Alliance & wPOWER Partnership
Women’s Empowerment Fund (WEF):
• The Alliance will partner with wPOWER to increase the number of women energy
entrepreneurs and promote product bundling to enhance livelihoods through this Fund
• Our partner iDEV will conduct due diligence on 2 women-led energy SMEs annually to identify
gaps where the WEF grant mechanism can support their growth
• Clean cooking enterprises will receive targeted coaching in gender mainstreaming and
women’s empowerment to scale women’s entrepreneurship within business models
Biennial conference: The Alliance will convene a biennial conference on women’s entrepreneurship
in the household energy sector to share innovations and best practices
• Learnings will be integrated into curriculum of wPOWER Hub to align knowledge and training
efforts of wPOWER umbrella globally
Empowered Entrepreneur Training Handbook: The Alliance’s handbook will be made available with
trainings conducted on its use to wPOWER partners who can implement the activities/tools with their
women entrepreneurs
Energy access education and awareness programs for adolescent girls: The Alliance will
pilot education and awareness programs in Kenya under the wPOWER umbrella
1 | CLEAN COOKSTOVES AND
FUELS
Alliance Gender Resources:
Resource Guide on Scaling Adoption through Women’s
Empowerment
• A practical tool for a wide-variety of Alliance partners.
o Increases the understanding of why women are critical
o Demonstrates how to ensure they are included in every segment of the
value chain
o Tells the story of women’s empowerment in the clean cooking sector
•
The Resource Guide serves as the foundation to build our partner’s capacity to
integrate and empower women
o Accessible information and resources: The Gender Online Knowledge Hub
features over 55 tools (www.cleancookstoves.org/gender)
o Resource Guide implementation: workshops, trainings, grant
opportunities, & media
o Series of publications
2 | CLEAN COOKSTOVES AND
FUELS
Alliance Gender Resources:
Empowered Entrepreneur Training Handbook (Upcoming)
What is the handbook?
• A 6-day holistic collection of empowerment, leadership and basic business training activities /
tools for female micro and small entrepreneurs
Who is it for?
• Practitioners and enterprises engaging women as micro and small entrepreneurs
Why is the Alliance developing it?
•
The Alliance’s Gender and Empowerment research and evaluation has revealed the need
to foster agency-based empowerment and leadership as key components to engage
women as micro-entrepreneurs in the clean cooking value chain
•
Intrinsic factors (such as self-efficacy, agency, motivation and drive) contribute substantially
to women’s competitiveness, growth and capacity to succeed as entrepreneurs
•
Empowerment training, coupled with leadership training can support the development of
these intrinsic factors. Further combining this with basic business skills training can equip
women with heightened opportunities for success as entrepreneurs
Partners developing the handbook: Johns Hopkins University, The Visionaria Network, and
GVEP International
To be released in November 2014
3 | CLEAN COOKSTOVES AND
FUELS