Netsanet Taye Seid, is an Electrical Engineer and Renewable Energy Consultant passionate about sustainable energy, gender equality, and community empowerment. She earned a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Hawassa University in 2013 and further specialized in Solar Power, Bioenergy, Hydropower, and Onshore Wind, as well as Business, Policy, and Climate Adaptation from Online Training Platforms like Africa Fellowship for Young Energy Leaders (AFYEL), and Ban Ki-Moon Center for Climate Adaptation. She completed a year-long “Women in Leadership-Accelerating Positive Change” program and recently earned a certificate from AGNES Cohort XVII Climate Governance Leadership Program. Netsanet has also completed a “Training of Trainers” program on Gender Equality in Energy by Women in Energy-Africa (WEN-A)
Your profile on LinkedIn is very impressive, I must say. Congratulations on all your success and your career so far. You introduced yourself as being passionate about sustainable energy and gender equality and community empowerment. Where did this passion come from? What created this person that you are now?
Actually, that person came from simply being a woman. As you know, the energy sector is male dominated, so we need to contribute as energy professionals because women are at the heart of energy consumption. Women do most of the cooking and household things which are energy intensive, and they waste a lot of their time collecting wood for fuel. I grew up in a small rural town where there is limited access to energy, so I’ve been passionate about solving my community’s problems from an early age.
I believe it’s important to involve women in the energy sector – in a visible way – so that they can contribute as energy professionals, influencing the policies and regulations as well as bringing innovative Engineering Solutions tailored to benefit other women and marginalised groups in society. They can also empower others by being role models.
You said you were passionate from being a child, was there a particular figure in your life who inspired that interest?
No, it was because I was born in a rural part of Ethiopia that is 250 to 315 kilometres away from the capital city Addis Ababa depending on the route. My family could not afford anything apart from kerosene lamps or rent energy services for lighting where I use electricity from 6PM to 12PM for me to study with. That’s when I decided to study electrical engineering so that everyone could get access to clean, affordable and reliable energy.
How is Ethiopia currently, in terms of access to electricity and response to the need for clean energy and the global climate crisis?
Many studies show that access to energy in Ethiopia is more than 50%, but in my opinion the reality is that it’s not even 30% accessible. People’s homes are spread out across rural areas so it would be very expensive for them to connect to the grid. I know this because I conducted energy poverty baseline study before I implemented a Solar Photovoltaic Project titled “ Energy for Rural Start-Ups (EneRSU) in 11 rural villages as productive use cases (PUCs) for public institutions (schools and health centres), Micro and Small Enterprises and Cooperatives as well as communities while working for Caritas Switzerland Ethiopia Country Office as Renewable Energy Consultant and Project Manager-Renewable Energy. So, they continue to use a diesel or benzene generator, and the price is very high, more than $3 per kWh. Another issue is that we are not manufacturing solar or other renewable energy equipment in Ethiopia for different socioeconomic reasons.
The government is trying to prepare and put into action some policies and regulations so that it can encourage the private sector to go into supplying energy, but because of the low tariff for grid energy, limited access to hard currency to import the technologies, The difficult to meet criteria to get access to different funding programmes like Access to Distributed Electricity (ADELE) make the investors not inclined to apply.
There is engagement from development partners like banks and NGOs who are doing some pilot projects, to showcase how to engage communities. For example, my last project engaged the community to contribute minimum 10% of the technology cost and pay back the remaining 40% over 10 months by generating/diversifying income through nano-grid energy technology Power Blox. If that had continued, 65% would be connected by grid and 35% would be off grid but it is not progressing as expected to achieve the electrification goal. So, we need to change our policies and our implementation of the policies so that we can speed up energy access for the Community by creating an enabling environment and engaging all actors and sectors.
As a woman, what’s the worst example you have of being treated badly because of your gender?
Well, I still get examples of that now, but I don’t give up and I don’t allow them to hold me back. When I decided to become an electrical engineering, they told me “That’s very hard science. You cannot do it. It needs mathematics and some hard sciences”. But I can do mathematics. Being a woman cannot prevent me from doing it. It only needs focus and giving time and interest – it’s not to do with being a man or a woman – I’m great at mathematics! They think they are caring for us, but it’s not correct. So, I want to prove them wrong. I joined Electrical Engineering, as I’ve said, because it was a passion to eradicate energy poverty, but also because they said electrical engineering is the most difficult type of engineering. So, I graduated, and I proved them wrong.
Unfortunately, the job market is very hard for all recent graduates, not only for women, but employers seem to think that women will leave to have a baby so there are fewer offers for women. Often there is an entrance exam for jobs, but I passed mine and out of 77 people I was the top scorer. In my first role there was systematic or maybe unconscious bias in that they didn’t give women technical jobs. I don’t keep silent on issues like that so I asked my supervisor “why don’t you give me technical jobs? I mean I’m also an electrical engineer; I passed the exam, I have the technical skills. I went through the same education process and proved that I am capable and now I’m here.” He gave me the opportunity after I asked for it.
The same thing happened again with another department of the same company; it’s continuous. But I always prove them wrong by showing my capacity. Some of the excuses are funny – “the daily allowance is not enough to pay for accommodation that would suit a woman, we are protecting you from suffering in a very harsh environment” for example. I say “You can protect me in other ways by increasing the allowances for all of us so we can afford accommodation. If not, I am willing to use my salary because I want to do that technical job practically”. I just contributed some of my savings and I did that job. Once they saw that I could do this type of job they sent me on similar ones and made me a representative of the company.
Even when I joined an international NGO I got the same thing from some people. But I wouldn’t let them undermine me. I just showed them that I’m capable by delivering the expected outcomes and guiding with technical and leadership capability.
So, every time you’ve overcome that by working harder and proving that you have the capability or the knowledge and the education.
Sometimes I feel tired; why do I always have to prove I’m good enough? But that has made me be confident in everything I do. The office politics is tiresome. I became a project manager with men working under me. Sometimes I get resistance because of superiority/inferiority complexes; but I use my leadership skills to manage the situations, by making them think that they are working with their sister to achieve a common goal to improve our community’s livelihood through access to energy. Eventually they admitted that I know what I’m talking about technically and led them by example and that they had learned a lot from me during a six-month performance evaluation.
That must take a lot of self- control and patience and dignity. But I very much admire you for that.
You’ve talked a lot there about equality. What else do you think women bring to the kinds of challenges created by the Climate Crisis?
Most women are not financially independent or not allowed to have their own money, so they are more vulnerable to the impact of climate change, even the educated ones, and they suffer a lot. In the Ethiopian Women in Energy Association (EWiEn) we have more than 470 members who are mostly Engineers. 35% of them are not employed/students, and some have graduated five years ago but could not get a job. We are pushing so that they can be hired by building their soft skills and hard skills in collaboration with our International and National partners and donors such as GIZ, Ministry of Water and Energy, Ethiopian Electric Power, Ethiopian Electric Utility etc, but until that happens, they don’t have any money. It’s difficult for them and they are some of the victims of the climate crisis.
Please tell us more about The Ethiopian women in Energy Association (EWiEn)
I joined two years after it started. It was established in 2919 by five women working in the energy sector; four of them were Electrical Engineers. It changed my life.
As I’ve faced those challenges in my workplace, attending the different thematic workshops made me not give up in pushing towards my goals, made me not settle for less, and empowered me. When I joined the organization as a member, my energy was getting low due to the challenges I was facing to prove my potential as an Electrical Engineer and contribute in the sector as a woman. My first in-person event after I joined that organisation was an experience sharing workshop at Sapphire Addis hotel in 2020/21. Our President Adey Getachew was interviewing our chairwoman Dr. Atsede Gualu about how she had achieved those outstanding achievements in European countries; she holds a PhD in Electrical Power Engineering, and she contributed to many different amazing projects as an African woman Electrical Engineer. So, when I heard her story, my energy was boosted again. I was inspired and within six months I got a promotion to be a senior Electromechanical Engineer and then within less than two years I became project manager, and my salary was three times bigger.
The EWiEN organisation is there to close the gender gap in the energy sector because, as I have said, it’s male dominated but women are the main energy consumers. There are no or limited technical positions for women. So the organisation was built to showcase that there are women who are capable, who are technically competent and have soft skills that are valuable here too. It is creating a networking environment with other experts in the sector so that they can learn from others how they escaped all the challenges and got to where they are now. The other important thing is to make influential women visible. So, since 2021 every year we award three influential women who have contributed to the Ethiopian energy sector from different sectors like academia, government organizations, energy implementation, NGOs, private sectors, or anywhere. This is so that other women can think “I can contribute, I can be empowered, I can be like them.” We are now getting attention from different governmental and non-governmental organisations who are supporting us financially as well as in kind. The Ministry of Water and Energy has provided us with an office so that we can work together with them on energy related programs and policies and anything they invite us to participate in and provide our professional contributions; so that every strategy, road map, policy etc. becomes gender inclusive so we have been contributing a lot since our establishment.
Excellent. What would you like to change about the current approach to tackling the climate crisis, either in your country or globally?
I’ve been thinking that if I were in a political position I would provide women with the necessary resources like finance and other tools so that they can tackle the problem. I mentioned that women don’t have financial freedom to start a business, or even to get a loan because they don’t meet the financial institution’s requirements like collateral for instance. I would adopt some solutions that can provide women with funding and follow up with supporting them technically to help them repay the bank’s money with different loan and funding mechanisms.
I got experience of this while I was working at Caritas Switzerland. Our organization was convinced to provide some women under the ultra-poverty level the energy technology they needed for their business ideas without demanding a down payment. They graduated from ultra-poverty very fast with access to resources/energy. They would make money through the energy services and pay it back from there. Amazingly, these women paid back the money before the others who had been able to afford the down payment.
This type of programme has to be adopted in financial institutions and other institutions so that we can provide women without the resources they need to respond to the climate crisis in entrepreneurial ways.
Women shoulder a lot of responsibilities. Let me give you my example. My family doesn’t have access to energy; and they are vulnerable to climate crises because of our economic status. They’re very poor and I was the first-born. So, to achieve my education, I had to work part time. And I gave all the money back to my family/grandmother as it is expected in our family; as a child cannot have her own money in our family or culture.
But actually, if women were given finance, they are entrepreneurial and they would be good at business
Yes, because I have seen for myself in my “ Energy for Rural Start-Ups (EneRSU)” project at Caritas Switzerland that woman-led small enterprises, employing lots of people – including some men – diversifying their incomes and being able to repay some of their loans faster than men. These are not necessarily educated women, but they know how to diversify if you give them the opportunity.
Finally, what would you say to any young women thinking about getting involved in supporting a climate-friendly future?
Actually, not only the women, but the young generation as a whole. I want to encourage them all. They might get some challenges and not be accepted but just keep pushing. Invest in yourself and what’s needed in the market. Always look at your passion and be driven by that. Look at gaps in your skills and fill those gaps. Don’t listen to all those negative energies around you. I always say just consider those negative voices around you as microorganisms. If you can’t see them, you don’t need to listen to them. Just focus on your goal and you will achieve one day; because hard work always pays off. I would like to advise them also not to focus on money i.e. don’t focus on how much salary you earn but focus on how that job opportunity or company builds your career, so consider working voluntarily for companies which can build your technical and soft skills. Go and tell them that you are interested to work for their company voluntarily. That way you start building your career, people start to see your capacity and start giving you more opportunity because you have proved to them that anyone can undertake anything if they are given the opportunity regardless of gender, age, or colour.
Netsanet was talking to Peter Allen