Empowering Women in energy

In Egypt in the recent years the more women started to take positions in the energy sector & now we have women leaders who have played major roles in this sector. 

At Chemonics Egypt Consultants , Eng. Omnia Atef & her team in partnership with the Egyptian Electrical Transmission Company have conducted a research about the role of women in the renewable energy sector in Egypt . They were looking about the women participation from the public sector and the private sector . 

The results are , in the public sector Egypt is impressive as there is 80% female  participation and a lot of leaders positions are held from women.

In the private sector there is 21% female participation in Egypt and this is lower than the female global participation as a global studies showed that the female global participation in the renewable energy sector is 32%, So it's time to discuss the key barriers and solutions. 

key barriers to the female participation in the privet sector ? 

  1. Social norms and values affecting this decision because of the long working hours required in this sector.
  2. Limited mobility which relates to how women can travel to the work sites.
  3. Unfavorable employment conditions.


What is the needed Intervention ? 

  1. Removing conscious bias by removing the CVs identity : an Egyptian company HR team has made a real expermint of removeing the names, gender and photos from the CVs by the end of this expermint they found that 50% of their hiring was femalses which reflected on hiring more women than they normally do. 
  2. Capacity building to continue upskill women in this sector.
  3. Mobility solutions such as :  On site safety solutions , providing transportation and facilities to women on site 
  4. Good advertising to gender equality if you’re a company which admit it.

Energy and contribution to climate change adaptation

In this session, Doaa Selmi Mohamed, Senior Chemist, Environmental and Social Studies, EETC, contemplated how the human footprint is affecting the climate change and what we should do to control our activities.

The Triple Planetary Crisis involves the 3 main interlinked issues that the Earth will face which could destroy our planet, such as: climate change, pollution and waste, and biodiversity loss.

The reasons behind the triple planetary crisis are: 

  1. The human activities like: GHG emissions as a result of our activities and huge land usage resulting in loss of biodiversity.

  2. The 3 issues are related to each other, for example the climate change causes fires which lead to loss of ecosystems.

We also need to go through the definition of the ecological overshoot. Ecological overshoot is when humanity’s Ecological Footprint exceeds the bio-capacity of the planet to produce all the resources we consume and to absorb the generated waste from our activities using prevailing technology and resources management practices.

The human bio-capacity in 1961 was 75%, so we were not using all of our resources. 

In 2020, humans bio-capacity is 175% , which means that we need another planet's resources which is not realistic.

The world  started to calculate the earth overshoot day starting from 1971 . This year, the earth overshoot day fell on Jul 28, 2022.

How as individuals are we responsible for earth overshoot? 

It’s through controlling our carbon footprint, to have the chance of avoiding  the 2 °C rise in global temperature, the average global carbon footprint per year needs to drop to under 2 tons by 2050. 

Lowering the individual carbon footprint from 16 tons to 2 tons doesn’t happen overnight!


The actions that should be taken to control our activities could be:

  1. Transportation : Having electrical or hybrid cars instead of cars working with fossil fuels.
  2. Energy is the main source of producing GHG, so we need to take action such as :

Climate change mitigation: actions to reduce greenhouse gases emissions such as: Energy Conservation, Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy.

Energy conservation & Efficiency solutions: 

  • Turn off your electronic devices , even in standby mode they still drain energy
  • Reduce your car speed
  • Use LED Lights 
  • Buy energy efficient products 
  • Check you air conditioner temperature by selecting reasonable settings in the hot and cold seasons

Renewable Energy solutions: Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy like solar energy like Benban Solar Bark located in Aswan,Egypt, Wind energy project  located in Ras Ghareb,Egypt, Green Hydrogen project located in Ain Sukhna , Egypt.

Climate change adaptation: actions to reduce harm and increase our resilience to climate change.

Energy Efficiency in buildings

This Session Key Points of discussion:

  • Impact of AI and ML on environmental sustainability.
  • Policy and regulatory environment in Egypt and enabling the deployment of green tech solutions.
  • Advancing Net-zero buildings in MENA region Smart Technologies in Buildings.
  • Role of Monitoring and analytics in maximizing Energy Efficiency in Buildings &international best practices
  • Role of design in buildings for energy efficiency & Materials in buildings for energy efficiency.

ALLCOT Academy