Gender and Energy Network of South Africa: National Training Workshop on Gender and Energy Safety

ENERGIA partnered with GERT (Gender and Energy Research and Training) to perform the South African national training workshop on ‘mainstreaming gender concerns into energy projects’. The workshop was held from 15–19 March 2010. The workshop had a total of 15 participants selected from low-income areas of the two South African provinces, namely Western Cape and Gauteng.

The training covered topics such as background on energy and gender concepts, ‘energy safety in the home and workplace’ with a focus on gender aspects, ‘energy efficiency in the home and workplace’. Participants were encouraged to think about their action plans i.e. what they would like to do when they go back to their constituencies. This was captured by the last day’s activities where each participant went through the plans they had been conceiving throughout the training and allowed them to present them to the whole group. The presentations assisted participants with information they could use for their action plans as everyone contributed to each other’s plans and suggested ways to make each plan work better.

In August 2011 a follow up session was held to track outcomes of the action plans. Most of the participants had formulated their action plans during the training workshop and had made commitments to see them through when they went back to their communities. Some of the action plans did not materialize due to challenges that participants were faced with when they got back to their communities, such as lack of time, resources, lack of buy-in from community leaders and decision makers. Nevertheless, out of a total of 9 plans to which participants committed 4 were deemed to be successful.

South Africa National Post Training Report - Download