PANAPRESS
Panafrican News Agency
Tanzania: Lack of energy security keeps half of the population in darkness (News Analysis by Anaclet Rwegayura, PANA Corresponent, Dar Es Salaam)
Morogoro, Tanzania (PANA) – Over five decades after gaining independence from colonial rule, Tanzania still struggles to give its fast growing population another crucial instrument for meaningful development – energy security.
But the female population, over 62 percent of the country’s inhabitants, is seen as being sidelined by policy and decision makers when it comes to gender mainstreaming in energy issues.
“Though women and men in general are affected by lack of modern energy technologies, plans for energy distribution projects in the country are executed without adequate consideration to make life easy and better for women,” Tatu Suleiman Mmanga, chairperson of National Gender and Sustainable Energy Network (NGSEN), told PANA.
According to her, Tanzania’s policy makers concentrate on industrial energy and don’t put emphasis on domestic energy for both urban and rural dwellers.
Energy is easily accessible in towns but none of the country’s expanding urban centres can be said to represent the countryside around them that has no access to commercial energy.
The usually-crowded and busy streets of major cities bear witness to much that is happening in the rural areas, both positive and negative results of Tanzania’s past development policies.
Hordes of young people keep drifting from villages into cities such as Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Mbeya and Arusha, to seize their share of what they were dreaming about as good town life.
But a majority of them end up as hawkers and loiterers if they don’t fall with gangs of criminals and drug addicts, who during the night put up in the dark colonies of shacks.
Thanks to the globally shared technologies and markets, this East African nation is moving into the modern world, but it requires extra resources to open up opportunities for the rural population to escape from the poverty trap.
Tanzania’s advance in such areas as literacy, universal primary education, health and life expectancy as well as transport and communication seems to be dogged by retreat somewhere else due to inadequate energy supply.
With a population of 45 million that grows at the rate of 2.7 percent a year, according to the 2012 national census and household survey, Tanzania will be home to over 63 million people by 2025, the year it envisages to reach middle-income status.
Also, the census statistics indicate that the urban population has jumped from 6 percent in 1967 to 30 percent in 2012 but only 21 percent of all households in the country use electricity for illumination.
Sheer statistics still threaten every gain the country makes over the next decade.
“The country’s rural electrification programme has reportedly reached 14 percent of the population, but in essence hasn’t changed the rural woman’s life. For her, it’s drudgery after drudgery from dawn to midnight,” said Gisela Ngoo, coordinator of National Gender and Sustainable Energy Network (NGSEN).
Women constitute about 62.2 percent of the Tanzanian population and they are the most affected by lack of access to modern domestic energy as they miss out on opportunities and the quality of life it provides.
According to Ngoo, a gender and energy specialist, women must be involved right from the design stage of every energy development project that is intended to contribute to economic growth and household incomes as well as an improved quality of life.
“Let alone energy projects,” Ngoo said, “gender mainstreaming is a sine qua non element in all endeavours for achieving broad-based socioeconomic transformation.”
Keeping the question of gender in focus while scaling up access to modern energy supply can help bring about great benefits to society as both women’s and men’s livelihood opportunities improve.
“Achievement of better livelihoods always empowers women and eventually leads to better gender relations within homes and communities,” remarked Eveline Kihula at a workshop for activists on gender mainstreaming, held this week at Morogoro regional capital in eastern Tanzania.
In Kihula’s opinion, emphasis on gender access to modern energy impacts on all economic activities undertaken by the people, but it also has direct benefits for women as it reduces drudgery and workload.
According to a new study by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the great dependence of populations in the Eastern Africa countries on biomass limits opportunities in the energy-dependent small and large scale industries, particularly in rural areas.
The study, ‘Energy Access and Security in Eastern Africa – Status and Enhancement Pathways’, which was released this week, has commended Tanzania’s national energy policy as “one of the most comprehensive policies in the sub-region, clearly articulating specific energy policy goals in different economic sectors, setting out energy access and energy security policy directions and actively encouraging regional trade and cooperation.”
Adopted in 2003, the national policy calls for all stakeholders within the energy sector to take deliberate sensitisation actions to encourage women participation in energy related education, training programmes and projects, planning, decision-making and, not least, energy policy implementation.
Among other actions, the policy also calls for promotion of gender equality within the energy sub-sector both on the demand and supply sides.
Tanzania’s gender strategy of 2005 aims to achieve gender equality and equity and, in a bid to ensure gender concerns are taken into account in the implementation of commitments embodied in international, regional and national pacts on gender, the government has set up a gender desk in every ministry.
Activists, however, wonder if those desks are active and effective to ensure gender mainstreaming in public institutions and, more importantly, programmes aimed at poverty reduction.
“Having a gender desk in every institution or government ministry is one issue, making that desk active is another,” said Ngoo, pointing out that budgetary resources set aside for gender mainstreaming were either misused or simply surrendered to the treasury at the end of the financial year because nobody applied to use the funds.
The principal goal of NGSEN is to see the entire population access to some form of modern energy at an affordable cost, not to impress one another with their prosperity, but to step up economic activities and self-employment.
“Energy accessibility is crucial and goes beyond economic growth considerations, to broader social development,” the UNECA report said, explaining that at the micro level, the existing heavy reliance on biomass and limited transition to modern energy sources has social costs, such as indoor pollution and the opportunity cost of retrieving firewood.
Based on data of the World Health Organisation, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that, globally, some 1.3 million lives are lost due to health complications resulting from inhalation of smoke from biomass burning. This health impact is largely felt by women.
Tanzanian policy makers face increasingly complex situations and choices in trying to make progress towards energy security for the people, but their task can be eased by mobilising private investors and capital.
-0- PANA AR/VAO 18June2014
But the female population, over 62 percent of the country’s inhabitants, is seen as being sidelined by policy and decision makers when it comes to gender mainstreaming in energy issues.
“Though women and men in general are affected by lack of modern energy technologies, plans for energy distribution projects in the country are executed without adequate consideration to make life easy and better for women,” Tatu Suleiman Mmanga, chairperson of National Gender and Sustainable Energy Network (NGSEN), told PANA.
According to her, Tanzania’s policy makers concentrate on industrial energy and don’t put emphasis on domestic energy for both urban and rural dwellers.
Energy is easily accessible in towns but none of the country’s expanding urban centres can be said to represent the countryside around them that has no access to commercial energy.
The usually-crowded and busy streets of major cities bear witness to much that is happening in the rural areas, both positive and negative results of Tanzania’s past development policies.
Hordes of young people keep drifting from villages into cities such as Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Mbeya and Arusha, to seize their share of what they were dreaming about as good town life.
But a majority of them end up as hawkers and loiterers if they don’t fall with gangs of criminals and drug addicts, who during the night put up in the dark colonies of shacks.
Thanks to the globally shared technologies and markets, this East African nation is moving into the modern world, but it requires extra resources to open up opportunities for the rural population to escape from the poverty trap.
Tanzania’s advance in such areas as literacy, universal primary education, health and life expectancy as well as transport and communication seems to be dogged by retreat somewhere else due to inadequate energy supply.
With a population of 45 million that grows at the rate of 2.7 percent a year, according to the 2012 national census and household survey, Tanzania will be home to over 63 million people by 2025, the year it envisages to reach middle-income status.
Also, the census statistics indicate that the urban population has jumped from 6 percent in 1967 to 30 percent in 2012 but only 21 percent of all households in the country use electricity for illumination.
Sheer statistics still threaten every gain the country makes over the next decade.
“The country’s rural electrification programme has reportedly reached 14 percent of the population, but in essence hasn’t changed the rural woman’s life. For her, it’s drudgery after drudgery from dawn to midnight,” said Gisela Ngoo, coordinator of National Gender and Sustainable Energy Network (NGSEN).
Women constitute about 62.2 percent of the Tanzanian population and they are the most affected by lack of access to modern domestic energy as they miss out on opportunities and the quality of life it provides.
According to Ngoo, a gender and energy specialist, women must be involved right from the design stage of every energy development project that is intended to contribute to economic growth and household incomes as well as an improved quality of life.
“Let alone energy projects,” Ngoo said, “gender mainstreaming is a sine qua non element in all endeavours for achieving broad-based socioeconomic transformation.”
Keeping the question of gender in focus while scaling up access to modern energy supply can help bring about great benefits to society as both women’s and men’s livelihood opportunities improve.
“Achievement of better livelihoods always empowers women and eventually leads to better gender relations within homes and communities,” remarked Eveline Kihula at a workshop for activists on gender mainstreaming, held this week at Morogoro regional capital in eastern Tanzania.
In Kihula’s opinion, emphasis on gender access to modern energy impacts on all economic activities undertaken by the people, but it also has direct benefits for women as it reduces drudgery and workload.
According to a new study by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the great dependence of populations in the Eastern Africa countries on biomass limits opportunities in the energy-dependent small and large scale industries, particularly in rural areas.
The study, ‘Energy Access and Security in Eastern Africa – Status and Enhancement Pathways’, which was released this week, has commended Tanzania’s national energy policy as “one of the most comprehensive policies in the sub-region, clearly articulating specific energy policy goals in different economic sectors, setting out energy access and energy security policy directions and actively encouraging regional trade and cooperation.”
Adopted in 2003, the national policy calls for all stakeholders within the energy sector to take deliberate sensitisation actions to encourage women participation in energy related education, training programmes and projects, planning, decision-making and, not least, energy policy implementation.
Among other actions, the policy also calls for promotion of gender equality within the energy sub-sector both on the demand and supply sides.
Tanzania’s gender strategy of 2005 aims to achieve gender equality and equity and, in a bid to ensure gender concerns are taken into account in the implementation of commitments embodied in international, regional and national pacts on gender, the government has set up a gender desk in every ministry.
Activists, however, wonder if those desks are active and effective to ensure gender mainstreaming in public institutions and, more importantly, programmes aimed at poverty reduction.
“Having a gender desk in every institution or government ministry is one issue, making that desk active is another,” said Ngoo, pointing out that budgetary resources set aside for gender mainstreaming were either misused or simply surrendered to the treasury at the end of the financial year because nobody applied to use the funds.
The principal goal of NGSEN is to see the entire population access to some form of modern energy at an affordable cost, not to impress one another with their prosperity, but to step up economic activities and self-employment.
“Energy accessibility is crucial and goes beyond economic growth considerations, to broader social development,” the UNECA report said, explaining that at the micro level, the existing heavy reliance on biomass and limited transition to modern energy sources has social costs, such as indoor pollution and the opportunity cost of retrieving firewood.
Based on data of the World Health Organisation, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that, globally, some 1.3 million lives are lost due to health complications resulting from inhalation of smoke from biomass burning. This health impact is largely felt by women.
Tanzanian policy makers face increasingly complex situations and choices in trying to make progress towards energy security for the people, but their task can be eased by mobilising private investors and capital.
-0- PANA AR/VAO 18June2014
