Clean Tech as the next big thing in rural india

• Women from rural India are increasingly adopting clean energy-based livelihood technologies to catalyse their businesses.
• From solar refrigerators to silk-reeling machines and biomass-based cold storage to bulk milk chillers, distributed renewable energy (DRE) is transforming women’s livelihoods at the grassroots.

Role of DRE in changing women’s lives

• A recent Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) study has shown that out of the 13,000 early adopters of clean tech livelihood appliances, more than 80% are women.
• DRE-powered technologies provide an additional advantage to women farmers and microentrepreneurs by enhancing income opportunities through mechanisation.
• They also free women from several gender-assigned manual activities that are laborious.
• By 2030, India is expected to see 30 million women-owned micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) employing around 150 million people.
• DRE livelihood technologies — a $50 billion market opportunity in India alone — have the potential to transform rural livelihoods, with women at the core of this transition.

Way forward

1. Pioneer models

• Leverage the experience of early women adopters.
• To overcome the challenge, technology providers must leverage early users to share their experiences with potential customers, becoming demo champions/sales agents to market these products, based on their first-hand product experience and local credibility.

2. Importance of live events, financing

• Organise hyperlocal events and demos.
• These events also create spaces for women to network, become aware of the product and connect with people who can help them procure, finance and use these machines.

3. Access to finance

• Enable easy finance to purchase products.
• Limited avenues to avail financing for these clean technology products remain a bottleneck.
• Financiers supporting women farmers and micro entrepreneurs should consider the technologies themselves as collaterals while easing the loan application process.

4. Market linkages

• Fourth, support backwards and forward market linkages. Only technology provision is not enough in all cases. Many rural products have larger market potential.
• Thus, finding and connecting producers to consumption hubs in urban areas are equally important to generate higher incomes.

5. Facilitate convergence

• Fifth, enable policy convergence. No private sector entity has the kind of reach and scale government institutions have, so leveraging their reach is imperative to exponentially scale up.
• Multiple Ministries are working towards promoting livelihoods for women — from State rural livelihood missions, horticulture and agriculture departments, Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, to the Ministry of Textiles. They should embrace clean energy solutions to further their respective programmes and outcomes.

Conclusion:

• Much like it takes a village to raise a child, scaling the impact of clean energy solutions on women’s livelihoods needs a village of policymakers, investors, financiers, technology promoters and other ecosystem enablers.
• Only then can we truly unlock the potential of rural women and clean technologies simultaneously.