Women face many challenges in participating and benefiting from energy sector development. The challenges are socio-economic and technological. Energy use is valuable not in itself, but for what it enables women and men to do or achieve. The commonly used measures of energy—be it installed capacity, conversion efficiencies or per capita utilization levels—are just helpful indicators of the performance and dynamics of processes whose aim is to benefit ordinary women and men, and achieve inclusive development.

Energy systems and their societal contexts and impacts are complex and non-linear. The job of engineers is to constantly interact with and negotiate this linear, non-linear systems divide. It’s through such an interaction that real-life engineering problems are solved. This necessitates that gender and social inclusion is also included in the equation to finding engineering solutions to energy sector development. — Blogs.adb.org/blog