAID-funded projects in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. She began as the Director of Finance and Operations for the Afghanistan Immediate Needs Project, and then moved to the Alternative Livelihoods Project to run the Gender and Micro-Enterprise Department. Her work on both of these projects involved collaborating with other NGOs, donors, and UN agencies working in the region.

Before moving to Afghanistan, Ms. Shilling worked in the home office of DAI for almost two years in the Crisis Mitigation and Recovery Group at DAI. Ms. Shilling's work included projects in Indonesia, East Timor, and Liberia, in addition to writing proposals to win new business. While at Stanford, Kaitlin will pursue research relating to post-crisis reconstruction with a focus on incorporating natural resource management into program design.

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