Solar Sister, Taking an Agency-Based Approach to Women’s Clean Energy Enterprise
How can the life-transforming benefits of clean cooking and solar technologies be taken to the most underserved, hard-to-reach communities across Uganda, Nigeria, and Tanzania? One effective way is to engage women at all levels of clean energy sales and distribution. Solar Sister, a long-time partner of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves and recipient of a Women’s Empowerment Fund (WEF) grant, does it by recruiting, training, and mentoring women to run their own clean technology enterprises.
With the support of the WEF grant, Solar Sister is applying the agency-based empowerment concepts and leadership strategies of the Alliance’s Empowered Entrepreneur Handbook to strengthen the capacity and effectiveness of Solar Sister’s network of clean energy entrepreneurs. Since 2010, Solar Sister has enabled 2,000 local African business women to bring clean cooking and solar solutions to over 350,000 beneficiaries in three countries. The WEF grant specifically supports a pilot to integrate the Empowered Entrepreneur Handbook into Solar Sister’s training program in Uganda, customizing the curriculum to Solar Sister’s unique model and approach to women’s enterprise development. If this pilot project is successful, Solar Sister plans to incorporate the Handbook into its institutional training work across its focus countries.
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In mid-November Solar Sister held a six-day Training of Trainers workshop, led by Anita Shankar and Genevieve Smith, in Kampala, Uganda. Solar Sister brought together its Leadership Team and Business Development Associates from across Uganda to undergo the training and build expertise on the business, empowerment, and leadership themes of the Handbook. Solar Sister’s Business Development Associates are locally-hired field staff and are Solar Sister’s direct link to entrepreneurs, serving as coaches, mentors, and trainers to women to help them grow their businesses. The training consists of the following components:
- The business section helps participants create a gender-sensitive business plan, including modules on marketing strategies, financial planning, and customer care, among others.
- The empowerment section helps participants reflect on their personal needs and goals by building an understanding of themselves and their core beliefs, and how to manage and overcome mental barriers.
- The leadership section provides participants with the tools they need to develop leadership skills and enhance leadership competencies.
“Leadership is influence, finding your voice and helping others find theirs.” – Solar Sister Business Development Associate and training participant
Over the coming months, Solar Sister will adapt the Empowered Entrepreneur curriculum to train Solar Sister entrepreneurs in Uganda to boost their sales, and strengthen their confidence, health, and well-being. As part of this program, Solar Sister is also collaborating with International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) to track the impacts of this training on women entrepreneurs, thereby building the evidence base for agency-based empowerment approaches in women’s clean energy enterprise development.
Solar Sister is part of a small group of Alliance grantees and partners who have the opportunity to begin implementing the Alliance’s social impact monitoring & evaluation framework, a standard set of indicators and data collection tools for measuring the social and economic impacts of the clean cooking sector. Upon completion of the monitoring & evaluation of this WEF project in September 2017, Solar Sister aims to have a proven employee training program that incorporates agency-based empowerment and leadership components, and to serve as a model for successfully engaging women entrepreneurs that can be replicated throughout the sector.