The gender perspective has always been present since one of the rationales of these projects has been to alleviate the time burden on women for collecting fuel and cooking. However, this perspective has been more pronounced since 2003 as part of the growing gender-energy portfolio under ESMAP‘s ―Increased Access to Modern Energy Services‖ and even more so under the ―Energy and Poverty‖ theme that included access to modern cooking fuels for poor and rural households and efficient use of biomass in its agenda (World Bank 2010a, pp.12-13). It has also led to specific gender sensitized energy programs such as the Africa Renewable Energy Access program (AFREA) and gender-energy tools such as ―Making energy work for Women and Men‖ (World Bank 2010f).

In practice, the projects include a range of activities with varying potential for improving the welfare of women. A recurrent activity ever since the 1970s has been planting of trees, primarily fast growing exotics such as eucalyptus, with variations in management ranging from subsidies for private planting of trees, community plantations, peri-urban plantations, to large-scale commercial plantations (often under government ownership). The primary objective has been to increase the availability of fuelwood and decrease collection time. The impact on women therefore depends on their participation in collection, as well as their relationship to the management structure put in place by interventions. As mentioned, emphasis has gradually shifted toward community-based woodfuel management (as in Bank-supported projects in Niger, Mali and Senegal), echoing the global trend of devolution of forest management to communities, spearheaded by Joint Forest Management in India but now seen in many countries also in Africa, Latin America and South East Asia. While there is often an environmental aspect in plantation projects, this is typically more pronounced in forest management projects. In either case, since exclusion is often an important component of management, there is a risk that women, and other less powerful groups in society, are negatively affected, at least in the short run. A related activity concerns charcoal production, and in particular securing supplies and increasing efficiency in the production, as in projects in Senegal, Tanzania and Mozambique.

# **2.2 Welfare implications**

The potential for positive project impacts depends on the economic scarcity of woodfuel and households‘ capacity to adapt to that scarcity. The consensus of the 1980s was that fuelwood supply interventions at the time showed little potential for positive impacts. However, this finding may have changed for women facing a high degree of economic scarcity of woodfuel due to few assets, exclusion from previous open access sources, and reduced natural vegetation.

When planting of trees and forest management have been designed primarily to relieve woodfuel scarcity<sup>16</sup> , the potential for positive project implications depends on the economic scarcity of woodfuel faced by households. How utility is affected by scarcity (and subsequently by an intervention addressing the scarcity) varies from household to household depending on household labor, assets, preferences, income, and the availability of feasible substitutes. To the extent that female-headed households have less land and labor, they can be more vulnerable. The more substitution options available to a household, such as alternative sources of fuel, improved efficiency in fuel use, use of idle labor e.g. in agricultural off-peak seasons, the better it will be able to cope with increased energy scarcity in a way that minimizes welfare loss. These substitution possibilities are also the reason for the common assumption that the welfare loss of such adaptation is rather low (Arnold et al., 2003). However, there can be great variation in adaptation possibilities over space and time. The conditions that limited the impact of plantation projects in the 1980s might not hold now in regions where population density has increased, natural vegetation has been degraded, and land tenure rights have

> 16 There are also other rationales for these projects, such as economic development and environmental concerns.

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