 Well welcome everyone to this panel which I think will be really interesting, the gender lens on energy investment and probably we have some of you here who are here because of the gender side and we have some of you who are here because of the energy side and hopefully at the end of the panel you'll all be satisfied one way or another. Maybe Jackie you can start and sort of set the stage for us and talk about what a gender lens on energy looks like, what we should be thinking about when we're taking that approach. Sure Nikki and I actually sort of like the energy lens on gender, like there could be some fun aspects to that as well, it does seem like there's a lot of energy around this conversation these days. Many of you have now heard me and I have heard people say it's only when you're tired of what you're saying that people are actually starting to hear it. So I will say one more time, when I think about gender lens, I mean a lens and not a screen, a lens and not a screen. I say that because when I have talked to people investing both in certain geographies and also in certain sectors like energy and I say a gender lens and they say well we wouldn't have anything to invest in. It's like no, no, no, no, this is not about saying oh we're going to you know if it isn't this and this and this that's out. This is about something that brings opportunities into focus. And put your lenses on and you start to see things that you might otherwise miss. Specifically in this case I can let people say look pretend you put glasses on and through one eye you were seeing the participation levels, the needs, the experiences and the leadership of women. And through the other side you were seeing participation level needs, experiences and leadership of men. And then start to take a look at where are those the same and where are those different and how does that relate to how you design your venture and so forth. So that's what I mean by a lens and we can go into very particular different lenses I think they'll get called out as we go but really a lens is a way to drive new opportunity. Well I think that's a perfect segue to one of the things that Catherine talked about when we were preparing for this panel we had a conversation and we were talking about what we each meant by this concept and Catherine who is the CEO of Solar Sister which is a company that's based in Uganda and actually a lot of different parts of East Africa that focuses on getting solar into the hands of poor women using women as as distributors the Avon Lady type of concept she said it's about and it's about intentionality the intentionality of of having women in this space so tell us what you meant by that Catherine so that everyone really understands how you do it yourself and how you think it makes a difference and what other people should be doing in a similar way. Thank you so much Solar Sister is a distribution using women entrepreneurs in rural Uganda to bring clean energy technologies to people who are currently living off the grid they're living lighting their homes with kerosene and we're providing them access to technologies to replace that kerosene with clean energy such as solar when we looked at our market of who in the household is our customer we realized it's the women who manage the energy in the household and so it's the women who are our customers and therefore Solar Sister before it was Solar Sister when we decided to create a distribution for clean energy technologies we realized in order to be most effective we're going to have to reach that woman and really be deliberate about creating an opportunity for her to access for her to make that decision and and let demand drive the sales and in order to do that we needed to create a pathway for her to be comfortable with new technology for her to find out about it and learn about it and we will leave when we looked at how clean energy technologies were currently being distributed it was often through a small electronic store in a village where you know you walk in and it's Florida ceiling electronic gadgety things and there's a guy standing there at the counter who really doesn't know too much about one or the other and so if you start asking questions about you know I would like some light for my home and start asking about products he even begins to get defensive and so it's a very difficult environment for the woman to find out more about the technology learn about what might work for her and so we created this woman's network of entrepreneurs to as you say very deliberately focus on the fact that if we're going to reach our customer and our customer is a woman then we have to have an avenue that works for her and learning about the technology from another woman who can she knows she trusts she's going to have a shared experience with and be able to say I use this technology at home and this is what it's done for me and my family and you can use it also and so I think being very deliberate about creating that space for women as customers and then also for creating for our entrepreneurs being very deliberate about recognizing that they need to have a certain space to learn about the technology themselves and to build this business well that that sort of segues into the to the to the area of the product itself so you know what what are these products that are being sold to the women are who are they being designed by and Leslie Silverthorn has a company that she's created called and Gaza design where she's she's an engineer so first of all she's a woman who is an engineer I think that I think as we learned earlier today that's a very small I think what is it they're 10% of all the engineers are women and so she's in the product design space and she's in the solar space I think you must be in a 1 percent all of your own Leslie but but when you're in the business of product design what does it mean to have a gender lens how do you look at products the design process differently the composition of the teams you know the way in which you test products what what is how do you do things differently looking through a gender lens yeah thank you so through a gender lens with product design I think one of the key components we have is really making sure that the team designing any specific service or product is really made up of a diverse gender you know cultural background and that's how the great ideas happen that's how you get you know people bringing just a diverse range of thoughts to the table which actually leads to some of the greatest innovations that have happened so our design team my background is in product design engineering but our design team definitely is a mixture of male and female and I think it's interesting because like Catherine said you know who's the customer for a lot of these energy products in the market and it's really the women who are using the products and I think this is a bit you know generalizing but in the design space I think it's the women designers that are really able to take a pretty holistic view of the customer and the product and the human-centered design process there's a word called empathy you guys might have really heard this word being tossed back and forth but how I think of empathy is really just the ability to step into your customer's shoes and understand their life and understand how they use a product and it's really important to design the product based on the needs of that user not not go in with any assumptions but just learn hand-in-hand with the user iterate on the product with the user and then just you know using this this term of empathy and then coming up with a product or a service based on just understanding your customer in energy space it's understanding how women use the product in a lot of cases so I'll just give you an example we were just talking to a lot of women in northern Tanzania and in northern Tanzania the women cook out of separate kitchen huts which are just pretty pretty simple five-foot round huts at times they're very small and they literally spend the majority of their day in these huts cooking and one of the the you know uses of solar lights that we were aiming for was women being able to cook with these solar lights where they might have been using kerosene lanterns before and so it was kind of a no-brainer yellow bring these solar lights and into their kitchen huts and cook with them and the women refused they said no this the solar light is a product that you know we paid a lot of money for we value there's no way I'm bringing in the dirty kitchen hut to cook by it so this this whole aspect of how we thought that you know women might use the product was completely shattered and and this is one you know example of empathy that we really shouldn't have and and ended up not imposing our own thoughts on how they would use the product and one more thought on that so a good designer not only are they engineering a product or a service but they're also thinking about how that product or service sells or is marketed to the customer and what I've seen a lot of times is that oftentimes it's the men who the man of the household who's making the ultimate purchasing decision but it's oftentimes the woman in the household who's using the product so how can you sort of you know appeal to to the women the household to sort of influence the man to ultimately make that purchasing decision and we're even seeing that one step further because we're a solar pays you go company meaning it's not only the upfront purchase decision of a product but they're also purchasing energy as often as a week at a time so it's also the purchasing decision of that energy chunk and so we're just starting to get all this data back about you know how how is the women influencing the man to make that purchasing decision and you know is it a guilt trip about the child being able to study at night or so it's just thinking about the whole marketing of a product as well. Well Ajaita Shah from Frontier Markets has a distribution company where she's actually spent a lot of time thinking about a number of these issues marketing to women and perceptions that men and women might have a product I remember one story that you told me about a particular light in India where it was just not selling and it wasn't a success and it was because the men thought it was too feminine which I thought was fascinating so if you can you know tell us some more give us some more examples about these kinds of gendered visions of products. Right sure so I think one of the fun things for me with Frontier Markets is that we spend time with just households getting to know them in and out because we always are trying to bring in new basket of products that would make sense for these households so it's not just a solar lantern but it might be you know a fox-like torch it might be a Pico home lighting system it might be a solar inverter system and so every time you're thinking about bringing these new products in you're constantly thinking about who that household individual is what their different roles are and how are they then thinking about the everyday use of these products right so you know a couple of examples but you know a fox light so a high beam fox light solar light is a focus light and this is a light that was demanded by all of our farmers and all of the farmers happen to be all men and and it wasn't that female weren't females weren't going into the field to do farm work it's just that culturally they would leave way before the sunset so that's the reason for why men were out there longer and so when when when men were out there longer they've required that high beam fox light torch and so that torch was a quick seller for every farmer male farmer that was in our in our in our market because they understood that product they identified with it and they knew the use immediately when we talk about so the irony is that when we actually talk about the solar lantern we actually do talk about it for during cooking but when we discuss it with women women that you have to discuss their frustration so their frustration for women is it's so annoying to have to keep you know a candle next to your stove and constantly have to get up to light a new candle because you have no sense of lighting and it takes a lot longer it's harder to see and you're definitely not keep a kerosene lantern next to you because you might burn yourself so that's when they're saying oh wow I can keep a light on top of my on top of my kitchen that would be perfect so I'm gonna keep it on top so it doesn't get near the mess so you hang the solar lantern versus keeping it right next to you a lot of things about talking to women about independence so freedom from having to go and charge their cell phones all the time by going to meant for it going to retail shop so this is another really interesting story but a lot of women don't own their cell phones right it's usually it's usually their husband's cell phone but once in a while they get the chance to keep the cell phone and they're so excited to like use that cell phone as much as possible because that's like the one day that they get it so when they've discharged that cell phone because they've used it the entire day they they really get scared that they're getting in trouble because their husband's coming back and being like why is my phone completely discharged so they run to the retail shop and because they don't have access to electricity so they run to the retail shop and they beg the retail guy to charge the phone for them and they'll pay him double the price to phone charge the phone because there's that sense of urgency so women have been actually wanting a solar mobile phone charger for themselves a lot more than the men have and it's such an interesting concept when you think about the role and what happens in terms of the day to day in Rajasthan specifically it's very different than the south right I mean Rajasthan super conservative and so you have to understand how you're supposed to be communicating to these women when you're supposed to be communicating to these women and what's going to be the different responses based on who's around right so we were talking about this earlier but you know if they're men around and you're trying to do a focus group about these products you're not going to get the women to respond but the second you get the men out of the room these women you know kind of take off their you know their their sorry covers and they essentially start really communicating with you and telling you about what they want and how they feel so you know I think that this is something that we look at and products marketing and sales like you know like was you was saying all the time and it's really exciting to see that you can't just identify women or men as women and men but you have to identify them as mothers as sisters as daughters as daughter-in-laws and what that role plays you know and and and also how that then interacts with like the male dynamic as well and so that's where product creation becomes really interesting well to segue to an airy and an airy patelle is with the UN year with with the United now I'm actually messing up my segue to you is with the United Nations Foundation and this is the UN year of sustainable energy and the UN Foundation has done an amazing job of promoting access to clean energy and in the course of that you and Richenda Van Luen who's leading this felt very strongly that there should be a gender component and that we should really be thinking about that the gender lens to for and clean energy in the context of the year so maybe you can tell us a little bit about the impetus for that and some of the initiatives that the UN year has has sort of promoted around this this area of gender and energy so the UN Foundation has the energy access practitioner network which is a global network of over 600 organizations and companies that work in this space so we have a pretty good eagle-eye view over the sector based on the data we get from different practitioners all around the world and what you would see in that that database is if 10% of engineers in the United States are women how many what percentage of engineers in India are women so it's a very male-driven space but at the same time 1.3 billion people in this world and need access to electricity and a little over half of that are women so it's really important to take into to take note in terms of investing in energy to have a gender lens as Jackie so eloquently put in the plenary session yesterday that investing in women actually needs a higher return and with the 1.3 billion person market that's a huge opportunity for for social enterprise and business and in new financial markets so the sustainable energy for all initiative rather than focusing specifically on gender as a method of increasing energy access it's a very cross-cutting issue we have to look at gender and all all all the silos of energy energy and agriculture because most farmers in the world are a woman energy and health because many hospitals don't have access to energy and women who are giving childbirth are doing it at night and it's extremely dangerous and is creating all kinds of health issues for women and energy is micro grids because using including women in that model for the villages to bring power but there's so many different aspects of energy access that needs to include the gender component and that's why it's so important to look at it through a lens and not at the screen as Jackie stated well Jackie you you are our expert on on all of these these these issues and maybe bring us an investor perspective you you've convened investors you know you you know the way in that investors think in this particular space in terms of energy what do you think investors should be thinking at you know particularly this issue of higher returns I should say I was chatting to an investor who happens to be a man earlier and I was telling him about this panel he's actually on a panel right now himself he said to me I really am bummed that I can't be there to listen because you know I was just chatting to Ross a village capital and he was telling me they did an analysis of their portfolio and the companies that are run by women are just doing what was it 12% better so give us some statistics as to why this makes this is not just something you should do from your heart it should be something you should do because it will actually make a difference to your pocketbook yeah so a couple different things so one I just want to say that I am in the company of esteemed experts here and and honored to be there be here and Richenda actually last year said to me as I was talking about gender lens investing she said Jackie I believe there will be more gender lens investing when there are more women doing the investing which was very interesting and put me again in this model of saying how do we get more women angels how do we empower more women philanthropists to start to feel like they can actually move money in this space what's happening there so short story on that at Socap in Amsterdam last year there was a wonderful angel network kind of practitioner mini session and it was a solar company and so little pitch and then how would angels talk to this company and it was a wonderful thing Suzanne be all God bless her stood up and said so I'd like to understand the gender diversity of your board for the solar company that was you know talking about how they were going to bring lighting to women and the wonderful brilliant entrepreneur said well our board is all men and and then he said nobody's ever asked that before and and so this is the aspect that you sort of go okay part of this for investors is starting to ask questions in an in an inquiry sort of way really no one's ever asked that before maybe we should start thinking about these things just both because gender diverse boards make stronger companies and also because in a space where gender diversity and especially women are such a huge part of creating impact how could you how can you not right and then that also goes from there through to the leadership of a company and what's happening not just with the CEO although I will say here you've got to look and say how is it that we are not completely supporting the women's CEO is in this space like how can we not but also throughout the whole ranks of the company what's happening how is it that there's a diverse workforce and and so forth I'll say I was talking with Kristen Hull who some of you may have seen yesterday up here and she had a wonderful perspective on this that I think more investors will start to come she said Jackie my passions are around sustainability and around social justice my strategy is around women so that was an interesting reframe for me you know that you could because I do have investors say to me well I'm I'm about the environment I'm not about women and so this reframe of like no actually you can't be about sustainability in a way that's actually going to work without also being about at least a gender lens and I would posit about women yeah I'm my company is very focused on the financing side how do we finance clean energy and water for end users many of whom are women and quite honestly we really have the women who are in the space here there aren't there there aren't a huge number of other companies led by women out there and these of course are delicious I mean amazing fantastic women but I would like to see more I want to see more women running companies who really have this focus and and more companies run by men that have a gender lens you know because many of their clients are women so I would love to find a way for us collectively to support these kinds of initiatives and just maybe maybe what we should do is open up the the room to questions or comments from people on on all of the things that you've heard and particularly on ideas about how we can make this a more gender-friendly space can I just say one thing before we start I think one of the reasons for why we've also though as women CEOs or you know like leaders and and looking at the energy space have been successful is because one of the things that all of us have been doing a lot more and we're just talking about this earlier was that we're collaborating a lot more you know we're creating a lot more networks and being more transparent about our work I mean you know Solar Sister and Frontier Markets have been tweeting with each other for like I think almost a year now about you know what we're doing because we're doing very similar work but in different in different countries you know when Angaza Design first came out with the product the first thing I did was start giving you design feedback for my customers you know and it's like I think that collaboration is something that we've been doing a lot more as women in the space and I've definitely noticed that you know building and getting stronger in the last couple of like years because you know when women for whatever reason work together we're not sitting here going oh your competition or this is gonna be you know this is information that's we need to sign an NDA for like you know we're very a lot more open and transparent to discuss that and then on the investment side we have folks like you that are actually taking this point to say that you know even if I can't invest in you I will find someone else that can invest in you and I think that's really important to kind of point out well does anyone have a comment or a question I can hardly see you actually are there any I there is a hand over there thank you can you hear me okay yeah no I I think it's very interesting when you're pointing out that when you bring up the idea of gender to people like you asked the composition of a board to see how many females were on the board and with somebody sort of stepped back and was shocked by it and thought well you know gee with it's all men in your right are especially when we're looking at energy access in the developing world where indeed as you point out most of your customers are women did you we do you receive pushback on the idea of adding more women to the board I mean because everything you're saying even though I'm a male I I totally resonate with the need to balance out our approach if for no other reason for expediency given the market that we're trying to to to access that we need the perspective of women to help balance out our approach when you finally sort of alert people to this new gender lens and the need for balance do you get pushback from from folks from from men probably more than two sides of that on the one hand no people will say yes we really do want to find women for our board and we can't find any and and then there is the question of both you know how many people have you asked and what what do you think actually qualifies a board member right right because it's a really fascinating thing to say what if you're working in energy in developing markets what's a powerful board is it a whole bunch of people who've been CEOs right before or is it a combination of different skill sets should you have someone who's been in product design should you have someone who understood you know that there's a aspect there so no I think that that people in general do embrace this question of a gender lens but then there's just the practicality of it and and the fact that you actually have to be deliberate and focus the other thing I'll bring up and I'd love to sort of ask the panelists is on the metric side of things I think that investors need to be asking more questions on on metrics and you know how gender differentiated data and that's hard for entrepreneurs on the one hand because it's more pressure on the other hand it really does demonstrate you know what what's happening and so forth so I have I have one anecdote from my previous life I worked in an organization called Women's World Banking which has spent a lot of time thinking about this issue and what we would do is we had we had a very broad network some of the organizations were led by by women the core network affiliate network and then we had a number of organizations that were led by men but that were leaders in the field of microfinance and what we did was we published data on a number of different things you know the number of clients they had the percentage of women and we published data on on the governance structure how many men and how many women there were on the board what percentage of the board was women at what percentage of the staff were women and I remember very early on a leading MFI I mean it was one of the biggest MFI's said to me because I was one of the people who was making sure this data got out there said to me well Nicky you know do we have to have the the book because they were doing really well on all the stats except for the board composition of women you know where it was I think it was like 3% I think they had you know they had a quite a large board and there was one woman or they had no no women maybe and I said yeah you know that's part of what we we promote as women's world bank can't we just leave that out do we have to do we have can't do we have to have that and within two years that organization had was up to 30% so it was it was just even making it visible which was I think to your point Catherine you know having just making it part of the conversation starts to shift behavior there was no penalty you weren't going to be thrown out or anything like that but you know people are competitive I want to be competitive on the number of clients I have and if this is another way in which I'm rated I want to be competitive on the number of women I have on my board but I think the thing that is most persuasive is if at the end of the day you know true to all the data that you've shown Jackie businesses are more profitable if they have diverse boards diverse staff if they have you know if they have a woman centered a woman cognizant woman centered approach that you don't really need to have more of a conversation than that if it's if that's what people care about but to your point on metrics I mean I think that it's it's not about whether we should be forced to look at you know women metrics versus male metrics it's just that there's there's got to be to me it's always been about a business sense right and so when I'm looking at you know what what has been the trend of women female purposes it's important to understand that based on what my actual value at as a business is because if I don't understand 50 percent of my market then I'm not gonna be a successful business but then also to track that impact because the use is different like you know the amount of kerosene being used by women versus a man depending on what she's using it for versus what he's using it for makes me have to measure impact metrics differently based on gender because of that reason and also generally thinking about even the purpose of a board it's not that it should be that oh you have to have women on your board but it's you understand the value add of having certain types of personalities or certain types of functionalities on your board which actually makes you a much more you know successful company as a whole right and I think that's kind of the direction that it should be going into you have a question here have a follow-on question right into that I guess in the US and other Western countries like women have that purchasing power and that say and in the finances to back up the the economics of it can you talk a little bit about each of your markets and how that dynamic plays out when they don't might not have the same amount of financial power and in the house so I can talk a little bit about in our market is in East Africa and Uganda specifically and I think most people assume that all financial decisions are made by the men in the household but it's not really true because what we're talking about are capital expenditures probably are and when you're talking about installing a large home system or making a big capital expenditure it's it's going to be made you know certainly as a family and most often by the man but when we're talking about daily purchases and and that's really what we're talking about in at the level of what we're doing is we're you know selling small solar lamps that are replacing the purchase of kerosene and that is something that the woman manages she manages her household budget and even if she has to go to the man to get approval for making a larger expenditure she's going to have to be the one who initiates that the husband is not going to sit back and think about oh wouldn't it be great for my wife to have this cleaner light you know she's got to be the one who goes to him and kind of points out you know I use the smoky light every day it's you know I'm coughing our children aren't studying yeah we could improve our family life with this new technology and so I think it's it's both women do have more purchase power than people realize and they have more purchase influence certainly than people realize really been surprising each time I got into the market and talk with customers and I'm just absolutely delighted by the fact that I think gender roles are really just getting flipped on their head you know I see men all the time maybe their their wife has died and they're really taking care of maybe five children and they're taking on such a traditional women's world by just putting priority to education making sure they can replace kerosene with a solar light to so their children aren't inhaling toxic fumes and they can study and then I see women who particularly in the with our pay-as-you-go system the women are stepping up and actually helping their neighbors top up their lights and add energy to their lights each week and you know that that kind of initiative that kind of independence to just you know help the village make these these weekly purchasing decisions too I just see the traditional gender roles not really holding up many times I don't know if that's necessarily true for India I think it depends on what part of the country you're in so if you're in the north there are a lot of really traditional gender roles that exist you know women aren't really making the purchasing decisions for most things there because the men tend to really take on that I'm responsible for the home I'm responsible for the income and so I get to make the decisions but the men in in in that space are a lot more sensitive to their responsibility of being a good husband and being a good father so you talk about you know having your wife be more comfortable or having your children you know educated and they actually are more susceptible to that whereas in the south it's the exact opposite I mean men are really we used to call them male male dud syndrome because they literally were just not involved in anything responsible and so women took on that role of really taking on the leadership role of that house and so she was actually the more active aggressive one making most of the purchasing decisions so she was involved in that and then if they don't have purchasing power if they don't have enough money what I've noticed and I think it goes along to what you're talking about in terms of helping top-ups but like we found this that women tend to help each other out more to cover the cost of a light or they might buy it in group they might do like some sort of group purchasing dynamics if we started doing a lot more interesting financial modeling based on the dynamics of women yes yeah thanks very much I'm for a great panel a great theme and great phrase gender lens I work with the world food program we talk about enhanced commitments to women but gender lenses a much easier way of saying it so thanks your last comments are just starting to get at my question we in the the energy area that you're looking at right now have been looking at women in agriculture and aware of just simple things like so many of our beneficiaries are women who are farmers who spend inordinate amount of time pounding out grain and so we look at things like grinders for the home so that we're reducing the amount of time they're doing it and we're looking at the role that they're playing in the agricultural production itself in both of these areas and in many others we're recognizing that we're not sure if we're recognizing we're starting to think about well instead of having a grinder in every home wouldn't it be smarter to have an entrepreneur in the in the village and and people go there or rather than having you know individual family tractors and so on some some other sort of more public works or publicly owned kind of scheme to address the these energy challenges I wonder the examples that you've all cited in your business seem to be household oriented gender lens and I'm wondering if there's a change in gender lens when you think about something which is just a little bit up the scale which is not household level it's more community level village or level approaches to energy solutions and how to look at those through the gender lens one of the things that we see is at the community level there is a really strong tradition of women's community groups and that they are such a natural resource to tap into for distribution of the types of activities you're talking about they do work together beautifully we see them come together and form these savings and loans groups and purchase kind of collectively purchase power groups so that they can provide you know service products for their entire group and it's a very efficient and beautiful way for them to access really financing at the most low low cost way because they're not charging each other interest and there's this incredible sense of community support that I think you know would be very appropriate for tapping into for the for the type of activities you're talking about just there's there's so I think the reason why we're talking more about household and not I guess on community level because there's also this sense of ownership that exists in terms of the products that we're talking about in terms of the energy space right there's this personal utility but then there's also commercial utility utility and I think that in in Rajasthan specifically I've actually been challenging this notion of using community models because generally utility has been something that people have not liked because there's it's it's not been reliable right so access to electricity has not been reliable and so I tend to always hear people telling me about how they want to be free of this ongoing commitment and they just want to have independence and have ownership and so that to me has become a little difficult to understand that on a community level play and generally speaking people will come together to insist on you know the local government getting street lights but they won't pitch in for that so I'm and we've seen a lot of sun charging stations come come in like come in this these were government initiatives where there were these sun charging stations that technically everyone would then bring their products to and charge but they haven't been successful so I'm finding it actually hard to even not even on a gender perspective on a community perspective to try to understand why it's not working at least where I'm operating well I think I think there are situations where it doesn't work in situations where it works where my organization happens to work in Afghanistan which is you know from a gender lens perspective I think the lens is very tricky there but there are traditional financing mechanisms that have existed since Alexander the Great's time where the community will pay the things it wants so for example fixing the mosque or paying the Mullah salary sometimes you know sometimes paying for the school that needs to be something that has to something to do with the school paying for generators so they'll pay for generators they'll pay sometimes to keep the wells functioning to fix something with the wealth but it's really it's very unpredictable what they will choose to pay for and what they choose to pay for has everything to do with the way the Shura system works and the way in which the community is motivated and inevitably the things that will get paid for are the things everyone can agree on like the mosque and the Mullah salary you know and and one of the interesting things in talking to villages there we were able to do focus groups actually with women and men the women who were widows whose husbands who had been Mohajideen fighters and who were who didn't have power in the Shura complained that their viewpoint was not being embraced enough by the Shura and that they had to fight very hard to get their perspective listened to and that they were you know they were sort of marginalized which is not surprising but some of them were actually very persistent and very very how can I say persuasive and they were able to have things that they cared for shifted like for example fixing the well outside their house which was for a small group of people was was paid for by by a local Shura member so I think it I think it's different in different contexts in some places the kinds of things that you're talking about are funded and women are at least the beneficiaries of it if they're if you know often they're pushing for it and sometimes it takes a long time for that viewpoint to to actually be be advanced and sort of implemented in a way that that's meaningful any other questions the energy access space tends to look at women as beneficiaries of energy but we really have to stress gender along with the entire supply chain yeah and so when we talk about you know involving the community a large part of it is having that community buy-in and targeting those influential leaders which typically tend to be men but what about the influential women in the community exactly why not be deliberate and look at those because there are definitely socialites in villages that have a lot of power just like the the men in the village do so just being deliberate along on the entire supply chain of of the system and to your point the wife of the mullah is a very powerful person even in a place like Afghanistan um do we have other questions in addition to along the entire supply chain bringing it back to um women on the investment side making sure that we are um women aren't just beneficiaries and they're not just supply chain but they are also owners and investments and you know we we invest really in women entrepreneurs at a very grassroots level but then when I look at that sort of pull back and say well you know we want those women entrepreneurs to grow not just to be small little cute entrepreneurs but to grow up to be businesses and we want those businesses to attract capital and um to take a look at why should somebody invest in a woman business a woman owned business at that level a small or medium-sized business doesn't matter at all that she's a woman and I think it still does I think in order to um to get the kind of engagement throughout society of women as um as you know beneficiaries as entrepreneurs and as business owners as investors you know we we need to very very um deliberately and intentionally encourage all of that all of that activity well and and I mean I'm sorry I I initiated the word beneficiary I take it completely back women in Afghanistan unfortunately it ends up being like that but women as customers as consumers you know as active participants in as much as it makes as we need to be moving in that direction even in some of these very challenging contexts so yeah absolutely we had a question over here um it sounds like it I totally understand the importance of having women as leaders of these organizations especially when females are and have a lot of purchasing power I'm curious how in each of your organizations you prevent the lens from becoming too much of a screen um to your point earlier have you ever struggled with making sure that um you have a diverse board that has you know both male empathy we do have uh both male and female board and um we even have um males working with solar sister we have solar brothers and um some of our entrepreneurs as well but I think it it's still our our primary motivation is to um to make sure that women are having that space to participate in the energy sector at at a very um real and hands-on way um we have a mixed board and a lot of our field staff actually are men and a lot of our franchisees are also men because they are actually there's a brick-and-mortar shop that they're managing for us it's not been about making sure they're all men or all women it's about understanding the dynamic that plays between the male and the women so like a lot of our franchisees wives are the influencers and they're like throwing these parties in their homes and they're actually creating they're creating another income-generating activity because we realize in our space women tend to do much better job marketing and gathering and not selling specifically um so I think and then even our field staff the men field staff are there because they can stay at night later to do light demos because at night that's when you can actually see the efforts of your solar lights women for um in our situation it's not safe so they outside women cannot stay running around in villages and trying to manage franchisees and so it's just about being sensitive as to what the role is what the capacity is and what the dynamic is um and that's how we kind of look at gender lens and prevent it from being a screen. Leslie? Yeah I mean I think we actually um I wish we looked at everything through gender lens more often um we have more male investors we have more male mentors and advisors and you know I wish it were a bit more balanced um traditionally we're not a company that is you know marketing specifically to women selling specifically to women um you know we're a pays you go technology development company um and oftentimes you know the majority of the people we want to hire are men because they're the engineers that we're reaching out to to get that talent um you know great if we can find the 10 percent women engineers out there but um it's not a reality all the time so I think it's it's definitely not a screen for us it's it's something we're just trying to balance out every day. My my organization has women and men on the board women and men who are staff women and male led organizations we invest in one of the things that we try to do is in our investments make sure that we are capturing gender data in a way that's meaningful so looking at the impact on women trying to see whether the companies if the companies you know to the question that you were raising earlier if the companies aren't naturally seeing that there may be a differential impact on men and women having some of those conversations so we're trying to be very even-handed uh and I would love to have panels where I'm not the only woman on the panel this is such a fantastic panel to be on because I'm the only woman they can roll out in the gender space gender sort of whatever in the energy space relating to to gender so I think we need more companies that do have an overly woman-centered perspective given all of that evenness that I was talking about earlier um other questions or comments this is a relatively new way of looking at things the one thing I'm familiar with is barefoot college uh I was wondering if you could comment on what you know about it whether it's a really leading edge model or is it have problems there there are a number of organizations particularly in southeast asia that have really looked at women as sort of as entrepreneurs and sort of as part of the distribution system which is what the barefoot college does you know another example that stands out in the energy space is Grumine Shakti where um all of the install all of I think all of the installers actually and the technicians are women so this is so if we if we think about you as I don't know whether they would even think about themselves as engineers but arguably they're in that engineering space and this is really very very many women who are who are building businesses and who are providing service and maintenance which is key for Grumine Shakti in having their model work so I think it's a I think it's a very important perspective uh Deepal Bharua who is the person who started Grumine Shakti has started an organization called the Bright Green Energy Foundation where it's specifically about creating opportunities for women as solar entrepreneurs he sees he wants to have I think he has a very large 100 million he wanted to have 100 million solar systems in Bangladesh run by and maintained by women uh which would be fantastic so you know those kinds of models I think are really interesting models I don't know if anyone I think the real genius of what barefoot college did was they looked at what what is it that um they removed a barrier that allowed women to participate and that barrier was that they that you have to be literate in order to go on to this engineering school and they said you don't need to be literate engineering is you know the engineering that they're teaching is all hands-on kind of stuff so by removing that barrier of literacy and saying we can take these women on even if they are illiterate it opened up the door for a lot of women to be able to participate in something that had traditionally been male and I see that in the same ways if you look at um being a shopkeeper often being a shopkeeper owning a store keeping it open late at night and thinking that that is the only way you can distribute products is through shops that means that somebody has to go and be at the shop from early in the morning to late at night well that by itself pretty much precludes women from being participants because women have children at home they have husbands to cook for they have so many other family responsibilities that are not going to be lifted from their shoulders and so thinking that the only way you can distribute the only way you can participate in this market is by becoming a shopkeeper means you are excluding women you're not even thinking you're doing it but you're excluding women and so if you take a look at some of those um sort of unconscious barriers that get put up for women's participation and remove those obstacles and then it opens up the way for women to participate and I really think that that that's what Barefoot College did so brilliantly is removing that obstacle and then it's just to open up the way for women to participate. I mean Shepi business model I know it's different from Barefoot College but one of the brilliant business pieces of that is that a rural Bangladeshi woman at home it's unacceptable for her to open the door to let a male technician install a solar home system on top of her house so training women's solar electricians um overcomes that obstacle and then allows for easier installations and then increases the business. So it makes business sense back to your point I just you're gonna make profit on that model. I love that I will be using that story. I think the key just is to understand your landscape understand the kind of women what motivates them and then really trying to figure out how that fits into your model right. I mean it worked in Thelonia really well but like I mean they haven't been able to scale that there are Rajasthan for other reasons right but in the south there are a lot of models like that that work really well so it's really about just trying to understand what works where well and and then and then implement that and it comes back to what what Catherine was saying earlier it's it's an intent it's intentionality there's an intentional aspect to this which I think for me is very powerful and very successful at the end of the day. Do we have we run out of time the clock is very interesting here it's moving forward and backwards I feel like we're we're we're sort of time traveling but let's pretend I mean it's giving us a couple of extra minutes if anyone has any more questions I can't see if there are any others here yes yes exactly this is so exciting don't you love that we're getting extra time on gender which is so fantastic within energy and and beyond I'm wondering if you could speak to intergenerational dynamics or trends that you're seeing with the gender lens I'd love to start on that it's actually really exciting so I think that so so there's a role that the mother-in-law plays which is so interesting to me versus the role that the daughter plays versus the daughter-in-law versus like the the five-year-old the seven-year-old daughter okay and and and it's it's it's all different layers of excitement so a mother-in-law what I'm seeing is if she likes the products and she understands solar she kind of gives her bindi which is her daughter-in-law like the signal because she's had some education to go and start helping her husband and that's really revolutionary to like see a Rajasthani woman like mother-in-law a Rajasthani mother-in-law saying yes to let her daughter in a rural village go out and start working we're also seeing a lot more excitement on the younger generation side so these girls that are like 15 16 years old and can't go to school anymore but they're at home they're like they're getting frustrated and they're seeing this movement in the in rural villages and they're saying we want to step up you know we want to get involved and so a lot of a lot of the children that are getting educated are again getting excited to get access to solar because it's giving them an opportunity to learn more so they're forcing their parents to come and listen to marketing activities so you're seeing a lot more interesting involvement in terms of the different roles and the different types of mentalities that you're seeing in energy or in in what we're trying to do on the ground and and I think that it's interesting to see the different age groups that actually then get involved in that I think your question's interesting even from from the perspectives of each of us individually um energy is an aspirational thing if you don't have it you want it for yourselves you want it for your children you want it for your grandchildren and you know I think about my grandmother who had she's Italian was Italian she had seven children and during world war two she washed the clothes of all of those children by hand in northern Italy because that's what you had to do and you know when she got a washing machine her life changed she could do all sorts of things it takes a lot of time to wash the clothes of seven children and so we're seeing that kind of and many of us I think had grandmothers and great-grandmothers who were doing a similar thing their lives were occupied doing these kinds of menial tasks that not having access to energy kind of captured them in now those shifts that happened to our foremothers are happening in the developing world through access to energy and I think I think we should all remember we're not that far away you know for me I can actually remember my grandmother telling me those stories that's just that's you know two generations away um and I'm sure many of you have similar kinds of stories even in your own families also I think it's interesting to note too that I think a current statistic from ILO is that 75% of Africa is under the age of 25 and if we're going to meet the 2030 goal of energy access for all all of the young people today in Africa will technically have electricity by the time they reach adulthood so it's really important too to think about the demographic kind of changes that will occur will those younger people start having less children are they going to live longer because of access to health care and all these different things that feed in from access to energy so like I love that question because it pulls into it pulls makes energy a bigger development um question and I'll share one anecdote which is um we in training our entrepreneurs we had a training session and all the you know the ladies came and they got the training and we go back a month later and and do the follow-up and one of the women stepped up and she was an older woman and her name's Francis and she said you know when I came to this training I looked around and I saw these young ladies and I thought oh you know this is a business this is a business for young ladies you know I can't do this because I'm a grandmother and she said but I gave it a try and I took you know the systems and I and I actually sold some and I was earned some money and I was quite you know she was actually quite successful and she said and and now I know that this is a business that even grandmothers can do and she stood up and she was so proud and it was really hot yeah it was great I think one comment on the training aspect too which we've seen which I've loved is um the so we have a mobile money component of just adding energy to a light that the family has to send a mobile money payment and oftentimes it's the children when I say children I mean like um you know 10 to 20 years old um using who have used mobile money in the past so the parents um are just immediately handing the product to the child and just saying you know I'm designating you as the person in the household to add energy you know whether it's a female child or a male child it's it's the youth that really just catch on like that so if we want to train people really quickly we find the 10 to 20 year old within the household so my my perspective on this came more from the investor side of things where I will say um we I'm very encouraged with the next generation um asking questions about where their investments are going and so you're seeing a lot of that in sustainable investing in general but the next gen um family members saying I don't want to be part of the foundation unless I start to get to have some control and I start to get to you know say where the investment's going and then you you know cross that with their interest in sustainability and then see previous conversation about you can't be interested in sustainability without being interested in gender lens and it all comes out quite nicely well I think I think the clock has actually run out on us is that right I don't think we can claim any more minutes from the clock so on that lovely note thanks to all of you for being fantastic and all of you who are investors you should be investing in these lovely ladies because they're all running fantastic businesses and and for those of you who are entrepreneurs in this space come and let us know because we need more of you to be able to support in the future so thanks to all of you for being here