Gender Responsiveness at PFAN
The PFAN Gender Action Plan
We recognize not only our responsibility but also the opportunity to contribute towards the overarching goal of gender equality and the empowerment of women. Therefore, PFAN wants to address embedded and unconscious gender bias within both our internal operations and its market-facing activities. To that aim, we have developed a gender strategy which was operationalised as a gender action plan in 2019.
The PFAN Gender Strategy has three main objectives:
- To achieve greater, more sustainable, equitable outcomes and impacts in an efficient and comprehensive manner by empowering women to actively contribute to and benefit from PFAN’s network and services;
- To encourage every project supported by PFAN to be gender-responsive so that women’s and men’s resilience and ability to address climate change, as well as access to clean energy, are equally enhanced; and
- To increase the pool of women-led and gender-focused projects in the clean energy and climate adaptation sector in order to reduce the gender gap of climate change-exacerbated social, economic and environmental vulnerabilities.
Objectives
Reaching these objectives requires working with all stakeholders, notably with the three key groups being the project developers, investors and members of the PFAN organization and network. Therefore, the strategy has been translated into the PFAN Gender Action Plan, which includes action points for each stakeholder group, such as:
- PFAN supports female entrepreneurs in accessing financing and expects to increase the pool of women-led and gender-focused projects by creating and promoting role models and success stories for other women.
- PFAN intends to play a central role in sensitizing project developers and investors on the strengths of gender-balanced portfolios and influence the climate finance environment by educating and raising awareness of the benefits of gender equality.
- PFAN adds different sets of skills, and improves team dynamics by providing women and men with the same opportunity to be part of PFAN: as employees, coordinators, project developers or network members.
The renewable energy and climate adaptation sector is fast-growing hence needs passionate and qualified individuals to take up leadership roles in seeing to the successful implementation and management of its market. As the Country Coordinator for Ghana and Project Assistant for PFAN West Africa, I help to screen a minimum of about 100 clean/renewable energy and climate adaptation projects every year. I also work closely with PFAN-recruited advisors in Ghana who provide coaching services to developers.
Environment 360, Ghana
I strongly believe that strengthening the role of women in renewable energy through better education and other measures would boost progress towards SDGs on energy, gender equality, health and education, amongst others. In PFAN, I have the unique advantage of being on both sides of the table. I am the co-founder of Radix Lifespaces Pvt. Ltd and a PFAN Advisor , coaching developers from an entrepreneurial point of view, and act as the bridge between entrepreneurs and investors.