5.5 Signature Solution 5: Energy

The new service offer by the UNDP global policy network on ‘local action’ is a key opportunity to further the LNOB agenda, including on addressing overlapping and multiple forms of marginalization. The UNDP local action offer and accompanying hub propose three solutions: 1) Empowerment of indigenous peoples and local communities and the CSOs representing them, to strengthen governance and advocacy; 2) Resilience – support communities in building the socio-ecological resilience of their land/ seascapes; and 3) Investment - transform financial and funding flows to communities to accelerate and sustain local collective action. The offer includes investments in the tools, capacities and financial resources to support the effective exercise of agency, and an adaptive management approach. While the current offer document does not mention LNOB specifically, it builds on the extensive and tested operational experience, national presence and organizational framework of the SGP, as well as other UNDP local initiatives. It is an attempt to counter the tendency of ‘elite capture’ by those NGOs who ‘speak UNDP language’ and capitalize on empowerment narrative, whereby people empower themselves by exercising their ability to visualize a future and to construct it themselves with UNDP support.

The energy Signature Solution works on the ‘enact’ dimension by increasingly promoting gender-responsive approaches and integrating LNOB into national frameworks for climate change mitigation. UNDP is positioning itself to invest more heavily in initiatives to ‘empower’, through the ‘moonshot’ intent to help increase access to clean and affordable energy for 500 million people.

Finding 16 – Energy: The UNDP energy moonshot and contributions to enhanced energy access for rural populations, women, the elderly and the poorest of the poor are serving as a key avenue for reaching the furthest behind first. Gender equality has received improved attention, but intersecting vulnerabilities are not yet fully understood.

UNDP is clear in its commitment to increasing energy access for those furthest behind, especially through its Energy Compact, launched in 2021. The compact aims to increase access to clean and affordable energy for 500 million people by speeding up investment in distributed renewable energy solutions, especially for those hardest-to-reach and in crisis contexts.282 Results are yet to become more evident and prove sustainability, but ongoing initiatives are geared towards benefitting left-behind populations. For example, youth have led initiatives to establish farms and rural enterprises with renewable energy and climate-smart technologies in the Dominican Republic.283 In Egypt, UNDP projects installed biogas units in rural areas where women were standing in long queues to purchase butagas cylinders for cooking, during a period of political instability when there were severe shortages.284 Through the project ‘Grandmothers in Solar Energy’, illiterate and elderly women were trained to become barefoot solar engineers in India, in order to build and maintain solar panels for their communities.285 The work of UNDP in Yemen won an award for its engagement of women refugees in solar enterprises and serves as an example of development and gender perspectives that UNDP can bring to protracted conflict settings.286 The installation of photovoltaic solar systems allowed the recovery and expansion of

282 Energy Compact Summary (accessed 2022). 283 UNDP independent evaluation, SGP. 284 GEF and UNDP joint evaluation, Small Grants Programme. 285 Barefoot College International (accessed 2022); GEF and UNDP joint evaluation, Small Grants Programme. 286 UNDP Independent Evaluation Office, ‘Evaluation of UNDP Support to Energy Access and Transition’, UNDP, New York, 2021.

health and education services and of livelihoods in agriculture, food processing and clothing production. UNDP also supported a solar hybrid system that provided an uninterrupted power supply to the central COVID-19 isolation unit.287

In Moldova, UNDP contributed to enhanced energy access for rural populations, especially women, the elderly and the poor. Initially, the Moldova ‘Energy and Biomass Project’ focused on strengthening the country’s energy security. It connected about 157,000 people to affordable heating, including the most left behind (e.g., children, elderly people, youth and PwDs).288 In 2022, UNDP estimated that the increase in food and energy prices as a result of the war in Ukraine could translate into a jump from 11 to 21 percent of the country’s population living in multidimensional poverty.289 Under a new project, which sees collaboration across Signature Solutions 1 and 5, UNDP Moldova introduced targeted interventions to shield household welfare while being less harmful to the environment and public finances than general subsidies. Preliminary results from Moldova suggest that some forms of targeted temporary cash compensation in times of rapidly increasing energy prices can greatly benefit poorer households and are financially achievable.290

Community-level data showed that certain groups proved difficult for UNDP to engage, and certain energy hardware was prohibitively expensive to adopt without energy subsidies for those further behind. For example, youth were often not ready to participate in the labour market, and many were interested in migrating away from rural areas without energy. Small enterprise owners often did not have the resources to sustain energy costs without help, or to support implementation of UNDP initiatives. People with disabilities, people living with HIV and drug users were also difficult to engage, due to continuing stigma and absence of partner reach with these populations. In contrast, women-headed households, single mothers and other vulnerable women have proven easier to involve. It is noteworthy that several of the local implementing partners for energy access initiatives do not have experience with UNDP standards for the involvement of potentially left-behind populations and have requested training in this regard.

Most UNDP energy interventions that included a gender component in their design were too reliant on assumptions that women will automatically benefit through inclusion.291 UNDP often targets women specifically to increase their access to energy, but has overlooked aspects of household decision-making over energy and budgeting, at times creating unintended consequences for female beneficiaries. In addition, women continue to face challenges in converting energy access and energy enterprises into changes to their economic status, often because initiatives failed to consider or address social norms regarding female livelihoods and financial control. Interventions combining energy with efforts on women’s empowerment did not put enough emphasis on the factors that enable girls and women to invest in longer-term change, such as new livelihood development strategies or opportunities to influence the gender-based division of labour. For instance, interventions reinforced women’s roles as unpaid carers by targeting women for clean energy cooking products and not involving men.

287 Project Enhanced Rural Resilience In Yemen II; United Nations Development Programme, ‘UNDP’s Solar Hybrid Solutions Result in

More Robust Health Response in Seiyun’, press release, UNDP, 13 January 2022, Seiyun. 288 UNDP independent evaluation, Moldova. 289 United Nations Development Programme, ‘Addressing the Cost of Living Crisis in Developing Countries: Poverty and vulnerability projections and policy responses’, UNDP, New York, 2022; United Nations Development Programme, ‘The Energy Transition’s

Inverted U: Soaring energy prices, surging fossil-fuel subsidies and policy options’, in Global Policy Network Brief, June 2022. 290 Ibid.; Project ‘Addressing the impacts of the energy crisis in the Republic of Moldova: Initiating solutions toward energy security and energy poverty’. 291 UNDP independent evaluation, UNDP support to energy access and transition.