Empowerment Through Energy? Impact of Electricity on Care Work Practices and Gender Relations

Abstract

Electricity provides a range of desirable services such as the electric light and the use of mobile phones and is regarded as a conditional factor for economic growth. Gender equality and women's empowerment are also promoted as a key to development on the international agenda. However, relatively little is known about how the advent of electricity in new contexts affects gender relations. The present analysis of electricity's impact on gender relations engages with the concepts of care work and empowerment. Based on two ethnographic case studies in rural communities in Uttar Pradesh, India, and Bamiyan, Afghanistan, we examine how and to what extent the introduction of electricity affected women's care work practices and empowerment – and potentially transformed gender relations. We also draw on our own empirical material from other parts of India (West Bengal and Jharkhand). We find that electricity affected everyday life in terms of providing important resources and enhancing women's opportunities to perform their expected role as care workers more efficiently and in a qualitatively better way. The women appreciated this positive effect of electricity in their everyday lives. However, we argue that in India, electricity at the same time reinforced structures of gender inequality such as patriarchy and dowry practices, and we trace this tendency to the conceptualisation of women as care workers in combination with conventional, gender ‘neutral’ electricity interventions. In contrast, there are signs that women's status increased in the Afghanistan case, which we link to the unusual inclusion of women engineers in the electricity supply.

Keywords:

• electricity
• gender relations
• empowerment
• care work
• India
• Afghanistan

Notes on contributors

Karina Standal is a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. Her current research project is on the effects of decentralized solar electricity systems on women in two Indian states.

Tanja Winther is a senior researcher at Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. Her research background and interests lie in the socio-cultural aspects of energy, and electricity in particular.

Notes

¹Sustainable Development Goal #7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.

²The data material for the case studies are gathered by Karina Standal in relation to the Ph.D. project: The Impact of Solar Energy on Rural Women in India, Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo.

³Following Kabeer (2001) resources include material, human and social resources acquired through social relationships, market, state and community. Access to resources does not only concern influence over allocation of current resources, but also future claims and expectations which are reflected in norms of distribution.

⁴The interviews in Uttar Pradesh, India, were conducted in Narwara and Rampura villages and the interviews in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, were conducted in Habashi, Pirdad, Ladu and Jarukashan villages. For anonymity reasons we will only refer to Uttar Pradesh and Bamiyan unless a distinctive feature of a village is highlighted.

⁵All informants gave their consent to participate in the research, but to safeguard their anonymity any names are fictional.

⁶The state of Uttar Pradesh is showing a rapid improvement in Human Development Indicators, but intra-state inequality is high and some of the subdistricts of Bundelkhand in this area have lower scores than the state average.

⁷A solar micro-grid is a small-scale power grid that can operate independently and is energised by solar PV technology.

⁸The micro-grid in Rampura village was introduced by Scatec Solar AS in 2009. The micro-grid in Narwara was introduced in 2011 by Scatec and the Indian Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).

⁹Stand-alone PV power systems are electrical power systems energised by PV panels which are independent of the utility grid.

¹⁰For more information please see www.barefoot.org.

¹¹Segregation of the sexes by physical segregation such as confinement to the home and/or requirement for women to cover their bodies in certain dress codes.

¹²An ethnic group adhering to a form of Shia Islam.

¹³In Uttar Pradesh, cooking was often done in the courtyard of the houses. It was a common perception that the implementation of the light and the water benefitted the daughter-in-law the most, as this was ‘her area’ of responsibility.

¹⁴This issue is complex and factors such as age, company and not least size of village, in addition to moral codes such as purdah and pusthunwali, are important for women's mobility in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

¹⁵The issue of exclusion from watching television was only brought up during the interviews in the Uttar Pradesh case.

¹⁶In Bamiyan, Afghanistan, there was a lack of trees for firewood; so people relied on a local bush and animal dung. Finding enough fuel was difficult as the bush was becoming scarcer and parts of Bamiyan were still covered with landmines from the Soviet occupation (Standal, 2010, p. 43).

¹⁷From neighbouring Daykundi province.

¹⁸In several Afghan communities the mahr or toyana (bride price) – a monetary transaction from the groom's family to the bride or her family – is common practice. Unfortunately, we have no information on how implementation of electricity has affected this.

¹⁹The informants claimed that ultrasound sex-screening and abortion usually would take place after the birth of two consecutive daughters and was a decision made by the father-in-law.

²⁰The data materials are gathered by Karina Standal in relation to the Ph.D. project: The Impact of Solar Energy on Rural Women in India, Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo.

²¹The ‘smart economics' promoted by development organisations, governments and businesses (Chant and Sweetman, 2012) presents women as central in the households' coping strategies, but such initiatives may put women at risk of being (further) exploited.

²² http://www.se4all.org/our-vision/our-objectives/universal-energy/.

²³For an interesting discussion of this please see Crewe (1997).