ENERGIA News, by Nalini Burn and Laurent Coche, October 2000
The Multifunctional Platform:  

  Decentralised Energy for Gender-aware Poverty Reduction in Rural West Africa 

This article outlines the ongoing experience with a project concerned with decentralised mechanical and electrical energy supply.

The project, which is supported by UNDP, is explicitly targeted at reducing poverty and achieving gender equality in villages in Mali and, through a regional project, other countries in sub-Saharian Africa. Energy Platforms, that is to say small engines to which a variety of end use equipement can be attached (mills,alternators, oil presses etc), are promoted. The basic aims of the project are to reduce the time and energy poverty of women and to enhance the opportunities this creates for reducing income povertyand for achieving desirable outcomes in terms of other indicators of well-being and empowerment. The project, using its partners, can achieve these outcomes through the benefits of water pumping and water point provision, electric lighting and education.

The intervention strategy is to endow women's associations that request the platform with the equipment, to build up their capacity to sustain ownership and control over time, and to develop the managerial and entrepreneurial competencies needed to enhance economic and technical viability. The entry point for vesting ownership and management in women is through concentrating on end-use characteristics, drawing attention to the traditional gender division of labour. The design and monitoring mechanisms explicity focus on the recognised risk of made appropriation of technology and income generated from this technology.

Further, this article engages with the current thinking and debate about gender, poverty and energy linkages and interventions. While the project focuse on the micro-level of the household and the village, its design, monitoring and evaluation use a conceptual, analytical and results-based management framework wich links the micro to the meso and levels of development. This gender analysis framework also takes onto account the link between the marketed, productive sector of the economy and the non-marketed, uncounted, productive, as well as reproductive, or domestic sector of the economy.

How the platform addresses rural women's activities and specific energy needs.

Smallholder agricultural or livestock production, which occupies the overwhelming majority of the women, men, girls and boys of Sub-Saharan Africa, is characterised by a variety of gender and age-specific productive and reproductive tasks. These tasks, which make intensive use of energy and time to varying degrees, are subject to significant trade-offs in terms of income generation, time for inter-personal care and other capabilities and well-being enhancing uses of time. Many activities undertaken by women enhance the capacity of both men and women to engage in smallholder production and sustain social and cultural life on a daily basis. These form the primary target of the Platform for electrification and mechanisation.

The Platform is a technology which has been specifically designed to address the multiple uses of women's (as well as girls' and boys') time and energy in a variety of daily unpaid and uncounted productive/reproductive activities, most of which are gender-based obligations. Post-harvest food processing (grinding, dehusking, oil extraction), water extraction, transport and distribution are the most important of these. The Platform also caters for lighting needs and other end-uses of electricity that occupy women's, girls', boys' and men's time, including income generation, entertainment and leisure, social and cultural activities; and capability building, such as reading, writing and studying.

The nature of the platform technology.

The innovative

aspect of the Platform is that it combines energy supply with a variety of tools for different end uses. It consist of the basic energy infrastructure; in the form of an 8 hp or 10 hp (approx 7 kw) diesel engine (the Indian-made Lister engine, widely available in rural areas of Mali and Burkina Faso). The engine, which is mounted on a platform, can drive equipment also installed on this platform such as alternators for electricity generation for lighting, battery charging, welding, powering carpentry and joinery machinery. Mechanical equipment can also be connected such as grinding mills, hullers, oil presses, straw shredders. These end-use tools, given the gender division of labour in rural economies, can save women, as well as men, time and energy, and generate income.

The platform is thus multifunctional and flexible. Different pieces of dedicated aquipment, for different end-uses, can be combined simultaneously and-or sequentially, for different uses and users. This is particularly appropriate for the time and energy-intensive multi-tasking that women engage in at particular times of the day, which can lead to bottlenecks in meal preparation, household maintenance, inter-personal services to husbands, the elderly and children before and after field work.

For instance, the engine can operate simultaneously, a water pum^producing between 1-8 cubic metres per hour, a mill rated at 150 kg per hour, a battery charger, and still provide lighting (capacity of up to 135-180 25 watt bulbs). This engine is widely used elsewhere well below its capacity (for example for single use in private mills). However, simultaneous multifunctioning is not possible with welding, rice hulling and mechanical saws. The platform is an example of a decentralised energy supply combined with flexible mechanisation, which allows the possibility of economies of scope.

Decentralised energy supply: diesel or renewables?

The average size of a village in Mali is about 1000 inhabitants. There are some 7,000 such villages dispersed over a wide area, typically with poor communications and infrastructure. This is unfavourable for centralised grid electrification; and decentralised supply is the only viable at present. The question is, which decentralised technology is best and are renewable energy options more desirable than fossil fuel based ones?. The sustainable development discourse and practice which focus on the links between enrgy, natural resources, agriculture and poverty (and which now attempt to "factor in" gender) have tented to opt for renewable energy options. Before making such a choice in reality, however, it is important consider a wide range of issues and factors in the local context.

This issue is best put into perspective from the vantage point of a village women's association considering energy substitution. They have to balance their ability and willingness to pay for equipment to supply energyservices, and for a variety of different end-uses, against the alternative: the supply of their own physical energy. If the different types of equipment (renewable and non-renewable) were offered under the same financial and institutional conditions, a platform run on diesel would be the most affordable and effective option, whaterver the time perspective, when compared to solar and wind power, in the present context in Mali and other parts of the Sahel. However, renewable equipment is often very heavily subsidised. Solar powered water pumps for instance are donated (a single end-use) with free provision of services and, in some cases, solar lighting systems have also been supplied entirely free of charge. However, it is a principle of the Platform project that the equipment be selected, at least partially, using market criteria.

Its acquisition requires financial outlays from the energy entrepreneurs (that is, the Women's Association), who need to make an assessment of financial, economic and social viability based on market demand and supply conditions. The rationale for this, from the point of view of the project, is the sustainability of the technology transfer beyond the project life and the life of the equipement. It is for this reason that access to the energy services of the platform is market-based and fee-paying.

The option of renewable feedstock for the platform: pourghere (Jatropha curcas).

There is scope for the platform to use renewable energy but this is not currently financially viable and may never be economically viable in many regions. The Indian-made Lister engine can run on vegetable oil as well diesel. Pourghere is a shrub that grows in different parts of Africa. It is not eaten by goats and is often grown as hedges to protect vegetable plts against animal predators. It thus also has an anti-soil erosion value and acts as a wind break. Most interestingly, its seeds can be pressed using an oil press mounted on the platform, and the oil poured directly into fuel tank of the platform. The remaining seedcake can be used as organic fertiliser.

To the women energy entrepreneurs, any competitive advantage of pourghere over will depend on the relative price of diesel, the seasonal labour requirements for pourghere production compared to other gender-specific uses of time and energy, the level of income poverty and agro-climatic conditions. With the prevailing prices and energy policies, diesel is still the cheapest option. The potential multiple end-uses of the pourghere are under-exploited at present. However, the platform has the potential to be an engine of synergy, if the many end-uses of this vegetable fuel can be coordinated to increase the value-added by each activity.

The financial conditions

Currently the project offers finances up to $1500, which is around 20 to 30% of the cost of the basic platform, provided that the installation of the equipment is economically, socially and technically viable. The basic platform includes the engine, an alternator (for the lighting of the building) and a mill, and is available on a demand-driven basis. The remaining financial outlay has to be mobilised by the village; clients pay for energy and end-use services.

There are separate financing facilities available for a minigrid for lighting or a mini-water network if the community so request. Around $10,500, 90% of the total cost, can be provided, if the proposal is viable in the economic, social and technical senses. For instance, a minimum of some 100 bulbs are necessary, at current financial arrangements, for electric lighting to be viable at the rate of 1000 FCFA (about 1.30 $US) per month per bulb for 3 hours of lighting daily. This can mean that up to 100 households are needed in the network, depending on purchasing power and other commercial and institutional users.

Ways of thinking: women, time and energy poverty

The literature on energy-poverty-gender, as well as the platforms of action for gender equality and women's empowerment, concentrate on widening access to energy. The access paradigm locks one into a pattern of thinking that perceives women primarily as users and consumers of energy. In actual practice, women are the source of energy, as the story in the box shows.

In 1998, in one village, Maourolo in Mali, a group of women told the evaluation team why they needed a platform. "At this moment it is harvest time, we spend all our time until wellafter dark in the fields. Tonight the children will go to be bed without food, and the men will go back to the fields without breakfast. You see, we do still have cereals in the granary but we simply do not have time to grind and cook food. We are exhausted. Tomorrow, we will stay behind and find the energy to prepare lunch to take to the men and the other women in the fields. They won't be able to work as they need to on a empty stomach".

Energy povrty is usually conceived of as energy deprivation, as traditional sources of biomass energy become depleted. Energy poverty can better be seen as the inability to afford alternative sources of energy when one's own supply, or own provisioning is exhausted. THis poverty exists because of an inability to command the energy and time using money or coercion (market or household provisioning) and to make more productive uses of one's own time. This adds another dimension to the issue of sustainability, that is, the sustainable use of women's labour.

Moreover, it is a gender-biased poverty since women provide their energy and time to others for free as an obligation towards husband and family, so taken for granted that is considered natural. In contrast, motorised equipment is for the exclusive use of men, paid for out of agricultural income. Indeed macroeconomic models and accounting systems consider women's unpaid labour as valueless in the economic sense. Even when gender analysis is mainstreamed in project preparation, the economic analyses carried out in parallel fail to include what is arguably the largest sub-sector of transport and energy in sub-Saharan Africa: human traction, haulage and energy.

Time and energy poverty are both the causes and the consequences of income poverty, and the associated conditions in education, health nutrition, and the lack of security, opportunity and empowerment. The real target for gender-aware poverty reduction and gender equality could thus be the disappearance of the human energy self-provisioning subsector, particularly for wome.

• Nalini Burn holds a first degree in economics from the London School of Economics and a master's degree in development economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has worked as a university lecturer for many years both in England and Mauritius and has been active in a number of women, as well as environment, NGOs in Mauritius. She now works as an international freelance consultant specialising in gender analysis, mainly for international agencies. She has been involved in the multifunctional platform project since 1997, developing participatory tools for design, monitoring and evaluation of the project as well as training of project staff and other partners.

• Laurent Coche graduated in International law and political sciences, and has a post graduate degree in development economics. Laurent  is the regional coordinator of the Regional Cell for the promotion of the energy platform in Mali. The aim of the programme is to assist interested countries to adopt the platform in their own project, initially as a pilot experience, to evaluate how efficient it is as a means of poverty alleviation.