Training and integrating rural women into technology: a study of Renewable Energy Technology in Bangladesh

Abstract

Women in developing countries are often poorly integrated into new technology sectors, but technical and vocational training may be a means of empowering women to achieve such integration. This article addresses the challenges of integrating rural women in Bangladesh into the Solar Home System (SHS) value chain through training. It reviews a USAID-funded training project undertaken by Grameen Shakti (GS), a major Renewable Energy Technology (RET) enterprise in Bangladesh, and examines the outcomes for the rural women involved in the project. Over the period 2005–2010, the company trained 2797 rural women at an extensive network of rural technology centres. While GS reached its target of selling and installing one million SHS units throughout the country, it was less successful in integrating women trainees into the value chain, employing less than 3% of women trainees after training. These women employees assembled SHS components, but their jobs did not draw on their acquired skills in promotion, installation, and maintenance of the SHS. Of those not employed at GS, a proportion found income-generating activities elsewhere and felt they benefited from the training. This study reviews the training, gender segmentation in the value chain, and changes in technology and markets to help explain this outcome. Both cultural barriers and limits to project planning, monitoring, and implementation affected the outcome. Moreover, initiatives based on small-scale, village-level production appear vulnerable to mass production and rapidly changing market conditions.

Keywords:

• Gender
• women’s empowerment
• training
• village production
• Renewable Energy Technology (RET)

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Grameen Shakti, Project Closure Report on Rural Empowerment Through Renewable Energy, September 2010.

2 The GS Project Closure Report in 2010 states that through training, ‘rural women would develop their self-confidence and at the same time get income generating opportunities to show their communities a way to solve the energy and environmental crisis they are facing’.

3 Grameen Shakti at a glance, May 2013.

4 Grameen Shakti, Project Closure Report on Rural Empowerment Through Renewable Energy, September 2010.

5 At the time these figures were calculated the exchange rate was $1 USD = 77.5 Taka (Tk).

6 A scoping study conducted by the research team in 2014, preliminary to the research design and survey field work, identified that less work was available for trainees who were employed due to the availability of pre-assembled SHS components.

7 See, for instance, the platform of interlinked components designed to minimize installation time illustrated in http://us.sunpower.com/commercial-solar-energy-system-helix/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). authors' views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the U.S. Government.

Notes on contributors

David Hemson

David Hemson is an impact evaluator with expertise in the fields of water services, climate change and clean energy policy, and in social policy. He has experience in many African countries and in Indonesia, Bangladesh, India and Kazakhstan. He has published articles and chapters and edited a book in these fields.

Nancy Peek

Nancy Peek is an international development evaluation and monitoring specialist, with expertise in the climate change and food security sectors and a focus on U.S. Agency for International Development programming. She currently resides in Kenya and has additional experience working in India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Angola, Pakistan, Japan, Ghana and Macedonia.