They call them ‘microgrid girls’. In Yemen, ten women are running a solar station 20 miles from the front line in Abs, a rural area near the border of Saudi Arabia. Five years of war left the country destroyed and access to electricity was limited and expensive. When the COVID-19-Crisis hit the country, the women felt compelled to act.
With the help of a United Nations development program and a 20-day technical training course, they learned how to operate and market a solar microgrid. The success of the women is all the more remarkable as none of them had any experience with renewable energies and only a few had ever done paid work, which is still often considered to be men's work. But the benefits that the microgrid girls bring to their communities have proven transformative. More and more women feel inspired and able to do paid work, and their communities are respecting them for it.
These microgrids might just benefit about 10 000 people in a rural area in Yemen, but they prove the extraordinary transformative power of renewable energies. Microgrids benefit everyone in the community by providing affordable and reliable energy. At the same time, they make the community more independent, because they enable the community to produce its own energy, independent from external suppliers. Last but not least, and especially in this case, they improve the position and opportunities of women in the community, which hopefully leads to a fairer and more equal society for all.
But gender inequality is by no means limited to rural areas such as the home of the microgrid girls. Even though women in the West have significantly more opportunities and freedoms, discrimination in the world of work is not yet a thing of the past. In the field of renewable energies alone, we find far fewer women than one would expect. Dr. Rabia Ferroukhi, Director of Knowledge, Policy and Finance Centre at the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) explains: The employment rate in the renewable energy sector lies at low 32% worldwide. In the oil and gas sector it is even lower with 22%. Low employment rates in other economic sectors are well-known. According to Christine Lins, the Managing Director & Co-Founder of Global Women’s Network for the Energy Transition (GWNET), the renewable energy sector is going to generate approximately 43 million jobs till 2050. Achieving gender equality and diversity is more important than ever.