Gender Responsiveness at PFAN
The PFAN Gender Strategy
PFAN recognizes not only its responsibility but also the opportunity to contribute towards the overarching goal of gender equality and the empowerment of women within both its internal operations and regional activities and wants to address embedded and unconscious gender biases internally and externally. PFAN’s gender strategy is built on this foundation.
The PFAN Gender Strategy has three main objectives:
- To achieve greater, more sustainable, equitable outcomes and impacts in an efficient and comprehensive manner by empowering women to actively contribute to and benefit from PFAN’s network and services;
- To encourage every project supported by PFAN to be gender-responsive so that women’s and men’s resilience and ability to address climate change, as well as access to clean energy, are equally enhanced; and
- To increase the pool of women-led and gender-focused projects in the clean energy and climate adaptation sector in order to reduce the gender gap of climate change-exacerbated social, economic and environmental vulnerabilities.
The PFAN Gender Action Plan
Reaching the objectives of PFAN’s Gender Strategy requires working with all stakeholders, notably with project developers and business owners, investors and members of the PFAN organization and network. The strategy has been translated into the PFAN Gender Action Plan in 2019, which includes action points for each stakeholder group, such as:
- PFAN supports female entrepreneurs in accessing financing and expects to increase the pool of women-led and gender-focused projects by creating and promoting role models and success stories for other women.
- PFAN intends to play a central role in sensitizing project developers and investors on the strengths of gender-balanced portfolios and influence the climate finance environment by educating and raising awareness of the benefits of gender equality.
- PFAN adds different sets of skills and improves team dynamics by providing women and men with the same opportunity to be part of PFAN: as employees, coordinators, project developers or network members.
Applying a gender lens
Since 2019, PFAN has been intensifying its efforts to achieve its gender objectives. In 2020, PFAN turned its focus toward virtually-held regional gender awareness trainings for its network (check out our 2020 Annual Report for more information). In 2021, with the support of Value for Women and generously Funded by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), PFAN has started to work on how to apply a gender lens to its various activities, including capacitating all PFAN advisors to make them more effective agents of change and drive and influence gender-equitable change. This was highlighted at the Gender Smart Investing Summit in February 2021, and is at the core of the commitment UNIDO made on “Embedding gender smart practices in climate entrepreneurship ecosystems”.
A practical step moving forward to this commitment was the workshop “Embedding Gender-Smart Practices in Climate Entrepreneurship Support” held on 16 September 2021. The objective of this event was to raise awareness, influence and inspire entrepreneur support organizations and investors in clean energy and climate change adaptation to become more gender-smart in their operations, ultimately mobilizing more capital for a just energy transition (check out our news article for more information).
For more updates on PFAN’s work on gender follow our social media campaign #PFANforEquality (LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook).
The renewable energy and climate adaptation sector is fast-growing hence needs passionate and qualified individuals to take up leadership roles in seeing to the successful implementation and management of its market. As the Country Coordinator for Ghana and Project Assistant for PFAN West Africa, I help to screen a minimum of about 100 clean/renewable energy and climate adaptation projects every year. I also work closely with PFAN-recruited advisors in Ghana who provide coaching services to developers.
Environment 360, Ghana
I strongly believe that strengthening the role of women in renewable energy through better education and other measures would boost progress towards SDGs on energy, gender equality, health and education, amongst others. In PFAN, I have the unique advantage of being on both sides of the table. I am the co-founder of Radix Lifespaces Pvt. Ltd and a PFAN Advisor , coaching developers from an entrepreneurial point of view, and act as the bridge between entrepreneurs and investors.