Energy Subsidies & Gender

​The absence of a road initiated a journey to a remote village located in a forest in Odisha, India. The village, Sarda Gram Panchayat, is actually a cluster of five villages and is located in a dense forest near the Sambalpur District of Odisha. The remoteness of the villages has severed ties to development work—energy access, education, health facilities and other services all have hit a roadblock.

A new report from IISD's Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI), entitled Gender and Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reform, suggests that the reform of fossil fuel subsidies should focus assistance towards women in poverty.

This report explores current knowledge on energy subsidy reforms and gender through a review of existing literature. First, it sets out the global context of energy subsidies, energy access and gender empowerment. It then reviews literature on gender, energy access, fossil fuel subsidies and mitigation measures related to subsidy reform, such as cash transfers. Finally, it provides an overview of these issues across three focus countries: Bangladesh, India and Nigeria, as well as case studies on Peru, Mexico and Morocco.

It is well understood that increasing fuel product prices can be a shock for low-income households, requiring careful mitigation strategies to ensure that subsidy reform does not harm the most vulnerable.

India has the world’s largest concentration of population using biomass with inefficient stoves—about 840 million people in India rely fully or partially on traditional biomass for cooking. This report explores the issues and challenges of clean cooking in urban India through a case study of the Ghaziabad Municipal Corporation in Uttar Pradesh. The report analyzes results from a survey of 250 households in Ghaziabad district which yielded statistics and insights on clean cooking coverage and accessibility, energy usage and prices and how gender is an important determinant of cleaner cooking fuels.

Kerosene subsidies are expensive: estimated to be more than US$ 4 billion in West Africa and more than US$ 5 billion in India. What are governments—often with highly limited resources—achieving by spending all this money? And with an increasing number of countries committing to reform subsidies, what will it mean for energy access if these policies are removed?

In New York this weekend (25–27 September) over 100 heads of state and government attended the UN Sustainable Development Summit to adopt the "Sustainable Development Goals" (SDGs) – the development agenda for the world for the next fifteen years. The goals cover 17 areas including their "Means of Implementation", which is how these goals will be funded.