EACREEE Sessions at REC

Preamble

Cross-boundary opportunities for women and the youth in the renewable energy sector across the EAC

The East African Community (EAC) is an inter-governmental regional bloc comprising eight Partner States. These include Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. The region is home to over 330 million individuals of which more than 60% are women and 80% are young people below the age of 35 years. The Community is highly endowed with vast renewable energy resources including solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, biomass and others. Despite the enormous potential, the partner states still have some shared challenges in pursuit of access to clean and modern energy. These bottlenecks include heavy reliance on biomass for cooking, low access to high-quality electricity, high reliance on fossil fuels for the transport sector, and limited access to modern energy in displacement settings and others. In these challenges exist enormous opportunities for the population to develop innovative solutions to address these bottlenecks. Despite constituting the majority of the EAC population, women and youths are still marginalised in the decision-making processes and have limited access to finance to be part of the solution to a just energy transition in the EAC. This session will explore the opportunities that exist in the energy transition journey of the EAC and how the Youth and Women can fully participate