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In 2017, the Economic Community of West African States launched its Policy for Gender Mainstreaming in Energy Access with each member state tasked to create a National Action Plan (NAP). This study explores the case of Sierra Leone to understand how stakeholders have influenced the NAP process, and what that might mean for implementation. Using the Actors, Objectives, Context framework with interview data from key gender and energy actors, we find elements that make Sierra Leone’s NAP unique, such as addressing systematic barriers, explicitly promoting solar energy and heavily relying on civil society for implementation. The study finds that a policy focus on gender reflects both a push from international donor organisations and the national efforts of civil society. Sierra Leone’s NAP reflects the tension between the high priority of gender politics at the national and international level and more immediate interest from the Ministry of Energy and government actors on economic development. It affirms the uneasy co-existence of the liberal and liberating view of women in international development with some evidence that the liberal view prevails. Still, despite the government’s focus on economic development, poor engagement with the private sector and cultural barriers are likely to hamper the inclusion of women into the energy industry.

In June 2017, the Economic Community of West African States adopted the Policy for Gender Mainstreaming in Energy Access to integrate gender equity in West Africa’s energy and climate policy making. The policy represents the first regional gender and energy policy in the world, establishing a framework to enhance understanding at the nexus of gender and energy, improve the inclusivity of policies, programs, and initiatives, and increase women’s participation in the field of energy in the public and private sectors. Each member state developed a National Action Plan (NAP) to operationalize these goals and align implementation with national contexts and policy priorities. This study examines the experience of Senegal’s NAP development, from 13 semi-structured interviews of key stakeholders and document review. We use the Actors, Objectives, Context political economy framework to understand how Senegal’s economic and political structures, historical and social context, and influence of key stakeholders shaped their efforts to mainstream gender in the country’s energy sector. We then describe four main objectives of actors in government, civil society, and the development space involved in policy development, summarizing these as: electricity access, economic development, access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking, and gender equity. We find that the objectives of government and development actors are reflected in the emphasis on energy access in the NAP and the government’s long-term development agenda, though a critical lack of engagement with the private sector has limited the policy’s efforts to mainstream women across energy sub-sectors beyond clean cooking. Women’s civil society organizations, historically less engaged with energy issues, have nonetheless achieved considerable success in advocating for increased women’s political participation. This advocacy has set a precedent for policies promoting ‘positive discrimination’ for women and marginalized groups, evident in policy activities aimed at electrifying women’s economic sectors.