Clean Energy as a Catalyst for Women’s Economic Empowerment

Executive summary

Clean energy solutions are a powerful lever for women’s economic empowerment (WEE), with far greater impact potential than previously recognised. However, the evidence needed to move funders and investors from interest to action has been fragmented, incomplete, and difficult to apply.

This report, developed through a synthesis of more than 115 studies, shows the many ways clean energy solutions can significantly improve women’s economic lives in emerging markets. The evidence is clear: women are using clean energy solutions. But which solutions women use, how and when they use them, and how these solutions impact WEE are the questions that this report sets out to answer. The evidence also makes a compelling case that clean energy and WEE are mutually reinforcing.

Funders who invest across both with intentionality, rigour, and patience are positioned to deliver outsized returns for women, for the climate, and for the broader systems of which both are a part.

Key finding 1: Clean energy has a multiplier effect on women’s income, safety, and agency

Across five archetypes of women, 1 evidence points to consistent, meaningful gains when clean energy interventions are well designed. Individual examples from the research illustrate the range of these gains:

• Increased income: Solar milk chillers have doubled earnings for women dairy farmers, 2 and irrigation has increased women farmers’ incomes by US$250 per year. 3
• Enhanced safety: A 16-percentage-point reduction in domestic violence followed the introduction of clean cookstoves in Uganda. 4
• Cost savings: Solar irrigation reduces irrigation expenses by up to 91% across five sub-Saharan African countries. 5
• Improved agency and control: Over 90% of women report greater agency over spending and over 80% greater involvement in household purchasing decisions after the introduction of clean energy assets.
• 6

These figures represent what is possible. Realising that potential for women consistently requires programmes designed around women’s specific barriers and contexts.

Key finding 2: The path to economic empowerment is not the same for every woman, and one solution can lead to cascading gains

WEE is not a single outcome but a multidimensional process spanning economic advancement, agency, and well-being. The most common ways to achieve this outcome are:

1. Through productive use technologies that directly generate economic returns for women
2. Indirectly through time savings or cost reductions, primarily in the household
3. Through employment, working within the clean energy value chain

The way women benefit further depends on their baseline socioeconomic status, the assets they use, the purposes for which they use them, and the surrounding context.

To measure the impact of clean energy assets on WEE, investors need frameworks that reflect this complexity. A cookstove may improve health, save time, and enable opportunities for entrepreneurial activities. However, a narrow assessment that focuses only on income uplift would miss most of the story. The evidence shows multiple, interacting pathways through which clean energy creates value for women: reduced drudgery, improved health, greater safety, stronger agency, and, where conditions align, increased income. Investors risk undervaluing interventions that deliver significant welfare gains, or overestimating income impact, if they track only productivity metrics.

Key finding 3: For women, financing terms can turn a viable investment into a loss

Financial modelling of fifteen clean energy assets led by Caribou in this study found that baseline conditions and enabling factors determine financial viability more than the technology itself.

Under the right conditions, solar milk chillers, improved cookstoves, refrigeration for micro-entrepreneurs, and solar irrigation pumps can all deliver strong financial returns for women. But the same assets can fail under the wrong conditions or assumptions. Technically sound investments can still fail if the surrounding context hasn’t been verified to ensure relevance. A solar fridge generates no revenue in a location without customer traffic; a milk chiller delivers no benefit when evening collection already exists. Investors should verify the conditions before committing, not assume them.

Productive-use technologies (those that create new revenue streams, such as solar irrigation enabling a second growing season, or milk chillers monetising evening production that would otherwise spoil) deliver stronger and more direct returns than well-being-oriented technologies like cookstoves, where realising economic gains depends on women converting time savings into paid work, which rarely happens without complementary programming. For investors, this may mean that there should be different expectations for how “success” is defined and measured in terms of return on investment for productive versus non-productive assets.

Financing terms are equally decisive: a solar irrigation system generating a 30% annual return when purchased upfront can produce a net loss under typical consumer finance or pay-as-you-go arrangements, where interest charges and premiums can exceed the income gains the technology produces. And even where returns are positive, affordability is a separate test; a technology that pays back over three years but requires monthly payments that consume 40% of household cash flow is not viable without concessional terms or subsidies during the early period. Positive return on investment is necessary, but not sufficient. These are market design problems, not inherent features of investing in women. Better-structured financing products, blended finance mechanisms, and first-loss arrangements can restore viable returns without requiring permanent subsidy.

Key finding 4: Five enabling factors matter more than the technology itself

The evidence points to five conditions—Agency, Relevance, Infrastructure, Skills, and Engagement (ARISE)—that distinguish interventions that deliver positive outcomes from those that fall short. Agency, relevance, and infrastructure (including access to finance) play the largest roles in the evidence base:

• Gains stall when women lack agency and men remain default decision-makers over what solutions are adopted and how they are When women are empowered to participate in decision-making and have control over finances, clean energy access translates into economic change. This is also why placement matters: technologies introduced at post-harvest and processing stages, where women already have operational control, are more likely to retain gains for women than those introduced at production stages where men dominate decision-making.
• Clean energy assets have the most significant impact on WEE when they are part of a set of bundled solutions that address women’s interconnected This means assets designed to serve multiple purposes, layered assets that build on each other, or the bundling of energy assets with complementary support, such as training and financing. Single-asset interventions rarely deliver the transformative change needed; bundled solutions do. A solar pump paired with zero energy cold storage, a women’s savings group and agronomic training for example outperforms the pump alone.
• When financing products offer flexible terms that are responsive to women’s needs, they can open pathways to assets that didn’t previously exist.

Key finding 5: Closing the gap between women’s economic empowerment and climate investment requires deliberate action

Too often, WEE and climate agendas operate in silos, with separate strategies, metrics, and funding streams, due to a perceived complexity of climate outcomes. Bridging this divide could simultaneously advance climate goals and transform women’s economic lives.

To capitalise on this opportunity, philanthropic funders and investors should:

• Design investments by segments; women are not one market. Conduct market research to understand and define the archetype of the women investments aim to The same assets perform differently depending on women’s initial conditions, roles, and context. Upfront investment in understanding local context and shaping complementary investments is what separates successful interventions from underperforming solutions.
• Intentionally bundle clean energy and non-energy solutions to deliver transformative Two-thirds of the solutions identified in this research included bundled solutions. Invest or partner with other funders to deliver holistic solutions that address women’s diverse roles and needs. Include solutions such as agency-building training, market access, digital access, and financing with terms that work for women, as well as valued health interventions like family planning, to ensure uptake and multiply impact for women.
• Understand the payback model from women’s perspective before designing new Financing terms alone can turn a viable return into a loss. Upfront assessment of whether proposed financing terms are affordable relative to household cash flows distinguishes interventions that deliver from those that underperform.
• Design with ARISE in mind Ensure the right conditions are in place for solutions to work by using these factors as a minimum checklist during design.
• Measure a range of outcomes—not just income—aligned to the relevant impact pathways identified in this Frameworks should track both monetary outcomes (income, productivity, yields) and non-monetary ones (time savings, health, agency). Programmes that measure holistically will generate insights that narrow monetary-oriented metrics miss.
• Invest in women’s employment in the clean energy sector. Low-barrier entry points offer strong returns for women’s income, agency and household decision-making. Opening more technical, leadership roles and shifting social norms will build a more inclusive clean energy sector, but requires a longer-term investment.
• Continue funding research that links intermediate outcomes to long-term WEE, so that future investment rests on up-to-date and broader evidence.

This report provides early insights into the opportunity that clean energy solutions offer for women. The field of the gender–energy nexus is still nascent, and the evidence base is strongest for cookstoves and lighting. For productive use technologies and agricultural energy, the impact pathways are clear, and emerging evidence is compelling. However, more rigorous, longitudinal research is needed. This report is a strong start. It is not the final word.

Clean energy and WEE are mutually reinforcing. Funders who invest across both with intentionality, rigour, and patience are positioned to deliver outsized returns for women, for climate, and for the broader systems of which both are part.

Where clean energy meets women’s economic empowerment

Climate change is not gender neutral. Women are disproportionately affected by energy poverty and climate impacts, making gender inclusion an essential pillar for building resilient communities.

Climate shocks are becoming more severe, with women in rural areas disproportionately impacted. In Africa, effects of climate change will potentially push 158 million more women and girls into poverty by 2050. 7 Women and girls, particularly those living in rural areas and lower-income households, bear a disproportionate burden of this impact because of existing gender inequalities that influence how women can respond to climate change. 8 They spend more hours collecting fuel and water. 9 When resources become scarce due to climate change, they adapt by working harder and travelling further. 10

Energy poverty restricts health potential and reduces safety for women

An estimated 2.2 billion people rely on biomass for cooking, heating, and lighting. 11 Two-thirds of women in rural communities across Africa, Asia, and Latin America spend one to three hours each day collecting fuelwood and managing household energy needs. 12

The health consequences of energy poverty are severe. Household air pollution from traditional cookstoves and kerosene lighting causes over 3.2 million deaths annually, including more than 237,000 children under five. 13 Millions more suffer from respiratory illness, heart disease, and cancer. Kerosene lighting exposes households to double the particulate matter levels of solar alternatives 14 and is linked to a 9.4 times higher probability of active tuberculosis. 15 Burns kill an estimated 180,000 people each year; the vast majority come from traditional cooking fires, 16 with women accounting for around 65% of severe kitchen burn injuries. 17

The risks extend beyond the home. In displaced and refugee settings, 75% to 90% of rapes occur when women and girls leave camp to gather cooking fuel. 18 The search for energy exposes women to violence in ways that cleaner, closer alternatives could prevent.

Energy access shapes women’s economic participation

Across Africa and Asia, women play a pivotal role in agriculture, shouldering most manual tasks, from planting and harvesting to food processing and water carrying. 19 Yet they are less likely than men to own land, secure credit, receive training, or benefit from government energy programs. 20 Yields in Africa are 13% to 25% lower for women than men, partly attributed to lack of access to productive resources, including modern energy and mechanisation. 21 Closing this gap could raise agricultural output by 2.5% to 4% and lift 100 to 150 million people out of hunger. 22

Women-led businesses are concentrated in heat- and light-intensive trades but typically rely on only one or two energy sources such as diesel, biomass, or Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). As a result, women-owned businesses in Africa often spend over US$100/kg of output on energy, compared to US$10/kg for men. 23 The difference is not ability but access. When women and men have access to the same appliances, financing, and infrastructure, measures of productivity are similar. 24

Within clean energy, women remain underrepresented relative to their share of overall employment. Globally, women hold 32% of clean energy jobs—below the roughly 40% share they account for in the broader labour force—with participation as low as 11% in South Asia. 25 Cultural norms, limited access to technical education, workplace bias, financing gaps, and a lack of inclusive workplace policies restrict entry and advancement across both formal employment and informal roles in the sector. 26

At the same time, women’s participation in clean energy value chains, as customers, employees, micro-entrepreneurs, and leaders, can accelerate the adoption of solutions and maximise climate impacts. Strategies and solutions that invest in women’s economic participation can unlock dual benefits for women’s economic empowerment (WEE) and climate outcomes. However, estimates suggest that as of 2021, only 2% of global climate financing is gender-responsive, 27 indicating a significant disconnect between climate ambition and gender-responsive action.

Realising this potential requires addressing persistent barriers faced by investors. Limited gender-disaggregated impact data makes it difficult to design targeted interventions or to justify gender-focused climate funding. Investors often lack a clear assessment of how clean energy solutions contribute to WEE and effective proxies for measuring impacts. Gender and climate investing operate in silos, with less than 2% of global climate financing being gender-responsive. 28 Bridging this divide could simultaneously advance climate goals and transform women’s economic lives.

About the research

This report draws on research and evidence synthesis conducted by Caribou and Value for Women for the Shell Foundation. Our objective was to curate, code, and synthesise the available impact evidence on clean energy solutions and WEE. We mapped 130 relevant studies and coded 115 in-depth, extracting findings on how different clean energy interventions affect women’s income, time use, health, and agency. The literature skews towards academic journals (57%) over practitioner literature (43%). However, only 17% of studies use rigorous experimental approaches, and nearly half fall are qualitative, narrative assessments. The remaining 40% of studies use quasi-experimental approaches to assess impact.

The literature clusters around five key archetypes that showcase how women interact with clean energy. Individual studies often cover multiple archetypes and/or geographies.

Coupled with this work, Caribou and Value for Women conducted 18 key expert interviews to generate additional insights on how commercial and concessional capital unlock gender and climate outcomes, and to validate findings emerging from the evidence review.

Building on the research base, Caribou developed interactive financial models for 15 clean energy products across 5 technology categories: solar irrigation, milk chilling, cold storage, solar refrigeration for small enterprises, and clean cooking. Each model allows users to adjust parameters, including household income, financing terms, technology costs, and local market conditions, to test how returns change under different assumptions. The models focus solely on financial metrics: ROI, payback periods, net annual benefit, and affordability relative to income. They do not capture gains in health, reduced drudgery, time for rest or family, or other dimensions of well-being that may justify investment even when financial returns are marginal or negative. The models also do not capture climate and environmental benefits of adopting clean energy assets.

This evidence synthesis provides the foundation for the findings, impact pathways, and recommendations that follow. Where the evidence is strong, we say so. Where gaps remain, we identify them. We aim to give investors and programme designers a clear-eyed view of what the research supports and where further learning is needed.

Clean energy assets can lead to women’s economic empowerment when paired with agency, skills, and opportunity

Clean energy solutions reach women’s economic lives through three distinct pathways.

• Direct: Productive-use technologies increase yields, reduce waste, and generate new revenue streams, connecting energy access to economic returns more immediately.
• Indirect: Assets that save time or reduce costs create the preconditions for economic Indirect solutions require women to have agency, market access, and complementary support in place to convert that potential into income.
• Employment: Working within the clean energy value chain delivers income, agency, and skills gains through the most legible and measurable route of all.

The evidence synthesis identified five archetypes of women as users of clean energy (micro-entrepreneurs, farmers, cooks, non-cooking household users, and workers in the clean energy value chain), each experiencing benefits through unique pathways.

The way women benefit depends on their baseline socioeconomic status, the assets they use, the purposes for which they use them, and the surrounding context.

Productive-use assets directly connect energy access to economic returns

For women running small businesses (micro-entrepreneurs), access to energy determines whether they can extend their working hours, preserve perishable goods, process raw materials efficiently, and reach new customers. As micro-entrepreneurs, these women more typically operate above the threshold where time savings is the primary mechanism driving income. They are more likely to have market access, business infrastructure, and opportunities to monetise reclaimed hours, especially in urban and peri-urban contexts, where enterprises cluster.

Clean energy solutions allow women to work faster across a diverse range of micro-enterprises. For example, electrified sewing machines and irons increase throughput for tailors. 29 Off-grid solar extends working hours, increasing production that was previously limited to daylight hours; 87% of artisans in Tanzania improved their business after the introduction of solar lighting. 30 Cooling technologies help micro-entrepreneurs manage inventory better; reduce the frequency of trips to the market, saving an estimated 2 hours per week; and offer perishable goods and chilled products that command higher prices. 31 As a result of efficiency improvements, women realise tangible revenue gains in their businesses.

Access to affordable, reliable energy, combined with appropriate financing and training, can shift women’s enterprises from marginal survival to meaningful income generation. 32

In turn, successful women micro-entrepreneurs gain status and recognition in their communities, becoming role models who shift perceptions of what women can achieve, 33 contributing to less overall gender discrimination. 34

For women farmers, clean energy technologies, including solar irrigation, efficient milling, and cold storage, can transform women’s agricultural productivity while shifting their role from unpaid labourers to being economic actors with control over assets and income.

Productive-use assets reduce on-farm drudgery for women and save costs. Milling, grinding, irrigation, and other machinery significantly reduce the time spent on physically demanding and time-consuming tasks. While drudgery is rarely quantified, time savings are significant and measurable: between 2 and 6 hours per day in Mali after the introduction of clean energy-powered grain mills. 35 Solar irrigation in Benin reduces the time women spend watering crops by 50%, freeing large blocks of time for other activities, including on-farm labour, 36 especially in households where women have greater participation in agricultural decision-making. 37 Solar-powered pumps can reduce irrigation expenses by up to 91% across five sub-Saharan African countries. 38 The savings flow directly to household income or reinvestment in the farm.

With time and money freed, women can increase and diversify production. Solar-powered irrigation enables year-round horticulture, overcoming the constraints of rain-fed agriculture. In East Africa, 75% of women using solar irrigation reported increased productivity, and 70% of women farmers in Benin raised their income by US$250 per year. 39 Cold storage protects these gains: Zero-Energy Cool Chambers (ZECCs) 40 reduced post-harvest losses in India by 30% to 35%, ensuring that increased production reaches the market rather than spoiling in the field. 41 In Kenya, solar milk chillers more than doubled the incomes of predominantly female smallholder dairy farmers by significantly reducing waste and losses. 42

These economic gains shift power within households. In Benin, women with access to agricultural clean energy assets were 2.7 times more likely than similar women without such assets to score above average on empowerment measures. In Mali, 1,800 small generators supporting irrigation, processing, and refrigeration reached 2.4 million rural clients and created new economic opportunities for an estimated 200 women per village through activities such as mechanised rice hulling, shea nut grinding, and small-scale farming. 43

Clean energy assets in the household require complementary support to turn benefits into income gains

Women as users of clean cookstoves gain access to efficient and improved cookstoves powered by LPG, biogas, or electricity. When bundled with reliable fuel supply, appropriate training, and access to financing to pay for more expensive cookstoves, women save time, improve respiratory health, and save costs.

The time savings are substantial. Evidence from across Africa and Asia indicates gains ranging from 15 minutes to over 1.5 hours per day, depending on the type of fuel previously used, the solution introduced, and the time women previously spent on fuel collection and cooking.

Household electrification and non-cooking appliances work through similar mechanisms. Reducing the use of kerosene lighting and introducing energy efficient appliances improves women’s health, saves time, and enables women to engage in income earning and household labour after dark. 45

Whether these time savings translate into economic participation depends on the amount of time saved and on the context of women’s livelihoods. In urban settings, small but reliable and well-timed savings, particularly during evenings or peak business hours, can generate returns as women have access to market infrastructure. Other factors that influence women’s ability to convert time savings into paid work include time agency (the extent to which women have control over how their time is allocated and reallocated), and training and knowledge of business skills that facilitate entry to paid work. In contrast, in rural settings, gains of three to four hours are generally necessary before women engage in income-generating activities; less is usually allocated to rest or absorbed by other unpaid work. 46

When conditions align and gains translate into economic participation, women increase their time spent in income-generating work by as much as 20% for every hour saved. 47 Financial savings compound the effect: reduced fuel costs can save households up to US$480 annually. 48 When women control these savings, their agency expands. In one study, 91% of women reported using energy-related savings to purchase clothes and personal items, a marker of increased decision-making power. 49

Beyond income and financial benefits, women also experience immediate benefits from reduced drudgery and improved health. Studies have measured significant increases in women’s lung capacity and a 19.5% reduction in lung cancer risk, as exposure to harmful smoke and pollutants decrease. 50 Burns and respiratory illness decline. One study linked use of clean cookstoves to a 16-percentage-point reduction in domestic violence, suggesting that reduced household stress and improved living conditions may reshape family dynamics. 51

Over time, individual gains can reshape household and community dynamics. Women may transition from being unpaid labourers to being economic actors with greater control over their time, income, and choices, with investment in children’s education and health noticeably increasing.

Clean energy reduced exposure to gender-based violence

Our review identified eleven studies that link the use of clean energy technologies in the household (mainly solar lamps and cookstoves) with reductions in gender-based violence (GBV). While many studies referenced the qualitative (and often unmeasured) benefits of cookstoves and electrification for women’s safety, very few provided quantified measurements of changes. The main pathways identified for how clean energy reduces GBV are:

• Exposure to violence while collecting fuel: Qualitative reports indicate women and girls face high rates of sexual harassment and assault while collecting fuelwood, and in some cases, men and boys who take over this task face physical assaults. 52 There are also reports of men coercing women into exchanging sexual favors to facilitate access to forests in refugee and displaced person camps, but these lack robust quantitative measurement. 53
• Exposure to intimate partner violence: Randomised control trial data from Uganda found statistically significant differences between treatment and control villages in pre- and post-intervention measures of domestic violence, with an average treatment reduction of 16 percentage points. 54 Researchers attributed this drop to more efficient fuel collection, more efficient food preparation, and tastier food from clean cookstoves.
• Reduction in household disagreements: There is some evidence that suggests that electrification can reduce household conflicts over kerosene purchases, potentially reducing the risk of violence against women. 55 However, some accounts indicate that violence remained prevalent or even increased, suggesting a more nuanced picture. 56

Women working in the clean energy value chain have the most direct path to income uplift

Working in the clean energy value chain offers direct pathways to WEE. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), women make up an estimated 40% of the global solar photovoltaic workforce, 57 compared to 22% in the oil and gas sector. 58 This growth reflects both expanding opportunity and a strengthening business case for hiring more women in clean energy value chains.

Working in the clean energy sector delivers strong outcomes for women across sales, finances, and personal agency.

These results reflect several reinforcing mechanisms. Women agents typically sell to women, and direct experience as users of household energy products builds credibility that male agents cannot replicate. Existing community trust networks reduce acquisition costs and improve conversion. Agency-based training amplifies these advantages: when women develop confidence and self-efficacy alongside product knowledge, performance gains compound.

Working as sales and repair agents, in particular, is a good, low-risk option for women, as it requires low capital overhead (after training). 59 Creating pathways for women to enter agent roles has significant rewards, but it requires longer-term investment.

Positive financial returns for women are achievable, under the right conditions

The financial case for gender-focused clean energy investment is frequently underestimated. A persistent assumption in development finance holds that designing for women carries financial penalties of lower returns, thinner margins, or longer payback periods. Under financial modelling led by Caribou, it is clear that positive returns are achievable, but whether they materialise depends less on the technology than on the conditions surrounding it.

The most consistent barrier our modelling surfaces is not the underlying economics of the asset, but the financing layer: standard consumer finance and pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) terms frequently eliminate returns that would otherwise be viable. This is a market design problem, not an inherent feature of investing in women. Better-structured financing products, blended finance mechanisms, and first-loss arrangements can address without requiring permanent subsidy.

Underlying conditions determine returns

All clean energy technologies depend on underlying conditions and enabling infrastructure that should be verified, rather than assumed. Knowing the existing infrastructure and its reliability is central to calculating potential returns.

• Milk chillers are most effective when evening milk collection services are Where evening collection is available, the primary benefit disappears, leaving only incremental potential gains from premium milk prices and lower transportation costs.
• Solar irrigation requires access to water sources and conditions that enable multiple growing A solar pump cannot irrigate from a dry borehole; an additional growing season doesn’t materialise if water, seeds, or labour are not available.
• Solar refrigeration in micro-enterprises requires sufficient customer demand for cold beverages and other A fridge in a location without traffic or in a community that cannot afford a premium price will not generate revenue increases.
• Clean cookstoves are most often used alongside traditional stoves (a practice known as “stove stacking”). 60 Stove stacking can reduce fuel savings, time savings, and health benefits The availability of fuel (LPG canisters) and intra-household decision-making around fuel purchases significantly affect the extent of stove stacking.

Productive-use assets deliver stronger economic returns than well-being

Technologies that directly support income generation (by increasing production or reducing waste) offer more direct and measurable paths to positive economic returns than those that primarily save time or reduce costs. For investors, this may mean that there should be different expectations for how “success” is defined and measured in terms of return on investment for productive versus non-productive assets.

Solar milk chillers and irrigation systems can nearly double the volume of products reaching the market. Milk chillers enable farmers to monetise evening milk production that would otherwise spoil or be sold at significant discounts, nearly doubling total milk volume. Similarly, where solar irrigation can enable an additional growing season, it can nearly double yields. In contrast, when evening milk collection is available, or irrigation increases production by only 13% to 20% through yield improvements, the capital costs often outweigh the asset benefits. Milk chillers and cold storage can be particularly beneficial for women because they sit at post-harvest stages, where women retain control and decision-making power.

Food businesses are a slightly different case. Women running food enterprises typically purchase fuel rather than gather it. Where LPG or electric cooking comes at a lower cost than charcoal, women realise an immediate savings.

In contrast, household users rely on reallocating time savings from clean energy assets to income-generating activities, which rarely happens without complementary programming and time savings above two hours per day. 61 In these cases, the net financial returns are modest for household users.

Financing improves access, but terms can eliminate positive returns

Across all but the cheapest of the fifteen assets modelled (improved cookstoves), realistic financing terms often flip positive returns into negative ones. A solar irrigation system that generates a +30% annual return when purchased up front can incur losses when financed through a PAYGo arrangement or a consumer loan that carries an annual percentage rate of 25% to 35%, which may add a 50% to 80% premium to the retail price. As a result, users may pay more in financing costs than they earn in additional revenue.

These conditions reflect the real costs of absorbing maintenance and default risks when serving households with volatile incomes. However, financing conditions can mean that low-income households, who could benefit most from clean energy assets, are the least likely to access them.

The financing gap can be narrowed through several mechanisms. Deposit subsidies are one option: a 200W solar irrigation system for a 0.4-hectare plot can take nearly 2 years to break even under standard market financing. However, with subsidised entry, the breakeven point can be pulled forward by 18 months, significantly increasing the solution’s viability.

Extending the loan tenor, introducing a harvest-aligned moratorium, or reducing interest rates can achieve comparable effects within a commercial framework. For service-based models like pay-per-use mechanisation, cross-subsidisation or volume-based discounts may be more appropriate than direct subsidy. For financiers to reduce premiums and subsidise access, they must absorb risk elsewhere. This can be achieved through guarantees or first-loss capital, or by reducing underlying default rates through effective targeting. 62

At the same time, financial products need realistic affordability checks built in. While models can predict a positive return for women, the financial burden of fixed monthly repayments or upfront capital costs may still be unrealistic. For this reason, affordability checks are essential to ensure that upfront costs or monthly payments are sustainable relative to household income. While our models explicitly flag this risk, women may still become over-indebted.

For example, households with lower income (e.g., ~US$2,000/year, or roughly US$1/day per person) might be illustrative of rural populations in countries such as Burundi or Malawi, where cash incomes are limited and livelihoods are largely subsistence-based. Even households in “medium” income brackets (~US$4,500/year, or ~US$2.5/day per person), representative of better-off rural households in Kenya or Tanzania, reflect constrained and irregular cash flows. In these contexts, even modest repayment burdens can quickly become unaffordable.

Additionally, there may be timing gaps between when new income from an asset materialises and when payments are due. Harvests are seasonal, fuel savings accumulate gradually, and new revenue streams take time to establish. Women must be able to service payments during this gap. In this stretched zone, women face higher default risks, especially in the case of disruptions. A bad harvest, a family emergency, school expenses, illness, or an unexpected expense may trigger missed payments and lost assets. The longer it takes for assets to pay themselves off, the greater the risk of default and of the asset never reaching the breakeven point.

Where payments fall into the stretched zone, financiers may require greater payment flexibility or subsidised loan terms to be viable for more risk-averse financial institutions. A positive rate of return does not mean cash flow risks have ceased to exist. Affordability analysis based on what households can actually pay before realising a solution’s benefits should be part of any return projections. For finance to be affordable, repayments should fall below 10% of monthly income. But for households earning less than US$60 per month, even modest payments can be out of reach.

For capital-intensive assets, like milk chillers, cold storage facilities, and larger irrigation systems, individual ownership is often structurally unaffordable, and the ownership model itself usually needs to change. This is true even for relatively better-off rural households with higher incomes (e.g., ~US$6,500/year, or ~US$3.5/day per person), which might correspond to more commercially oriented farmers in Kenya or Ghana. For these cases, where monthly repayments consistently exceed what individual households can sustain, shared ownership through Savings and Credit Cooperative Organisations (SACCOs) or farmer cooperatives, fee-for-service models, or community-scale facilities spread both capital costs and utilisation risk across a larger group. A milk chiller that creates unsustainable debt for a single farmer earning US$130 per month from dairy can generate viable returns split across three or four farmers using 80% of its capacity. For assets at this price point, collective models are often the only route to affordability.

Business scale determines whether investments pay off

For technologies where returns scale with existing business size (e.g., a micro-retailer adding solar fridges for chilled products), existing business size and baseline income are the primary determinants of financial viability. Financing terms, however well designed, cannot compensate for an insufficient revenue base of the existing business model.

Assets like milk chillers and solar pumps deliver strong financial returns when they allow for evening milk collection or unlock an additional growing season, potentially doubling yields. However, solar refrigeration typically delivers a percentage uplift on existing revenue, by adding premium products to a micro-retailer’s shop, rather than doubling customers or revenue outright. As a result, the absolute value of the return depends entirely on what the business is already generating. The same asset with the same financing terms and the same percentage improvement produce fundamentally different outcomes at different income levels.

For the smallest micro-retailers, the monthly payment for these assets cannot be recovered from the income they generate—not because the technology fails, but because the base it is working from is too small.

The tension in the scale of returns leads to a dilemma. Vendors who most need income support may operate at scales where productive-use assets cannot pay for themselves. Programmes may face a choice: target operators above viability thresholds where impacts are incremental, or subsidise solutions for smaller operators, where the case depends on grant funding rather than returns.

Shared ownership improves affordability for capital-intensive technologies, but coordination costs may be high

For higher-cost productive-use assets, shared ownership offers a pathway to viability. Our milk-chiller model shows that splitting capital costs across 2 to 4 farmers can move monthly payments from unaffordable to sustainable. A US$1,400 chiller requiring US$39 monthly payments may strain a single farmer earning US$150 from dairy. Split across three farmers, the US$13 payment falls within sustainable thresholds while each farmer captures meaningful returns. This approach requires coordination that programmes can build into their designs.

Solar-powered cold storage facilities scale this logic further. Community-scale cold storage rooms serving 20 to 50 smallholders can achieve utilisation rates that individual units cannot, spreading capital costs while providing access to reliable storage.

The trade-off is coordination cost and infrastructure that programme designers should plan for from the outset.

Context drives impact for women: Five enabling conditions for impact

Knowing that clean energy works is not sufficient for investment design. The same asset can double a woman’s income or push her into debt depending on context, financing terms, and whether the right enabling conditions are in place. ARISE (Agency, Relevance, Infrastructure, Skills, and Engagement) is a practical framework for assessing those conditions before committing resources. Each factor represents a design decision, not a background assumption. They align with established models of technology diffusion, which emphasise that adoption depends on fit, accessibility, and sustained support, not technology alone.

The framework emerged from a review of 115 studies, where over 90% cited agency or infrastructure as crucial factors for positive outcomes. But the five conditions are not independent: weakness in any one can limit or reverse gains from the others. Interventions that cannot demonstrate how they address each factor should expect weaker outcomes for WEE.

Agency

Self-efficacy and bargaining power enable women to redirect time savings toward income-earning work, to retain earnings, and to influence household spending.

When men remain the default decision-makers over what solutions are adopted and how they are used, gains stall because women cannot control the benefits. Women’s lack of decision-making power and control over household expenditure often undermined the adoption and sustained use of modern energy technologies, leading to limited or failed outcomes for interventions. 63

• Men are rarely the primary users of household energy technologies, despite being the primary decision-makers for purchases. 64 This disconnect leads to low uptake of modern energy solutions by women. 65 In contrast, prioritising women’s decision-making in community solar projects led to greater empowerment and challenged gender norms. 66
• In Senegal, women with higher intra-household bargaining power were 10% to 15% more likely to adopt clean fuels. 67 Conversely, when women lacked bargaining power, adoption rates were lower, and women did not experience the intended health and economic benefits of clean energy interventions.
• As assets prove economically valuable, men frequently assume control over assets women previously managed. Technologies placed at post-harvest and processing stages, where women already have operational authority, are more likely to retain gains for women than those introduced at production stages where men dominate from the start. 68

Agency plays a key role in ensuring women claim, and retain control of clean energy assets, so that the benefits of investments are not captured by men. Agency and empowerment training featured in 20% of studies, typically through peer-to-peer and group learning, highlighting the importance of training for building agency.

Relevance

Bundled solutions address women’s interconnected needs.

Assets and the supporting infrastructure around them must be designed with women’s needs in mind. Solutions designed without understanding women’s realities often fail, regardless of their technical efficiency. Women’s needs are interconnected: they manage households, care for families, farm, and run enterprises, often simultaneously. They face multiple barriers, including limited access to finance and assets, limited digital and financial literacy, and social and cultural norms that constrain their ability to adopt new clean energy solutions.

Cookstove adoption, for example, is complex, with stacking common in over 80% of households. 69 Many factors affect stove adoption and use, including compatibility of new stoves with current practices, perceptions of stove benefits, durability of stoves, ease of stove use, and affordability. 70

Irrigation equipment is often designed without understanding women’s typical landholding sizes, water source proximity, and the physical demands of use. As the impact modelling in this research illustrates, a solar pump sized for a larger plot can quickly produce net losses for smallholders with less than 0.5 hectares.

These examples highlight the importance of designing products and interventions that are responsive to women’s actual needs, preferences, and cultural contexts.

Infrastructure

Access to physical, market, and financial infrastructure enables women to adopt and benefit from clean energy assets.

Roads, storage facilities, and distribution networks determine whether technologies reach women and whether their gains reach markets. Of these enabling conditions, financing terms present the most consistent and documented barrier, and financing with terms that work for women is essential. 71

Across contexts, high upfront costs, lack of collateral, high interest rates, and financial service provider reluctance to serve women are reasons why women are unable to access or adopt new technologies and assets. 72 In sub-Saharan Africa, women-owned micro-, small, and medium enterprises face an estimated financing gap of US$42 billion. 73 They have limited access to appropriate, gender-responsive financial products, and collateral requirements are significant barriers to women’s uptake of renewable energy assets and business growth. The lack of scalable, gender-inclusive financing models and insufficient capital flows to the sector have disproportionately impacted women, especially during crises like COVID-19. Gender-responsive financing is beginning to address this gap in the clean energy sector, supporting women’s uptake of modern technologies.

Microcredit, typically at market rates, is the default financing mechanism for most assets. However, women have often faced gender-based barriers in accessing financing, including a lack of assets to act as collateral, lack of formal credit history, restrictive social norms, mobility constraints, and financial products mismatched with women’s needs. 74

Alternative finance mechanisms, such as PAYGo and asset financing, are designed to lower traditional barriers to collateral and account requirements and to provide more flexible repayment options. PAYGo assets typically have remote lock/unlock technology, so if payments stop, the asset switches off. After the final payment, customers often own the asset outright. Asset financing allows women to use the asset itself as collateral, eliminating the need for separate collateral. Payments can be fixed or flexible, and after the final payment, customers own the asset. Community financing, often channeled through groups or SACCOs, enables shared ownership of assets, reducing collateral requirements and repayments, thereby bringing more assets within reach.

While still not mainstream, these mechanisms are gaining commercial traction, particularly for more costly productive-use assets and infrastructure. They pose a lower risk for women and expand access for many who were previously “unbankable” under traditional microcredit.

However, these mechanisms still need intentional design to overcome old barriers and avoid creating new ones.

• Upfront demands: Women may still need IDs to sign contracts and collateral or a down payment on assets. 75 Women micro-entrepreneurs are still often “unable to take advantage of lease-to-own programmes because they did not have full initial deposits of 20–30.” 76
• Asset registration: PAYGo schemes do not inherently address asset registration norms or household decision-making dynamics. Initiatives that encouraged registration of assets in women’s names have enhanced legal asset ownership and decision-making power, supporting WEE. 77
• Affordable repayments: Innovative financing models risk passing high costs on to consumers. 78
• Payment dependencies: PAYGo often shifts the onus from bank accounts to mobile money/digital Data from the GSMA shows that women are 4% to 18% less likely than men to use online banking/mobile money, and 400 million women globally do not have access to a mobile phone. 79 New dependencies on phone ownership, digital literacy, and mobile money access can continue to exclude some women.

Promising approaches are emerging to women-centric financing that addresses these barriers by dropping requirements for collateral, guarantors, or formal credit scores, allowing flexible repayments and employing gender inclusive workforces. However, these approaches may be most effective for women in peri-urban areas, who have stable incomes, mobile money access, and supportive household dynamics.

A meta-review by the World Bank confirms that microfinance, community finance, and asset financing have been crucial for women in acquiring productive assets such as solar pumps, improved cookstoves, and electric vehicles. 80 Where these financing mechanisms are not gender-responsive, women’s uptake is significantly lower.

For larger, typically income-generating, productive-use assets, financing determines access to assets and income-generation opportunities. As a result, financing is a defining feature of the sector, with bundled financing appearing in two-thirds of the studies reviewed, most often in the form of credit and microcredit. Innovative models (including PAYGo and battery-as-a-service) appear in a third of studies, indicating a growing alternative.

Access to credit increased the probability of clean cookstove adoption by 23% for female-headed households in Kenya, primarily delivered through women’s social groups. 81 Further flexible mechanisms, like PAYGo, have increased access to solar energy systems. While high connection costs and financial dependency on men are significant barriers, flexible repayment solutions, often integrated with mobile money, are found to reach more women. 82

Results-based finance instruments, like the Clean Impact Bond, launched in 2022 by the International Finance Corporation, and partners (BIX Capital, the Osprey Foundation, and Sistema.bio), are expected to unlock over US$800,000 in upfront financing for clean energy solutions for women-serving enterprises. 83

Without accessible, affordable, and gender-responsive financing, women are often unable to benefit from energy assets and technologies, limiting both their economic empowerment and the overall success of interventions.

Skills

Capabilities determine whether women can benefit from assets or just own them.

The evidence points to four types of skill-building that matter: technical and vocational training (repair, maintenance, installation), business development (management, cash flow, planning), agency-building (confidence, self-efficacy, decision-making), and basic operational training for end users. More than half of the included studies reported training components, most often vocational training in business and entrepreneurship, and technical skills.

Technical and business skills are critical for women seeking roles within the clean energy value chain as technicians, distributors, and micro-entrepreneurs.

• In Nepal, limited technical training meant women remained dependent on male family members for repairs of rural energy technologies, restricting their autonomy and the sustainability of interventions. 84
• In Mali, women’s associations received training in management, business skills, and maintenance to operate community-owned solar assets. Where training was sufficient, women significantly increased their economic empowerment; where it was not, breakdown and repair costs offset income generated. 85
• In Senegal, ElleSolaire’s Academy trained women from village savings associations as solar sales agents, covering business strategy, financial literacy, marketing, and technical skills. The programme raised the company’s customer closing rate from 60% to 80% and drove 286% sales growth in one region. 86

Hands-on training, reinforced with peer demonstrations and follow-up support, is the most effective.

Beyond these technical and business skills, agency-building lays the foundation for broader empowerment among women as users of and workers in the clean energy sector. Beyond business returns, training leads to improvements in self-efficacy, business commitment, and psychological empowerment. When bundled with cookstoves, empowerment training led to meaningful increases in “self-knowledge, intentionality, self-reflection, and a sense of control over one’s own life,” 87 with a 21% increase in grit (perseverance), and 32% increase in personal growth for women involved. 88

Evidence from adjacent sectors reinforces this finding. A large-scale randomised trial of socioemotional skills training for agribusiness entrepreneurs in Nigeria found that interpersonal skills training covering negotiation, empathy, and collaboration raised women’s business profits by over 50%, with profits at existing businesses rising around 32%. 89

Engagement

Frictionless after-sales support sustains adoption.

Without the backbone of refueling, fast repairs, warranties, hotlines, and reliable PAYGo or LPG delivery, even successful early adoption can decay into abandonment. The technology only works if it keeps working.

A solar pump without spare parts or a PAYGo system without mobile money access will not deliver lasting impact. After-sales and maintenance services, ideally provided explicitly by women, are a cornerstone of trust-building for clean energy assets. 90 When examining the customer journey from a gender perspective, the World Bank has highlighted the importance of offering a package that includes post-sales service to help women feel more comfortable buying new assets. While studies highlight how the lack of after-sales services (e.g., repair and parts purchasing) can decrease asset adoption, this is rarely formally measured and is instead indicated as a barrier contributing to the disuse or abandonment of clean energy assets. 91

The investment case for the gender–clean energy nexus is clear

This report set out to answer a practical question: under what conditions do clean energy investments improve women’s economic lives, and how can funders design for those conditions? The evidence across 115 studies and five archetypes gives a clear answer.

The conditions and pathways to impact are real, and the returns for women are meaningful when the design is right. Productive-use assets and employment in the value chain offer the most direct, measurable, and immediate benefits to WEE. Household assets play a meaningful role in welfare-related outcomes and can have an indirect impact on incomes when the surrounding context is supportive. Financial modelling confirms that positive returns are achievable across a range of technologies, but whether they materialise depends less on the asset than on the conditions surrounding it: financing terms, baseline business scale, and the enabling factors that the ARISE framework captures. Realising the potential of clean energy assets means deliberately designing against all five ARISE conditions.

However, the evidence also shows, with equal clarity, that the gender–clean energy nexus is still nascent in important respects. The evidence base for cookstoves and lighting is deep, built on decades of programming and increasingly rigorous measurement. For productive-use technologies, agricultural energy, and women’s participation in clean energy value chains, the picture is compelling but thinner.

Our modelling suggests that the archetypes where evidence is weakest are often those where economic returns are strongest and most direct. Productive-use technologies and employment in the clean energy value chain offer clearer, faster, and more measurable paths to income uplift than household assets, yet these are the areas where rigorous, longitudinal evidence is thinnest. That gap is itself an investment signal: the case for funding both programming and measurement in these archetypes is stronger, not weaker, for the relative lack of data.

The practical implications follow directly from the evidence.

1. Funders and investors should invest in market research upfront to match impact pathways to investment The same asset performs very differently depending on women’s initial conditions, and a context-driven theory of change using the archetype and ARISE frameworks improves outcomes significantly.
2. Assess all five ARISE conditions before committing resources, building enabling conditions into programme design rather than assuming them.
3. Investments should bundle deliberately, prioritising interventions that pair productive-use assets with agency training, market access, and gender-responsive financing—these offer the clearest path to return on investment.
4. Funders and investors should verify financial viability using realistic financing terms, not optimistic Stress-testing the proposed terms against real-world baseline conditions and a positive return on paper can flip to negative under market-rate financing.
5. Impact measurement and social return on investment should measure across both monetary and well-being dimensions (e.g., income, productivity, and yields alongside health, safety, agency, and time savings), because single-proxy metrics undervalue the investment and miss what is actually changing.
6. Invest in women’s employment across the clean energy value chain, where low-barrier entry points in sales and repair offer quick, measurable returns while longer-term investment opens technical and leadership roles and shifts the norms that shape the sector.

Clean energy and WEE are connected and can be mutually reinforcing. Funders who invest across both with intentionality, rigour, and patience are positioned to deliver outsized returns for women, for climate, and for the broader systems of which both are part.

Appendix 1: Interviewees

Aditi Kothari, Climate Policy Initiative

Amanda A. Satterly, Asian Development Bank

Beatriz Velho, J-PAL Global

Gerbrich Salverda, FMO

Jael Amati, Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund

Jimena Serrano Pardo, IDB Invest

Leesa Shrader, Gates Foundation

Leonor Gutiérrez, Root Capital

Petra Mikkolainen, Nefco

Pranita Achyut and Depannita Misra, International Center for Research on Women

Rebecca Rhodes, GOGLA

Richard Midikira, Aceli Africa

Sam Jewett, Acumen

Sara Litke-Farzaneh, Mathematica

Sinead Maharrey, Solar Sisters

Sitara Merchant Carter, Swiss Capacity Building Facility

Venu Aggarwal, 60 Decibels

Xavier Collet and Noreen Oloya, Mirova

Appendix 2: Measuring multidimensional impacts requires impact frameworks that reflect complexity

WEE is not a single outcome but a multidimensional process spanning economic advancement, agency, and well-being. To measure the impact of clean energy assets on WEE, investors need frameworks that reflect this complexity. A cookstove may improve health, save time, and enable opportunities for entrepreneurial activities. However, a narrow assessment focused only on income uplift would miss most of the story.

Multi-outcome frameworks capture the interactions between different dimensions of empowerment. They can reveal, for instance, when income gains come at the cost of increased time poverty, or when asset ownership translates into meaningful use only where women also have decision-making agency. They show whether productivity gains are linked with them reaching markets and generating profitability. Most importantly, multi-outcome approaches tell us not only what changed but also how and for whom.

Metrics for non-income-earning use cases

For household-use assets, such as improved cookstoves, welfare-focused metrics on health, safety, and agency may more accurately capture impact than income proxies. The most commonly used metrics for these interventions include cost and time savings (related to fuel and cooking time), changes in household agency and financial decision-making, and health and safety.

Metrics for income-earning use cases

For women already engaged in income-generating work, using clean energy assets within their businesses or enterprises increases efficiency, reduces costs, and increases revenues. Productive-use assets offer more direct measurement pathways. Solar irrigation systems, for example, save time, 92 reduce costs, 93 and increase yields 94 —indicators that together can proxy for revenue growth. Milk chillers improve quality and reduce spoilage, 95 enabling women to sell more at better prices. 96 Yet even here, profit and revenue remain notoriously difficult to measure accurately across diverse contexts.