How do you picture the face of work in deeply impoverished communities? One stereotypical image is of women lugging containers of water or hunched under the weight of harsh loads.

In many ways, these images aren’t too far from the truth. Research by the United Nations and other institutions on energy use shows that “energy poverty” affects 75 percent of the world’s women. Energy poverty is defined as unequal access to resources like fuel and electricity.

While climate change continues to devastate our world’s natural resources, the connection between women’s use of power resources and extreme poverty is critical to understand. But how will the link between women and energy use influence the future of poverty alleviation?

First of all, women do a majority of the world’s labor. As a result, they take the lead in forms of work that maximize energy efficiency. As access to different types of technologies expands at lightning speed, poverty intertwines more tightly with energy use.

Women and children spend around 200 million hours a day just collecting water. Instead, they could spend their time and energy on education, safety and development projects. This would encourage sustainable energy use and help transition families away from subsistence living.

Secondly, a rising 83 percent of the world (over 6 billion people) currently live in undeveloped nations. These countries tend to be reliant on coal, biomass and other less sustainable forms. The 2015 Africa Progress Report showed that a single village woman in northern Nigeria can spend 60 to 80 times more on energy than a member of an industrialized country.

Women are often the primary decision-makers when it comes to family choices about fuel and food. That power can be harnessed to a powerful degree.

Catherine Russell, the United States Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, recently called for sweeping reform on how stakeholders have approached women’s access to energy. She added that a greater number of women are needed in the field of sustainability in the developing world and elsewhere.

In short: preserving natural resources will be a key part of future efforts to sustain human development and alleviate poverty. Women make up half of the world’s users, and they are ready to send volts of change through their countries and communities. By studying women’s use of energy in developing countries, it will be possible to tap into a new kind of power for the future.

– Eliza Campbell

Photo: Flickr