By Abdulaziz Khattak

The global clean energy transition is generating investment at an unprecedented scale, yet the governance structures and financing mechanisms underpinning it remain conspicuously weighted towards a formal, male-dominated economy.

From sub-Saharan Africa to the advanced economies of the European Union (EU), women and marginalised communities face compounding systemic barriers that effectively exclude them from the very programmes designed to deliver a low-carbon future.

The strategic and moral stakes of this exclusion are now well-documented, and the accumulated evidence points to a single, consequential conclusion: An energy transition that does not centre gender equity is neither just nor structurally sound.

In Europe, this challenge has been documented by Morningstar DBRS, whose analysis of EU labour markets underscores how systemic underutilisation of women’s workforce capacity imposes measurable macroeconomic costs.

Roughly half of female EU residents aged 25 to 34 held tertiary qualifications in 2024, compared with 29 per cent in 2004, yet female employment rates across the euro area remain roughly 10 percentage points below those of men.

OECD modelling report indicates that closing gender disparities in employment, participation, and working hours could add 0.10 percentage points to annual GDP growth and lift GDP per capita by approximately 3.9 percentage points by 2060, a forecast with direct implications for how European energy industries must recalibrate their talent and leadership pipelines.

STRUCTURAL EXCLUSION OF WOMEN FROM ENERGY FINANCE & GOVERNANCE

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) notes that the financing models most commonly deployed in energy transition programmes are calibrated to a formal economy that assumes business registration, credit history, and established institutional connections.

This design by default excludes the majority of women, particularly informal workers, small-scale entrepreneurs, and residents of coal-affected communities, from accessing capital, training, or leadership roles in the green economy.

In South Africa’s Mpumalanga province, in coal-dependent districts, such as Komati in Emalahleni, women report that the national energy transition feels disconnected from the realities of daily life.

Linet Miriti, Chief Gender Officer at the African Development Bank, noted at a meeting of the Think 20, an official engagement group of the G20, that systemic barriers persist even under progressive financing instruments, such as the Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa.

These range from gender data gaps and rigid eligibility criteria to male-dominated value chains that govern access to new green industry supply networks.

Nevertheless, proof of viability exists: In Mpumalanga, 25 women farmers are leading climate-smart agriculture initiatives, supported by African Development Bank-backed programmes that integrate skills development with project financing.

Lebogang Mulaisi of South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission warned that without a systemic shift in how underrepresented people are perceived, the transition risks replicating the same concentrations of power and resource that characterised the fossil fuel era.

The asymmetry between those who bear the costs of energy system transformation and those who exercise control over its direction constitutes a structural risk that no just transition framework can ignore.

Research cited by IISD’s urban climate programme shows that adaptation efforts, which neglect social equity, can produce ‘green gentrification’, which means climate and environmental investments that raise property values and living costs, and deliver benefits predominantly to higher-income groups while displacing or further marginalising the residents most exposed to climate hazard.

FROM PERFORMATIVE INCLUSION TO STRUCTURAL PARTNERSHIP

The most substantive counter-model currently operating at scale is the Scaling Urban Nature-based Solutions for Climate Adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SUNCASA) project, a three-year initiative jointly managed by IISD and the World Resources Institute (WRI) with $21 million in funding from Global Affairs Canada through the Partnering for the Climate programme.

Operational across three cities, including Dire Dawa in Ethiopia, Kigali in Rwanda, and Johannesburg in South Africa, SUNCASA is structured explicitly around the principle that gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) organisations are not supporting actors but structural partners in climate adaptation delivery.

In Kigali, AVEGA Agahozo, a Rwandan association founded by widows of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, leads gender inclusion work alongside agroforestry and urban greening activities.

In Dire Dawa, the Hararghe Catholic Secretariat Gender Desk has developed a childcare model that directly addresses one of the principal barriers preventing women’s participation in nature-based solutions (NbS) work.

And in Johannesburg, GenderCC Southern Africa, a feminist network linking gender justice and climate action, leads GESI implementation while simultaneously building NbS technical expertise amongst its membership, including skills in ecosystem mapping and restoration methods.

The project’s first year produced measurable outcomes across both environmental and social dimensions.

In Dire Dawa, 313,330 seedlings were planted, including over 128,000 in afforestation efforts that recovered 60 hectares of bare land; agroforestry targets were exceeded, with 142,600 trees planted across 131 hectares.

In Kigali, 1,344 hectares were planted with agroforestry species, and more than 108,000 urban trees had been established by September 2025.

In Johannesburg, 80 per cent of urban greening and buffer zone targets were met within the first year, with 6,324 trees planted across densely populated areas adjacent to the Jukskei River. 

DESIGNING GENDER INCLUSION INTO ENERGY SYSTEMS BY DEFAULT, NOT BY EXCEPTION

The evidence assembled across these programmes converges on a principle that policymakers and energy executives have consistently under-applied: Gender inclusion must be designed into the architecture of energy systems, not retrofitted as a compliance measure.

The IISD analysis of South Africa’s energy transition context calls for governments and G20 partners to move beyond performative participation towards the genuine co-production of policies and investment frameworks.

Co-production requires not only that women be present in project governance structures, but that they hold real authority to shape the technologies, financing instruments, and regulatory conditions that will define their communities’ energy futures.

South Africa’s G20 presidency in 2025 provided a specific policy window for this agenda, one that Bertha Chikoro of GenderCC Southern Africa noted is not yet visible to most South African citizens.

If G20 energy commitments are structured around women and marginalised communities as active economy-builders rather than peripheral beneficiaries, the transition becomes genuinely transformative.

If they are not, the infrastructure, employment patterns, and power relations of the fossil fuel economy are simply replicated in a cleaner technological register.

The EU context, meanwhile, demonstrates that the macroeconomic logic of gender inclusion operates at scale even in advanced economies.

Morningstar DBRS’s analysis notes that OECD modelling credits women’s increased contribution to European labour markets between 2002 and 2022 with generating annual productivity growth of 1.73 percentage points, more than sufficient to counterbalance the negative impact of a contracting working-age population.

Energy industries confronting acute skills shortages in grid engineering, battery storage, and offshore wind operations face an identical structural choice: Expand the effective talent pool through deliberate inclusion or constrain growth by design.

The SUNCASA experience crystallises what systemic inclusion looks like in practice; this is not a social welfare programme; it is an operational standard.

As IISD’s analysis of the urban climate agenda makes clear, the sustainability and legitimacy of climate adaptation outcomes are materially strengthened by inclusive participation and local governance.

For energy sector executives and policymakers calibrating their transition strategies, the evidence now available is sufficient to treat gender-inclusive system design not as an ethical aspiration but as a performance criterion on which projects will, increasingly, be evaluated and funded.