Review: HT26: Week 7 – Embedding SDGs in Women-Led Clean Energy Transitions in Kenya
by Linus NjoguView the associated event for this review
What Dr Ayse Demir, Associate Professor at the University of Roehampton, initially designed as a seven month study in rural Kenya grew into a four year project, with each new phase conceived only after the previous one demonstrated the need for further intervention. Presenting to the Oxford Energy Network, she walked us through how the finding – that giving women access to solar products was not, on its own empowering – led to successive rounds of intervention across 13 counties. The final data had arrived just days before the seminar.
Energy Access Without Empowerment
Dr Demir began by outlining the scale of the challenge: around 37% of rural Kenyan households still lack reliable energy, and millions continue to rely on firewood and kerosene, with significant consequences for health and the environment. Women disproportionately bear this burden. In recent years, pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) solar home systems, financed through mobile money installments, have expanded energy access in off-grid areas. But Dr Demir’s central argument was that access alone does not automatically translate to sustained economic empowerment for women.
Her Phase 1 survey of 201 PAYGo customers across 17 counties found clear welfare gains in health, safety, and time savings from solar adoption. Yet nearly two-thirds of users reported no new income-generating activities, almost 60% struggled to meet down payments, and outcomes were notably worse for women. As she put it, “empowerment is a systems outcome, not a product outcome.”
Diagnosis and Interventions
The project was built on a tri-sector partnership between academia, the NGO Tumaini Women Kenya (TWK), and solar provider Solar Panda. Having identified the gap between access and empowerment, the team first addressed the supply side by training 46 sales agents in SDG-aware and gender-responsive messaging. This led to a 42% increase in weekly sales.
They then turned to the demand side with a pilot for 30 women in Nakuru and Nyakach, focused on raising awareness of the long-term productive benefits of clean energy. This resulted in 100% adoption of solar products, with 52% of participants reporting reduced energy spending, and 36% extending their business hours. The training also bridged a gap between providers and communities; some women had not even known that Solar Panda operated nearby.
Scaling Up and Community Handover
Encouraged by this, the project scaled to over 200 women across 13 counties, with training delivered through TWK’s network of chamas, informal savings groups with approximately 800 members. In the final phase, the researchers stepped back and let the communities lead. Twenty-two SDG leaders trained their own chama groups using materials shared via WhatsApp, and 17 women received seed funding of 10,000 Kenyan shillings (about £78) to run local micro-projects. These ranged from installing solar lighting in rural schools to piloting water pumps for farming.
Endline survey results were impressive: 97% of the women reported switching their energy source, 92% reduced kerosene use, and about 88% reported increased income. These figures were self-reported, as Dr Demir clarified during the Q&A. A particularly notable finding was the strong demand for solar-powered water pumps and incubators, products that, as Dr Demir noted, are largely absent from the sales portfolios of most PAYGo providers.
Discussions
A distinctive element of the seminar was the live participation of partners from Kenya. Scovia Amulen, CEO of Tumaini Women Kenya, explained that women increasingly see solar as an economic tool and that peer experience builds trust. David Wanjohi of Solar Panda added that working through community groups fostered peer-led uptake in ways that individual outreach rarely can.
One of the questions that came up in the Q&A was how income increases were measured in communities that are largely subsistence-based and do not depend heavily on cash transactions. Dr Demir explained that gains came mainly through two channels: reduced expenditure on kerosene and firewood, and increased farming output through solar-powered water pumps. She acknowledged that the effects of solar lighting on income generation would likely take longer to materialise, as households begin to extend productive activity into the evening.
When asked about sustainability beyond the project’s lifespan, Dr Demir pointed to the tri-sector partnership model: while the academic team would step back, the ongoing relationship between TWK and Solar Panda was designed to continue supporting communities. She emphasised that reaching rural populations through established grassroots organisations was far more effective than working through government or university channels alone.
The project is now a UNFCCC reference grassroots project, and Dr Demir was invited to join Gambia’s COP30 delegation as a clean energy expert. The next phase, funded through the Global Methane Hub, will measure methane mitigation through solar home system use. The seminar offered a good example of community-grounded, iterative research in the energy access space. But it also made clear how much has to fall into place beyond the product itself – training, trust and community leadership – for energy access to translate into lasting change.