Women participation at policy making process in community Rural Electrification entities ( CREE) A case study of 40 CREEs in Nepal

Abstract

Access to electricity impacts women and men differently. This thesis examines women’s role in Community Rural Electricity Entities (CREEs) of Nepal, participation in policy making process and experiences of women in these CREEs. Access to electricity has definitely increased women’s productive time, reduced drudgery but has not addressed women’s ability to manage community based organizations in various sectors and has not yet seen women as leaders. The main objective of this study is to find out the participation of women in policy making process of CREEs in Nepal. The study is based upon the primary data collected from the field survey. The main tool of the study is questionnaire and techniques are one to one interview. The key informant interview and focus group discussion was also conducted using the checklist. The respondents of the survey are female members in the CREEs whereas the key informant includes male and female members involved in this sector as academic, researcher, activists, etc. Participation is a process through which stakeholder influence and share control over priority setting, policymaking and recourse allocation. This has been analyzed and from the study, it is found that females are not so active in policy making process as compared to their male counterparts. Reasons might be education level, availability of time, men seeing women in different roles, etc. Some suggestions have been made for ways to raise women’s role in policy making process. The most prominent one is raising awareness and training to women on leadership and organizational management. An in-depth investigation could not be performed because of time limitation and access to data. Since this study included wide range of female respondents from many districts, due to resource limitation, data collection required quite a long time.