 Today's topic, and I think the event, comes at a very opportune time here in Washington. Really comes as we're beginning to see a critical mass of players. The African Development Bank, development institutions, African governments, international organizations and donors start to focus in this very serious way on the energy sector on bringing electricity access to Africa. Obviously there's been a long-standing recognition that energy and electricity access has had a tremendous, or the lack of, has had a tremendous drag on African growth and on improvements in human development and education, health, livelihoods and poverty alleviation. So there are big new initiatives. The African Development Bank has made this a key focus. The World Bank has also made this a big focus. The International Finance Corporation, a huge amount of its Africa portfolio is focused on energy and power generation, sustainable energy for all, and most recently the U.S. Power Africa Initiative, which is really the first time that the U.S. has begun to focus its efforts on kind of the private-public partnership in driving electricity access. And I think as this critical mass of interest grows, there's a need to build in really from the start an understanding of the particular challenges, the needs and circumstances of women in electricity access who bear in so many instances the lion's share of the backbreaking work in small holder farming, in cooking, in collecting fuel and water, huge amounts of time spent in that, in child rearing, so education, health, and so forth. And as with water access, I think investing in the ways that alleviate that burden, improve on women, improves productivity, excuse me, frees up their time, gives opportunity for livelihood diversification, and so forth. So this is not a niche topic, it's a huge development opportunity to build the needs and circumstances of women into these initiatives early on. Second, this is a time that there's growing interest and need in the U.S. to get U.S. entrepreneurs and investors thinking about opportunities in Africa. And there's huge opportunities for creative thinkers, for social impact investors, and for for-profit investors to engage in new ways and expand their ties on the continent. Opportunities are growing and that's driving a healthy competition with others and I think the U.S. does not want to get left behind in that competition. So I hope, I think U.S. investors generally have been less aware of the opportunities, kind of more frightened by the, you know, an over-calculation in some instances of risks. And I hope today that we can play a small role in particularly in our third panel in looking at what are the opportunities for smart investments that have both development impact and work at a business viability. Our first panel today is going to be on the question of energy access for women. Again, this is, this is fairly, you know, it's a fairly new time to be talking about this although our panelists have been talking about this for a very long time. A water access which has gotten more attention I think in the past than energy access, it will be our second panel. And our third panel is looking at what are the opportunities, what might be some of the platforms for diaspora and U.S. more generally to be finding opportunities to engage in these. At the end we're going to show a short film, Marilyn Smith of the Energy Action Project is going to introduce the premiere of a film, Darkness, which talks about the impacts of energy poverty and is quite compelling in a very short film that I hope you'll all stay to watch. Let me just turn over to Frank. I'm so glad to see you here and I'm really grateful to our panelists today and for the topic that we're going to be addressing. So Frank. Good morning and welcome to CSIS. So Jennifer has provided the substance in play by play. I'm here to do the color commentary. And let me just tell you when we first started talking about this and the fact that we rescheduled it. So I thank you all for turning out on our postponed event. And when I saw the weather this morning, I actually thought that the next time we do this, it'll be energy, water and weather forecasting. Amazing. We do expect because we've gotten a number of emails that folks coming in, especially from Northern Virginia are having horrible trouble getting here. So I expect that the crowd will fill up. We just thought we needed to get started. Let me just say it's been a great progress that we've made moving this forward, but it really was Tim Reschenda. And I've got to say the same thing that Jennifer said in terms of Lawrence Jones. So I've known Dr. Jones for several years now from when he used to send me emails about Liberia. And then we started talking about energy issues. I serve and I'm proud to serve on as an advisory director on his board. I'm also on the board of the Nomad Foundation. And like a lot of other NGOs, we work in Niger with a Tuareg. And NGOs frequently think that they've got it all covered, right? So when we first went into this country, these are nomadic herdsmen. They need water. They need medical facilities. They need food. So we started food banks. We bought cattle and goats, right? We drilled water wells. These are all good things. We built schools and medical facilities. And we found quite early on that even though we had the schools, people weren't coming to the schools. And the reason was the children spent so much time pumping the water well and then carrying the water in buckets and jars back for their irrigation and to feed the families and their crops and also their animals, right? So then we put in solar facilities, which so solar pumps were actually a good thing. So the water was flowing 24 hours a day, practically. It freed the children up. And we found that it actually helped spur an entirely new industry of solar panel assembly installation and then maintenance and repair. So these are all good things. Children still weren't coming to the schools. So I've covered kind of the energy and water piece. And then we got smart enough to go to the women and mothers of the groups that we were dealing with. And they said, you know, if you would add breakfast to the curriculum, the children will show up. And so sure enough, by doing something similar or simple like that, now we have the schools full as well. But it's been an extraordinary experience. Lawrence, anyone that knows him, this notion of enthusiasm that's undaunted and persistence and substance is just a joy to work with. And Tim and Richie in the same way. So we're really looking forward to this day. I have found throughout my career that humility, listening, and learning are always good things. And I don't want to lose that. So that's what I expect to do for the remainder of the morning and come off better for it. The first panel, as Jennifer lined out. So Rishinda is going to moderate the first panel. I'll introduce her and then let her introduce the panel. In your programs, there's actually an extensive bios on all of our speakers. And it really is an extraordinary group. But Rishinda Van Luen is executive director of the Energy Access Initiative. And she leads the UN Foundation work on energy access and its engagement with the UN Sustainable Energy, the Energy For All Initiative. She founded and leads the United Nations Foundation Energy Access Partitioner Network, which was launched back in 2011. She joined the UN Foundation in 2010 from global energies. It was a global renewable energy private equity firm where she led its work both on commercial emerging markets and renewable energy investments. She also served as a founding board member for the Good Energies Foundation, focusing on the application of renewable energy technologies for poverty alleviation in developing countries. And prior to this, she served as executive director of Trickle Up. She has extensive background and knowledge on this subject, as do all of our commenters and panelists today. And I'm so grateful that you're here today. I welcome you to CSIS. And Rishinda, take over the program at this point. We'll be back to join you later. But thank you all for coming. Thanks very much, Frank and Jennifer, for those kind introductions and to all of you, again, for joining us for this really important discussion today. Before I introduce the panelists, I just want to say a couple of remarks to set the stage a little bit further from the standpoint of sustainable energy for all. And I hope that Venkat in particular will also contribute to talking a little bit about the broad scope, because I recognize that some of you may be coming slightly newer to this subject area. And so just by way of background, some sort of high level framework setting, globally, there's still about between 1.2 to 1.3 billion people globally who don't have access to electricity and the development benefits that derive from having that access. In sub-Saharan Africa, in Africa as a whole, there's something, again, data is not exact, but something approaching about 500 million people who don't have regular and reliable access to electricity. And it's predominantly, but not exclusively, a rural issue. And of course, it affects households. It affects communities. And yet, at the same time, particularly, as we've already heard in just some of the introductory comments, there is very much a focus on some of the differential ways that it affects women in their homes and in their businesses and communities in particular. And we're going to be talking a little bit about that, particularly, and I'm delighted this morning to have three just tremendously experienced panelists to help us sort of unpackage that issue and really to talk about why, in fact, we should be focusing, particularly, on women's experience, but also on the flip side of the equation, what women have to offer, what are the opportunities, how women can engage in being part of the solution, and not only in terms of being the beneficiaries, if you will, of improvements in their local environment and their household access. So without further ado, I'm delighted to introduce our panel this morning from my left, Venkat Ramanaputi. He's from the World Bank and I know Venkat, so I don't want to look to his bio too much, but he's just been a tremendous resource for many years at the World Bank through the SMAP program, the energy program. He's a manager there. He's been a longtime supporter, engaged catalyst for a whole range of work on different energy issues. And I'm just delighted that we have two men on the panel as well, because I think women and energy is too important an issue to be left only for women to be speaking about. So delighted to have Venkat join us. The World Bank has a large gender and energy program in Africa that Venkat will be talking a little bit more about as we move forward. On my right, Paula Jackson, who is the CEO of the American Association of Blacks in Energy, and Paula also has a very distinguished career working in the energy industry in a number of different areas. And in particular, through her association, they're engaging through their membership with a whole range of energy companies in different parts of Africa. And again, she'll be talking a little bit more about their experience, in particular, working with her counterparts in South Africa and other countries. And on my right is Bob Healy, who is the Robert Healy junior, I should say, who is the head of the Healy International Relief Foundation, who is an entrepreneur, has been a very successful businessman with his family business. And if you need to or thinking about taking a vacation because the weather is so bad and you're thinking about maybe taking a cruise, Bob is wincing at that. But his business is one, certainly, to consider if you're thinking of that with the weather so bad. But on his philanthropic side, he leads the Healy International Relief Foundation, which is doing a tremendous amount of work now, particularly looking at health care settings and something very close to my own heart, which is looking at the way that you can help to bring more sustainable and secure energy access into health care settings as a way to deliver better maternal and child and community health outcomes. So again, delighted that Bob could join us this morning. And just to say that we did originally have a representative from Power Africa as part of this panel this morning as well. And unfortunately, he's sick in bed with the flu, so was unable to join us. But some of us who know Power Africa, I think we can perhaps talk about some of the elements that we see going on there as well. So I'd like to kick off with each of you in turn, just giving a few introductory comments about your program, introducing your perspective. And then from that, we will go into a broader conversation and also as you're listening in the audience, we want to have plenty of time for questions and input from the audience as well. So Venkat, maybe you could kick us off. Thank you very much, Rishenda. Good morning to all of you. First of all, I'd like to thank the organizers for this meeting and Rishenda for the invitation. But most of all, thanks to all of you who braved the weather to be here. That shows our real commitment. And the real commitment is what we need if we really want to make a difference in the gender equality. Because for too long, of course, people are aware of gender issues. Everybody talks about them. But most of the time, we end up just paying lip service to that or at a project level or a program level. You simply check a box. So we need to make sure that that commitment actually seeps into making a real difference on the ground. And I'm glad to say that at the World Bank, we moved on quite a lot from simply checking boxes to trying to do actual work. And we have now been doing work in the gender and energy for a long time. But now at the World Bank Group, including IFC and other organs that we have, we actually have a corporate policy of having to put everything through the lens of gender. All the projects, programs, grants, trust fund activities that we do. And I think that's a tremendous change if you compare it with, say, five years back in terms of what we were doing and so on. In the energy sector for a very long time, the activities around gender actually focused on energy access per se, and also largely in the household energy sector. So it's the issue of basically looking at the impacts of energy access or the lack of access on the women's lives and the lack of participation on the part of women in the energy programs and also the lack of decision making power of women making choices at the household level. So these are some of the issues that I've been grappling with. And we actually have a number of programs in terms of energy access and gender. But also now we have expanded the scope of our gender activity to all the aspects of energy sector as a whole. So whether it is utility management or generation transmission or various other aspects of energy. And there are, I think, two issues here. One is to see what kind of impact that energy systems or energy access as women, but also the flip side of it. What can an enhanced role for women in the management of energy projects or programs can actually have an impact on the energy sector. And very often I think we end up simply looking at the first thing and say that, oh, we need to make sure that the energy projects would benefit women and so on. But I think now the discourse on gender and energy is now also moving towards saying that we need to have an enhanced role for both genders in an appropriate way so that we have an efficient management of projects, efficient achievement of results and so on. And I think that is what we are really moving to. And of course, Rishanda has made a mention of sustainable energy for all and where energy access is one of the goals. And the goal is to achieve universal energy access for all by 2030, which means providing access to electricity for 1.2 billion people across the world, developing world, and about 2.8 billion people providing a clean cooking access. Because that's one of the major issues related to gender, because most people, especially in Africa, South Asia, and so on, still use traditional biomass and biomass methods and technologies for cooking, which has huge impact on the health and various other issues related to development and poverty. So let me stop there, but let me just make one last point that before we take up the discussion again, which is when I first started my career, the very first research paper I actually wrote was about 25 years back was on gender and energy. And we are basically, at that time, we were talking about how much time women spend in collecting fuel and how much time they have to spend in cooking, that kind of thing. And even after 25 years, in many countries, we still talk about the same issues. So in that sense, in a way, while we have made some progress in terms of awareness and even some programmatic things, but we are still talking about some of the basic problems which still not have been completely addressed. And I think with the advent of Sastryal Banji for all and all these things, the time probably has also come to see how we can accelerate this gender mainstreaming process so that everybody can actually benefit from whatever access that we are trying to create. So let me stop at that, and then maybe we can take a discussion. Thank you. Thanks very much, Venkat, for those remarks. Turning to you, Paula now. So what do women bring to the table in the energy sector? What's our unique strategic advantage? What, in your experience, is the benefits that you can provide working through your membership, in this area, and particularly as it relates to what's going on in the transformation of an infrastructure in Africa right now? Well, that's a big question, so thank you. First, thank you for having me here. It's really such a pleasure, and thank you to Dr. Jones. And for me, it's really, really, really nice to be here, because oftentimes when I speak at conferences around energy, there are not this many women in the room, to be frank. And so to see so many women in the room and so many women of color is a really, really big deal. As Dr. Jones will attest, that's extremely rare. But I think if I were to talk about what's going to go on in Africa in terms of an emerging economy, some things I'd like for you to think about and to leave you with, when we talk about oftentimes sustainability, we're talking about sustainability of resources and how you produce the power that people need. But I would suggest that sustainability also means how do you ensure that the people who are there who are going to receive that resource, that energy, that power, are able to then have some economic vitality around that? And so how do you ensure that they have the technical capabilities to work in the industry that we're trying to create for them? How do we ensure that the energy sector in Africa does not look like the energy sector in the US, which quite frankly is only 13% female? So we don't want to replicate that when we have an opportunity to do something new and different there. And it's very easy to transfer the skills and expertise that we have and the models that we have in the US someplace else. But what I would suggest is that when we look about developing a sustainable energy economy in Africa and we start talking about distributed generation and micro grids, we don't want to use a US model because that's not what we have in the US. And we're struggling here. And how do we transfer our existing energy infrastructure to something that would support more renewable resources to something that would support micro grids? And so when you start thinking about things like regulatory framework and the like, what you don't want to do is say, well, you need to do it the way we do it in the US. Because the way we do it in the US is not going to give you the outcome that you're looking for there. It's not giving us the outcome that we're looking for here in terms of change. And so I think that's important. As an association, just a little bit, so we're a professional association, which means that my 1,600 members all work in the energy sector, from well-head to burn or tip, in all areas of management. They could be meter readers. They're CEOs. Our commonality is that 99%, 98% of us are African-American. 100% of us are interested in making sure that we are well represented in this industry here and obviously abroad. And so in my experience, particularly in South Africa, there are two things that have struck me as quite strange, but really very interesting. The first time I was in Morocco and South Africa, I stood out because I was female and worked in this sector. And it did not matter who I met. They often asked me. They were very surprised. They were like, wow, you work in the energy industry. Have you always been like, oh, you're not been in the industry 20 years. And they were like, really? And so that was a surprise. And that went from ministers to people at the African Development Bank to just anybody who's trying to get in the sector. But more recently, what you're seeing, particularly in South Africa, is lots of young ladies who are going to school to learn how to do solar installation, to learn how to do these kinds of projects that don't have mentors. And so I was there in October to speak at a policymaker conference. And there were a lot of academics in the room. And the one thing that they wanted to make sure that I did was get on campus to meet these young ladies. Because what they realized is that oftentimes these women, maybe the first to go to school, maybe the first to have that kind of opportunity. And there isn't a base of women there that can be mentors and supportive of them. And so while we don't have that large of a base here, we as an association feel that it's extremely important that that's a role that we can very easily play is being mentors to young women. And quite frankly, to Africans and African Americans who are interested in getting into this business. And finally, I would say, when we talk about energy and access for women, I hope that we also talk about the economics around that. One of the things that I've noticed when I'm in conferences here at the US and we talk about climate change in women, we talk about health, but we don't talk about small business opportunity. And I think that's a shame because that's really where the real power is. We absolutely agree, I think no one would say that we shouldn't all have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink and good health. But if we don't focus on how do you ensure that female-owned businesses or minority-owned businesses are part of that economic engine, then I think we're doing a huge disservice because in my view, that's really what's sustainable. That's really the most important part about sustainability is how do you have that longevity so that there's an economic vitality in those organizations in those countries? I hope I answered your question. Great, thanks so much, Paula. Very rich set of comments and insights there that I think we can pick up in the discussion going forward. But let me turn first to Bob. And Bob, I know that you're doing a lot of work on the ground in Sierra Leone, so can you unpack that a little bit further for us in terms of how you are looking at gender issues in the context of your work with hospitals and energy access there? Certainly. Well, first off, thank you all for braving the weather. Rishenda's right in the other half of what I do. If you wanna go to Miami or Florida and get on a boat, I know a guy. So can help you out. But I have to tell you that I wouldn't rather be anywhere than here today because while we have a lot of other businesses in my family, this has never worked for me. I enjoy this greatly. So the Healy International Relief Foundation has primarily been in Sierra Leone, Africa for roughly the last 10 to 12 years, right towards the end of the Civil War, if any of you are familiar with that portion of West Africa. By and large, what we found is that although the entire population certainly suffered the greatest piece of that population that suffered as women, there's no question about that. You know, as has been illustrated by my other panelists and by Rishenda, women bear the brunt of the labor around the household, particularly in rural areas. Women are delivering in childbirth. And in a country like Sierra Leone, that's oftentimes a death sentence. Sierra Leone had the highest infant mortality rate in the world for many, many years. I think it's finally been, I think it's finally on its way up, but it has one of the highest children under five mortality rates in the world. It has one of the highest pregnant mother death rates in the world as well. And a good portion of that has to do not only with zero access to energy when you get into the rural areas, but also very small access to education. You have untrained midwives who are delivering babies who have almost no idea what they're doing. And a big piece of that, a big part of that education that's missing has to do with energy access, quite frankly. And I'll share you a story that might illustrate this. And you'll have to excuse me because being in a family business and being in so country specific in what we do, we tend to take a really long-term view in our programs and what we try to achieve because my joke with people is, people will say, well, when are you gonna go to another country? And I say, well, when we fix all the problems in Sierra Leone, then we'll move on to another country. So we'll be there probably until I'm old and gray, hopefully. There's a village up in the north of Sierra Leone called Kitchum. It's one of the poorest villages, chieftains, rather, in the country. A few years ago, Kitchum installed a, well, many, many years ago, the now deceased chief of Kitchum, his big thing was education. He felt that every child ought to be educated. No child in this chieftain should lack for an education whether they were male or female, which was a very radical thought in the 70s and early 80s. And so he insisted that all of the children of the village be sent to school. He built many, many schools around the chieftain. He forced some parents to send their children to school to be educated. And so these children were. Their test scores were extremely low. Everybody relegated that to the fact that it's the poorest part of the country and these are country bumpkins and you're not gonna be able to educate them even if you pump a lot of money into building schools. Well, I can tell you that a few years ago, they installed a solar array on a library in the main village in Kitchum and suddenly all the test scores went up. Now why is that? Three extra hours of studying time. That's it, kids get study at night. All the test scores went up. Many of the schools in Kitchum are now at the top of the list of the school lists as far as grades are concerned. The reason I tell you that story is because we take a downstream look at this stuff. How many of those children, particularly young girls in a rural area, will get, well with that extra three hours of education because of the benefits of having access to energy will now go on to instead of being, living out their lives the way their parents did, may now go on to Freetown, to the university there or perhaps to another university in Africa or maybe even in London or the US. So I would challenge you not only to think about the access for women in the energy field which is extremely, extremely important because by and large, as Paul illustrated, there's a lot of small business opportunities there. There's a lot of sustainability but also make sure that women don't miss out on the benefits of what that energy then provides. All of those secondary benefits which are absolutely massive and stunning even on a very small scale, particularly when you're dealing with Sub-Saharan Africa. Thanks, Bob. That's a great point to sort of throw the discussion open a little bit more because sort of looking back to the work that we're doing, we talked a little bit about the Sustainable Energy for All Initiative which is initiative of the United Nations and the World Bank, Secretary General and President and if you're not aware that the UN has actually declared 2014 to 2024 the decade of sustainable energy for all and one of the three areas and goals within that is this focus on universal energy access, the other two being improvements in energy efficiency and doubling the global use of renewable energy as well. But beyond that at the UN right now there's a lot of discussion around what happens next after the Millennium Development Goal process is concluded in 2015 and sort of what should replace them and so there's a lot of discussion around sustainable development goals and particularly looking at some of these what we call nexus issues. So I suppose to put it easily, everything is related to everything else. So Bob's point about the fact that energy access has incredible benefits beyond the actual provision of the electrons to that school in terms of future educational outcomes for those children I think is a key point in this. And so one of the areas that we're looking at in fact is treating it as a sort of a nexus issue which is potentially as its own sustainable development goal but recognizing that it has an impact on income, on opportunities for some businesses on health and education and other areas as well. So turning back to all of you now I mean I think it would be really good just to talk a little bit more about some tangible areas where you see opportunities for ensuring that we can not only sort of by default have a benefit for women but how can we in our programs and perhaps Bencat you can pick up some examples from your work in Mali and Kenya and Tanzania. How can we be sort of trying to get the most bang for our buck whether it's from a private for profit side or whether it's from a institutional investor side to get as many of these benefits as possible for women? You know is it the education piece? Where should we be moving for this work? Okay thank you. I think the first of all the gender mainstreaming in the energy sector is not going to happen by default. I think we will have to make it happen at least for the foreseeable future. I think that is the first point. So we need to consciously incorporate the elements of gender mainstreaming into any project design or program design that you take up. I think that's very critical. To give an example we have been doing the rural energy access program in Mali in West Africa for a long time though it's now on hold because of all the political turmoil that happened in the last year or a half or so. Where the main focus of course is on extending access through grid electricity but also it had components of half grid through solar and also clean cookstores for cooking and so on. And one of the things that we have been working with the rural energy agency which is the focal point for us is to see how we can actually introduce the elements of gender mainstreaming into that. And one of the initial things that we did was actually to work with two, three women who are part of this program from the government side and sensitize them about the whole gender issues and so on and then see how we can reflect that in the project design at the gross roots level. And after a year of that kind of activity one of the things that happened was that the rural energy agency actually decided to employ one of those three women as a gender specialist to all the rural energy programs that they're doing which in our view at that time was a tremendous achievement the clear recognition that there is a role for somebody like that to play in a project implementation I think is a huge advancement as far as their mindset is concerned. So that's a very concrete example of how we could actually make that difference. But there are many, many examples. In fact I have a list here, the LPG program in Indonesia which is thought as a very successful program has documented evidence in terms of the difference that it made to women. And then we have the urban South Africa has some examples. We have Mali I already mentioned and also in terms of the entrepreneurship providing electricity access to women entrepreneurs has improved incomes in Janjibar, in Tanzania. So there are a number of examples that are out there but the thing is they still tend to be small somewhat isolated examples of success and they're still at a pilot scale and all. So the challenge really is how do you really take this whole thing to scale? So that is really the challenge. And as we are now under sustainable energy for all talking about in the next 15 years providing energy access to 1.2 billion people, you're really talking about scale, right? I mean, so when you basically do that kind of scale up how can you actually ensure that the general mainstreaming is an integral part of that is one of the challenges that we, you know, going forward we need to tackle. You know, I would say that probably the first step would be to make sure that you include them from the very beginning. You know, we heard two stories today that I think are really quite telling. So we start out hearing about a story about children not going to school and the way to get them there is to provide them breakfast. And the only way you know that is that someone actually went and asked them how come you're not sending your kids to school. And then we hear another story about students not doing well on tests and then you discover well all you needed was a light bulb. And so the hardest thing to do really is to include people from the very beginning. And so if you're trying to respond to the needs of women and make them a part of this process, that means you have to have them there when you start thinking about whatever it is that you're trying to develop and find out what their immediate needs are. And I would suggest you look for the low hanging fruit, because that's how you get the buy-in. So if the simple thing is look, I just need some electricity five hours a day to do X. And we're able to accomplish that very easily and simply. Then it's really easier to then keep them engaged as you try to build this out and move forward. But I won't suggest you that that's an easy thing to do because I don't think it is people. We all know we all have multiple things that are our priorities in our day to day lives and how difficult it is to engage people on something that I may think is important, but may not be at the top 10 of their list. But if you make that effort to include them, I think then the rewards, you'll see way far beyond what you could have possibly imagined. Just thinking when you talk about inclusion and scale, I would say you've got to look not only to those two things, but you have to look to, well, I can give you a specific case, frankly, banking. The reason I tell you that is in Sierra Leone, we're very blessed that they have a gender affairs office within the government that is very, very active. I know the head of it very well, and she's extremely fierce, very fierce woman. And so the country's been very fortunate in providing forums for women business owners to get together and share ideas. I was very blessed to be able to be president one of those forums. And almost categorically, the first thing I got told when I said, well, OK, what's your biggest need here? What's your biggest problem? Is banking. And there were many women owned business. There were a couple who were solar installers. I mean, just as an example, if you are a single woman in Africa, at least in Sierra Leone, good luck getting a loan. I mean, minus a microloan. But these are women who have taken that microloan and built their business. And it's a small business, but they're profitable. And the only way they can go in and get a loan with any reasonable interest rate or any size of money whatsoever is their husband either has to come and he's the signer. Or God forbid you're a single mother or you're a single woman, you can get a loan. But I guarantee you it's not an interest rate that you can do business on. So I think some attention has to be paid. And I don't present to you any easy, quick silver bullet fix to that. But some attention has to be paid to access to capital for women business owners to be able to expand and grow their business. That's the only way you attack scale on that end, in my opinion. Thanks very much for Bob on that. And for those of you who might be tweeting, I think that's eminently tweetable because this is something that we hear time and time and time again from women around the world, which is make it easier. We want to grow our businesses. We even talk about the sort of the missing middle of access to capital for the SMEs. We've got it as far as microfinance is concerned, but there's still so much more that can be done in helping women even get beyond that doorstep of access to capital, whether it's through the bank or through other arrangements to be able to grow their businesses. Women are great at running microenterprises, but they don't have to stop there. And they want to grow their businesses. And that's something that we hear from many different parts of the world, which is it's just still way more of a struggle than it needs to be. So hopefully somebody can put that into 140 characters or less. So coming back to this, Paula, you had taught also about sort of some of the ways that you mentioned about the girls getting the education. And we've heard in my work, we know that some of the best solar technicians out there in Ethiopia and Uganda are women. And we hear that they've had to struggle to be accepted initially, but when they're on the job and they're actually more dedicated oftentimes, they're more eager to learn and they're really, really persistent. So how do you think structurally, do we have to wait a generation until the girls that are being educated now can sort of help to take over? How do you think we can address this in a way that we can make an impact today as well as tomorrow? And I'm sorry, that wasn't the questions that we had on the cheat sheet before we started. So I'm throwing her a little bit of a curveball. That's a good question. That's a tough question. If I had a simple answer, I think the energy industry in the US would look a lot different and it doesn't. I would say that part of this is time. I would not suggest waiting a generation. I don't think you have a generation to wait. The world is changing and there are going to be more young women, young girls who are gonna be getting into industries across the world and particularly in Africa. But I think that we need to, particularly as Americans who are either investing in projects or who have influence over those investments in those projects, you can exercise that influence in a myriad of ways. And one way is to ask the question. So what are you doing if I'm going to invest in whatever it is here to make sure that women are a part of that project or a part of that workforce or trained or educated, et cetera. And you really just have to ask the question. It's not even really that you have to make a demand because typically asking the question is enough of a hint for somebody to kind of get that they've got to do something. But I think for us a lot of times, it's a hard question to ask. And I would suggest that this is very similar to when we talk about here about diversity in our workplaces. It's not until someone actually brings it up that people start to think about it. And yet sometimes we're afraid to bring it up. And I think that that's a problem. I mean, you know it's not diverse. In my professional career, and this is an example, I worked at a company and at one point we were hiring and I would always hear, we don't have African American engineers because we can't find them. And so I would say, okay, so if I find some, you'll consider hiring them. And it was kind of like, okay, yeah, we would absolutely do that. But it took me to actually mention it because it just wasn't on anybody's radar screen. And so I think we have an obligation to at least put it on somebody's radar screen to say, so what is it that you're going to be doing to be ensuring that you have more women as part of this workforce? To ensure that you have a work environment that is going to be welcoming. But I think the other piece for us is that it requires, and this I think speaks to some about the banking capital, is it requires some creative thinking. Everything can't happen and be done the way we do it here. All right, we're investing and going somewhere else. We need to have some cultural sensitivities about the way people in that particular environment, how they do their work, how they spend their days, how they think about their time and work-life balance and all those kinds of things. And in that I think then you'd be able to get people to think about how am I going to be more inclusive. But if we're trying to take the model that we use here and dump it somewhere else because it works well for us, I think that you fail at that. I don't think that works very, very well. And so I think we need to be very creative in terms of how are we going to bring more people in and particularly get more women involved and we're also going to have to give signals that that's important to us so that someone understands that that's one of your priorities. Great, do either of you want to take that on? Let me make a small comment here. I mean, talking about diversity, yes, I mean, having more women in workplaces is definitely a start. But I think it's not simply a question of numbers. It's also an issue of mindset. Here, of course, in an organized setting and a developed world setting, we probably take some of the gender mainstream issues for granted. But in the last one month, the most profound gender statement I had was from an ex-Congresswoman who said that American public is not ready for a woman American president. So I said, oh, okay. So we need to make some progress here as well. So it's not simply, there's some remote area in Africa that we are talking about. So there are two parts to this challenge. In terms of, okay, we do these numbers, we help women access to finance, improve their businesses, that's one part of it. But there is other part which is to work on the cultural mindset, which is century's old process. Because one proposition that I always make in this thing is you can't simply claim that you are mainstreamed in gender while you are not independent in any way in any other aspect or any other sphere in the society that you are working on. So the energy mainstreaming cannot be independent of everything else that happens in the society. So in that sense, of course we make a lot of efforts in the energy sector to gender mainstream and so on. But the progress you can make if you really don't work on the other parts of the society is only going to be marginal. So that is where it's very important to have this integrated approach where the education, the health, all the other sectors that have linkages to this and the nexus that Rishenda is talking about is extremely critical. Because we simply cannot say that, okay, from the energy sector perspective, we are doing what we can do and then we leave at it, then it's a very, very slow burning, slow progress that we can make. So let's come back again for a moment to the sort of the nuts and bolts of energy access. Again, recognizing that not everybody in the audience may be so sort of familiar with the technical issues. Maybe we could just spend a few minutes and then we'll throw it open for questions to come back and sort of walk us through what are we talking about? When we're talking about access to energy and women's involvement, particularly, let's say as a beneficiary or the customer if they're purchasing the service, what specifically are we talking about? Are we talking about the design of a small scale solar solution that meets women's needs? Are we talking about powering the appliances that they're working with? How are we looking at this sort of in a tangible, practical way? I know Bob can talk a little bit about some of the healthcare settings and specifically how we talk about saving women's lives, but specifically what kind of interventions are we looking at when we're really sort of coming back to, let's walk it through at the level of the woman, whether it's in her community or in her household. What are the solutions that we're talking about? Well, if you want to break it down at a very basic level, if you're talking about a woman, let's say who's about to give birth, then there's, I mean, energy pervades the entire process, and access to energy is normally a life or death thing. So by and large, the nearest clinic or hospital is extremely far away, so that's one form of energy. It may not be renewable. You're talking about gasoline or diesel, but she's got to be able to get there and she can't walk by and large. So you're talking about having access to vehicles for women or at least some sort of ambulance system, which doesn't exist right now. You're then talking, once you get somebody to a hospital to treat them, whether it's for pregnancy or something else, talk, keep in the pregnancy vein, then you're talking about having to do all of the work up and tests to find out where they are, how far along they are, how's their health, what's their background. By and large, those records don't exist. I mean, you're talking about having a computer system that requires a lot of energy, and frankly, when you look at a hospital, a computer is about the last thing a doctor or nurse in a third world country is gonna tell you they need or want there. They want maybe an X-ray machine. They absolutely need machines to sterilize all of their instruments because that goes back to sustainability because you can't throw everything out, you've got to reuse everything that you can. And a lot of the clinics that we saw by some very high end organizations that are out there doing a lot of good work, they're sterilization techniques of brick furnace, which does work, but it's not optimal, I can tell you that much. Once you've actually delivered, you've got a recovery period. If there's any sort of complications, you're talking about massive needs for everything from just basic electricity to being able to run out from whatever clinic or hospital you are to get whatever medications are needed back to there in a timely manner. And keep in mind, every minute that you deal with a pregnancy complication, that woman or that child gets that much closer to not making it. So time is extremely of the essence and being able to have a rapid response to all these things is extremely important. All that requires energy, whether it's being able to power up a cell phone to make a call or whether it's being able to get in the car and head down the road or whatever that is. So on our end, we deal a lot, our foundation particularly in several of the hospitals we deal with deals a lot with generators. It's not sustainable, it's not optimal, but it's what you have. You know, you've got some hospitals that are starting to put in solar arrays. It's expensive, it's a lot more expensive than it is here by and large. You know, and then you have the issue with what happens if it breaks? How do you keep it repaired? You know, I can find you a diesel, I can find you got a repaired diesel generator in Sierra Leone. It's much, much harder to find you a man, woman or woman to repair a solar array and to get them out there in a timely manner. So that's, I mean, that's pretty much how energy pervades that sort of a process when it comes to health care. I mean, I think I would say that, you know, in every step of the process, there's probably an impact to women. So, you know, access to electricity is really not gender specific, obviously. Everybody, you know, the real thing is everybody needs to have it. But there's so many different things that are going on when you talk about access to power in a place where there is no power. So you're talking about building a grid. You're talking about what is the regulatory structure of that grid. You're talking about serving a customer base who may or may not have the ability to pay. And so how do you, one, make sure that whoever's providing that service is profitable? If that's, you know, if it's a private, privately owned entity. It's about making sure that that power is reliable so that you're not having rolling blackouts. And if you do people kind of know, if it's from two to five, I'm not gonna have power. I know that, not that just, you know, one day it goes dark and I have no idea when it is or is not going to come on. It's about education. And so, one, the education that people can get because they have access to electricity, but it is also about giving people education so that they can work in what is an emerging industry. And it may be building a solar array, developing, installing a solar array, but it's also about grid management. It's about accounting and business. I mean, there are so many things that are kind of wead into this industry that you've got to think about and that I think women can play a role. It's about how do you include small businesses and how do you look at capitalizing small businesses. It's about how do you, quite frankly, make sure that African resources are used for Africans. All of that stuff I think is really are issues that you've got to start to think about. It is about sustainable resources, but quite frankly, it's about natural gas. And I think we've got to talk about base load. And so how are you going to ensure that even in places where you have micro grids, whether it's solar or wind, there's some sort of backup sources. Is it diesel, is it gas, is it hydro, what is that? And if they're using water to develop power, let's think about then all the other things that we need water for. And so that we're not having water constraints because we're using it for one particular thing and taking away from something else. And understand that some of these generating factors need water anyway. And so it's all that kind of balanced up in terms of just the industry grid development that we have to be very, very clear on. And all of the things that feed into that. So to me it's about understanding what is the supply chain in the procurement process. And it's great to be able to develop the solar array and I could be the solar array developer, but it might be better to be the person who builds the solar panel. Or build the bolt that puts that solar panel, the photo they take and things. So you gotta understand what that supply chain is so that there are all these kinds of opportunities that we have laying out for people to be able to take advantage of. But then how do you educate them? How do you make sure that they are aligned, involved, interested, prepared, and so on and so forth. And then at least for us as an association, our job is to figure out how do we support that effort. My job is not to do it. My job is to figure out how do I help you be successful so that you can do it so that when we go back to whatever it is that we do, that's still running and you have that kind of opportunity and economic viability. Thank you. You know there was a mention of the solar repair. You know one of the powerful examples of what actually women can do is the barefoot college in India where a number of, in fact thousands of illiterate, semi-literate women actually were trained in the solar assembly and repair and many of them actually have gone on to become entrepreneurs. And now the activity has also spread to Africa and many other regions. So that's a very good example of actually what can be done. But again, you need a huge multiplier there we need several more thousands of such examples to really make a difference. I think both the panelists here actually have spoken about the access at a kind of a micro level. So just to kind of unpack it at a slightly broader level when we are actually talking about access we are talking about broadly four things. We are talking about access to electricity because electricity is a versatile source that can do a number of things. And then we have the access to clean cooking. You know basically now mostly people use what we call solid fuels, biomass, coal, charcoal, you know that kind of thing. So how can we basically move them towards more LPG, electricity, you know, those things. Then we have what we call the productive applications. You have two categories there. You have economically productive applications. So how do you ensure access of energy to say agriculture, small-scale industries or cottage industries, you know, things like that. And then you have the socially productive, you know, applications, whether it is energy access to community health centers or, you know, community centers for people to get together or schools, you know, some of those things. So these are the broad, you know, macro categories that we talk about when we talk about expanding energy access. And within that of course, you know, as Paula mentioned in electricity, you have grid electricity, you have off-grid. Now mini-grids are actually becoming quite popular across Africa, for example. And then in the issue, in the case of clean cooking, you have a number of options. You know, even biomass itself, now you have improved advanced stores that actually take care of some of the health issues that we have talked about. Then we have LPG, we have, you know, electricity-based gadgets, you know, a number of things. In fact, if some of you have followed Kirk Smith, who is a well-known expert in the health and energy, you know, one of his recent formulations is that he's now recommending that if you really want to address the health issue, which is in the case of biomass, he's four million deaths every year, premature deaths every year due to exposures to indoor and outdoor pollution. So he's basically advocating now to move towards electricity where you have reasonable supply. Of course, the problem is in most countries you don't have reasonable supply in the rural areas, but that is where if you can, for example, combine off-grid electricity solutions and then move the cooking to electricity that's perhaps the best case scenario in terms of addressing the health impacts for women. So that's, you know, so this is the kind of, you know, formulation we also have under sustainable energy for all where at the country level right now we are engaged in developing what we call investment prospectuses, you know, in terms of increasing access. So this prospectus essentially would come up with a number of investable projects, programs, and activities that if all, you know, if they found the finance required and they are implemented, would actually help the country reach the universal energy access goal, you know, by 2030. So in this process, again, you know, all these categories that I have mentioned, you know, obviously there is a strong role for, you know, gender mainstreaming and creating inappropriate roles. You know, for, and also let me add here that when we talk about, you know, gender mainstreaming we also, of course, always equate it with basically increasing the role for women. And given the, you know, relatively, the role women have in the society that's very appropriate. But in the context of the energy project itself, you know, the way we see it is that you need to basically have what we call appropriate roles for both the genders, you know, in terms of managing, designing, managing, implementing, you know, those programs to basically maximize the, you know, impacts. So that's, you know, very important. So in each of these categories we could actually look at specific roles for women and men and, you know, men, so on. And then we basically need to make sure that it is reflected in the, you know, design of whatever programs that we do. Great, thanks everybody. So in the few remaining minutes I want to turn it over to you now for any questions or comments. And in the interest of time, if you could just say your name, your organization, if that's relevant and keep your comments short. So we'll take three questions. So start here in the middle. Is there, there's a mic. So three quick questions and comments. And we'll turn back to the panelists. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for your presentation. My name is Rosemary Seguero. I'm a president of two companies, an unprofit carbon and a profit carbon. And I want to thank CSI for this wonderful event. And the most person I want to thank is President Obama for the power initiative because I'm involved into the power initiative. And being involved is I'm an African woman born and raised in Africa. I'm from Kenya. I'm focusing on rural area ratification because rural area people have been ignored in Africa completely. They are the ones who have given the worst things they can do, electricity, stove and whatever. I'm advocating and I'm part of the pale on the hill. I'll share with you what I send Congressman Eti Royce on the pale for power Africa. Oh, what I wanted to comment was what he said about education. If African people now, Africa is developed using cell phones. If they can pay for their cell phones in the rural areas, they can pay for power, looking at farmers, women cooking with electricity, not stuff. We want actual power in the rural areas. We want actual power in the schools. We want actual power in the clinics like he said, using power in the rural areas. Investors say, we can't invest in rural area because they are not going to pay for the power. Those people can be educated. If they can use cell phones, they can use power and pay for power. So why can they be given really power instead of a stove or a generator to use? So how do we work with the Obama Initiative on credit? It has involved us as civil societies. And I'm so happy as an African woman, I'm involved. Coming to World Bank, I was the first, my camp was the first camp to write a missing middle concept. In our missing middle concept was about women, was about solar, was about energy, was about water. They said they could not give us money because we were startup bank to support women. So I left that alone until I focused on my own camp to help the women in Africa. How do we make this happen in the rural areas of Africa? It's all about education. People being educated. If we don't, and then we just say they are rural area and that's why I'm part of the PIL, I'm part of Obama Power Initiative, and I'm part of CSR now listening to you on how do we make it happen in the rural area where I come from? Not a story, not a book, not a television. That's where I grew. And there's need in all African rural areas. How do we work together and make it happen? As he says, we just talk power for Africa. But how do we know what is happening on the ground? We went, the World Bank will get a researcher, stay in a big hotel and then don't go to the rural area, finished my research. Everything is done, power is done. No, this time I'm watching and I'm following, I'm part of it, we want the money and we want the rural areas to be supported. How do we do it together? Not only stories, thank you. Thank you very much. A great challenge to all of us. The lady at the back there. Thank you so much, panel, for your insight. I'm Courtney Vaughn and my company is called Gulf Lady. We do have an energy sector. I actually wrote the five-year strategic business plan to institute the West Africa Electric Power Pool on the World Bank on contract for 2006 and five years later. But nonetheless, and I've worked in over 40 countries, many of them are African societies. Energy sector is just one of what we do. We're from an investment banker that got into development banking. And listening over the years, the various comments about Africa and energy and women and even today, it seems as if there's a disconnect between what the rural state is and the modern state, especially when we speak about energy. Many of what Paulie is talking about is mostly from the modern state. And rightfully so, you did say that one has to understand context on the ground in different countries where, for example, women are involved in energy, have always been involved in many African societies, even if they're just selling coal. That's a major micro sector where women are involved. It may not be American electricity power where coal is at another level in terms of modernization, for example. Fuel, women are involved with fuel for transportation and diesel in a major way. So unless we start to really look at the realities on the ground and how to uplift it, I think there will be so much confusion about women in energy, whether they're engineers and things you know you have to invest in today for the future as the electricity sector evolves and modernize, okay? So, and then in terms of investment, I do believe that, again, a woman who has her little coal, you know, coal bags of coal sell in the market, she has made that investment. And I believe that is where World Bank also needs to pay more attention to bring some of the solutions. Thank you. Good morning. I want to thank all of the panelists for speaking. My name is Tiaji Salam Blyther. I come from Congressional Research Service. My job is to provide analysis to members of Congress on a range of issues. I am a global health specialist, and usually when I'm in the room with energy people, they look at me like I'm weird, like why are you here? So I was glad to hear Bob's comment because absolutely energy is critical for the functioning of health systems as well as for things we don't think of in terms of refrigeration of medicines and equipment. If those, the medicines that are needed are not properly managed at the right temperatures, they're useless and we donate medicines and don't think of these things. But I wanted to say thank you very much to Ms. Jackson for talking about not necessarily exporting our way of doing things. I think the lack of infrastructure is actually a wonderful opportunity to leapfrog and skip some of the mistakes that we've made, particularly in a messy business we don't like to talk about which is extractable energies. So I would like to hear more from you about what your organization does to work with policy reform with these governments to work towards sustainable energy not just in piecemeal projects which we love to do, pilot projects but in terms of creating an enabling environment, a policy environment to have thoughtful, well thought out energy plans that could permeate all the sectors so it's not this piecemeal approach. Thank you. Thanks very much to everybody for those questions and comments. In the few minutes remaining maybe we could start with Paula to begin to address those and put in those concluding remarks but I would like to remind everybody we have the rest of the morning as well so it's great to have such a passionate and engaged audience and I hope through the morning we'll be able to pick up on a number of these themes also in our other panels and over lunch as well. So as you hear, we women we're passionate about these issues so. Very briefly, what I will say is most recently when I was in South Africa I did speak at a conference for policy makers and quite frankly you could have written my comments. So for us as an association our role really is to inform and educate not just policy makers here but now we've expanded that and the ideas that you've expressed are the very ideas that we start to talk about but we also, when I talk about capacity building we're also talking about capacity building for regulators so that when you're beginning to develop a framework you're keeping in mind the context in which you are in now and not trying to replicate something else which is not to say that what we have here is not successful because obviously it's very, very successful. It just means that it's not the only way to do it. And so we start to talk to people about thinking through what is it that you have now? What is it that you want and how can you create a framework that's gonna work for your particular desires and not necessarily just replicate where you see something else? First off, you don't look that strange to me. So now I feel a little more comfortable. You know, you mentioned something I think that's very key and that's extractibles. I don't think you can ignore them. For better or for worse, they're here. I think it's a horrible thing personally that we continue to be on them to the degree that we are in the Western world and in other places. But you have to deal with them and you have to deal with their management not just as it pertains to providing energy for wherever they're being extracted but how they're managed as far as whether they're sold out of the country and where that money goes and whether that's well-regulated. Sierra Leone has found oil offshore a couple of years ago and marked my words over the next 20 years how they manage that find. Whether that's coming into the country, whether it's being sold and how that money's used, how they manage that's gonna dictate where they go. So you can't ignore it, you have to deal with it. Thank you for all the comments. I particularly was struck by the last comment in terms of the need for an enabling environment. Just to put the whole thing in the context, when we are talking about achieving universal energy access, one of the key requirements there is huge amount of investment. The estimation made by the International Energy Association is we need about $50 billion every year till 2030 if you really have to achieve that particular goal. So we are actually talking about large amounts and that kind of resources is actually not going to come from public funding or donors and so on. So there is also a need to leverage a huge amount of private sector capital into the sustainable energy sector which is actually a huge challenge that the sustainable energy for all initiative is trying to tackle. And also, if you want to attract private capital into sustainable energy projects, we need enabling environment. The private sector capital is not going to come into a country or a particular project if it is not going to make profits. So if you don't have the right kind of regulatory environment, right kind of policies, they are not going to be interested. So one of the efforts actually that we are doing in the initial phases of sustainable energy for all is try and work with the governments and other stakeholders in these countries to create exactly that kind of enabling environment. But within that, I would also say that within that framework we also need to make more focused and specialized efforts to also make sure that enabling environment touches upon the gender issues as well. So if you basically need to probably make special efforts to increase the business opportunities for women or increase the access of capital to women, businesses, and so on. So in that sense, especially in terms of scaling up, we are actually talking about a huge challenge and creating the right kind of enabling environment at the country level, at the program level is an important component of that. Just one more thing. I actually have some pamphlets here on the World Bank's work on gender and energy. I'll leave them here. So for those who are interested, you could pick them up. Thank you. Thank you very much to all of our panelists. And I also want to say that we have about 1,600 energy entrepreneurs that we work with and we'd love to see more women. So personally, I'm going to be talking to Paula after this to figure out how we can be really looking at helping to bring more women into the sector. But please join me in thanking all of our panelists this morning for an interesting panel. Thank you.