Women Are the Ones Most Affected by Energy Poverty. They're Also the Solution.

Before dawn in a rural village in Guyana, a woman is already awake. She's building a fire to cook breakfast. Her daughter is doing homework by the light of a kerosene lamp, eyes straining. This scene repeats — with local variations — across Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and South and Southeast Asia. Billions of times a day.

Energy poverty is not a gender-neutral problem. Women and girls bear its heaviest burden. And they are also its most powerful solution.

The Data Is Clear

The World Health Organization estimates that 3.2 million people die prematurely each year from household air pollution caused by cooking over open fires and dirty fuels. More than 60% of those deaths are women and children.

The International Energy Agency puts the number of people without access to clean cooking at 2.1 billion. Of the hours lost each day to collecting firewood and managing open fires, the overwhelming majority fall on women and girls.

The World Bank has documented the direct link between lack of reliable lighting and girls' educational outcomes. When a household gets electricity — specifically, lighting after dark — girls' school attendance and study hours increase. When it doesn't, the gap compounds year after year.

These aren't soft social metrics. They are hard economic losses. Every hour a woman spends gathering fuel is an hour not spent on a market stall, a sewing machine, a phone call, a ledger. Energy poverty is one of the most efficient destroyers of women's economic agency that exists.

What I've Seen Firsthand

Through my work with ACEN (the Africa-Caribbean Energy Network) and the Lady B Bless Humanitarian Foundation, I've seen the same pattern play out across contexts. In communities where electrification arrives, women move fast. They set up charging hubs. They run small cold-storage businesses. They start taking mobile payments. They stop losing inventory to spoilage.

The economic multiplier on women's energy access is not hypothetical. It's documented. IRENA data shows that women-led energy cooperatives in East and West Africa consistently outperform mixed-gender or male-led ones on community adoption rates and long-term maintenance. The reason is straightforward: women who live with energy poverty understand the problem better than any consultant who visits for a week.

Pay-as-you-go solar has been particularly powerful. In Kenya and Tanzania, women represent the majority of PAYG solar customers in rural areas — not because of targeted programs, but because they are the ones making household energy decisions and they recognize the value immediately. The product meets a need they've been carrying for years.

The Caribbean Is Part This Story

Energy poverty in the Caribbean takes a different shape but carries the same gender dimension.

In Guyana's interior, communities still depend on diesel generators and kerosene. The cost and unreliability fall disproportionately on women managing households. In Jamaica, electricity tariffs above 40 cents per kilowatt-hour make energy a constant household budget pressure — and women, who in Caribbean households often manage day-to-day finances, absorb that pressure directly.

Climate vulnerability adds another layer. When a hurricane hits and the grid goes down for weeks, women are managing households, children, and extended families without power. The recovery burden is not evenly distributed.

And yet women are chronically underrepresented in Caribbean energy policy discussions, utility boardrooms, and infrastructure planning processes. The people who understand the problem most intimately have the least structural power to shape the solutions.

Three Things That Need to Change

1. Gender-disaggregated energy data must become standard. Most national energy statistics do not track energy access or energy burden by gender. You cannot design effective interventions for a problem you aren't measuring. Every national energy survey, every IEA country report, every utility access audit should include gender-disaggregated data as a baseline requirement.

2. Women must be in energy leadership, not just energy beneficiary programs. Targeted programs that deliver solar lanterns to women are not the same as structural inclusion. Women need to be in the boardrooms of utilities, on the technical committees of CARICOM energy working groups, leading the engineering and financing of infrastructure projects. ACEN is working on this. It's slow work. It matters.

3. Gender-lens investing needs to enter the energy transition. Development finance institutions and climate funds have made progress on gender equity commitments — on paper. The gap between commitment and portfolio allocation remains wide. Investors who apply a genuine gender lens to energy transition financing will find better outcomes, not worse ones. The evidence is there. The capital needs to follow.

The Women Holding It Together

I think about the woman cooking before dawn. I think about her daughter and the kerosene lamp. I think about what changes — practically, concretely — when that household gets reliable electricity. The daughter studies longer. The woman sleeps better because she isn't managing smoke. The family's health costs drop. A small business becomes possible.

Multiply that by hundreds of millions of households.

The energy transition being built right now will either include those women as decision-makers and beneficiaries — or it will leave them behind again, the way every previous infrastructure wave largely did. That is not inevitable. It is a choice being made, right now, in policy rooms and investment committees and engineering firms.

I intend to keep showing up in those rooms and saying so.

If you want to understand energy poverty — what it actually means, who it affects, and what the path forward looks like — Energy Poverty Explained is $9.99 at iamladybbless.com/products.

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