A quiet but forceful demand is reshaping Africa’s energy debate: if the continent is truly transitioning, women say they must no longer be treated as afterthoughts.
The warning comes from a new advocacy brief by the feminist climate network Shine Collab, released alongside the 64th sessions of the UNFCCC Subsidiary Bodies (SBI 64 and SBSTA 64) in Bonn, Germany.
Titled “Whose Energy Is It Anyway? Centring Women’s Voices and Realities in Africa’s Energy Future,” the report reframes the continent’s energy crisis as something deeper than power shortages: a structural system of gendered inequality.
“Energy poverty is not neutral,” said Dr Melania Chiponda, Executive Director of Shine Collab. “It is experienced through women’s bodies, women’s labour, and women’s time.”
Across Africa, the consequences are blunt and unrelenting; hours lost each day fetching firewood and water, exposure to toxic smoke from biomass cooking, and shrinking access to education, income, and rest.
Nearly 600 million Africans still lack reliable electricity, with Sub-Saharan Africa accounting for about 77 percent of the global energy-poor population. The report argues this burden is quietly transferred into households where women absorb the cost in unpaid labor. In countries including Tanzania, Ethiopia, Mali and Rwanda, women spend several hours daily on survival tasks tied directly to energy poverty: collecting fuel, hauling water, and cooking with polluting biomass.
The health toll is devastating. The brief cites estimates that indoor air pollution from dirty cooking fuels killed about 700,000 people in Africa in 2019 alone; most of them women and children closest to household fires.
But the report also shows what changes when energy arrives. Clean cooking systems and reliable electricity consistently reduce hours of unpaid labor, freeing women for education, work, and leadership. That promise now collides with Africa’s flagship electrification drive: Mission 300, led by the African Development Bank and the World Bank, targeting 300 million new electricity connections by 2030.
Advocates welcome the ambition, but warn that scale without gender design risks reproducing the very inequalities it seeks to solve. The brief lays out a blunt agenda: track who benefits from energy investments through gender data, guarantee women’s participation in energy decision-making, prioritize clean cooking in financing, design affordability schemes for women-led households, and embed rural and marginalized women in energy planning.
It also flags a looming demographic shock: more than 220 million women and girls in Sub-Saharan Africa could fall into extreme poverty by 2030, with nearly half facing food insecurity.
“The transition is being measured in megawatts,” said Dr Chiponda. “But the real measure is time. Who gains it, who loses it, and who has always been forced to give it away.”
By: By Ntaryike Divine Jr
