This strategy aims to have impacts at the individual level, to strengthen the capabilities of project officers and policy makers working in developing countries where the ENERGIA network is present. Project officers and policy makers’ capabilities to design and implement gender-sensitive rural energy access projects and national energy policies will be strengthened.

ENERGIA’s capacity building strategy in Africa aims to aims to broaden the in-country capacity base on gender mainstreaming in 13 countries (i.e. Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, South, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe) by strengthening the capabilities of project managers to design and implement gender responsive energy projects. The strategy is implemented in such a way to ensure that trainings are self sustaining and contextualized to individual countries, and that the outputs are applied. This is done through the following steps:

• Training of Trainers (ToT) resulting in the expertise/capability to conduct gender and energy training being available in developing countries where ENERGIA is present.
• Contextualizing national training packages: The results of this step are training packages with country relevant context.
• National training workshops: the specialist trained in the ToT workshop will directly transfer their knowledge/skills to rural energy access project mangers in national training workshops to bridge the capability gap to design and implement gender responsive rural energy access projects.
• Gender Action Plans: developed by participants of the National Training Workshops to assure that gender is integrated into the design and implementation of rural energy access projects and national energy policies.
• Return workshops: facilitated by the national trainers as a follow up to the national training workshop, and during which participants discuss and assess the progress of implementing their gender action plans in their work environment.
• Post-Training Coaching: through which at least 2-3 participants per country participate in an electronic forum during which they are able to receive guidance on the implementation of their gender action plans from a gender and energy expert and other participants in the forum. Together the forum becomes a community of practice for mainstreaming gender into energy projects. More