Seed funding of national network activities

With a view to enable the National Focal Points (NFPs) in carrying out regular gender and energy networking activities and to help them engage with key stakeholders and leverage resources and support at the national level, ENERGIA provided seed fund to eight NFPs: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. The focus of seed funding is inclusion of network members in ENERGIA activities, formalizing of network structures at national levels, and closer ties with the national governments. Seed funds are provided for a variety of activities: awareness creation, capacity building or training workshops, setting up resource centres and electronic exchange fora, policy influencing, and research and analysis of gender and energy issues at the grassroots level.

Regional Network Meeting 2008

5-7 November 2008, Bangkok, Thailand

The Asia Regional Network Meeting 2008 mainly focused on the review of the progress of ENERGIA-Asia activities, organizational and implementation challenges faced by network members, evaluation of the network structure at all levels (national, regional, international), exploring common grounds for working together, and charting out future priority areas and strategies.

The strategic objective of the meeting was to strengthen the ENERGIA network structure by bringing together individuals and institutions with diverse backgrounds into a collective endeavour to work on issues of common interest i.e. to engender energy and to empower women.

The meeting was facilitated by Ms Christina Aristanti of the Asia Regional Cookstoves Program (ARECOP). Altogether 19 participants from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, Lao PDR, the Philippines, and Pakistan participated in the meeting. The meeting was also attended by Ms Nozipho Wright, African Regional Network Coordinator from Botswana and Dr. Govind Kelkar, senior technical advisor for ENERGIA.