OeEB
November 10, 2020 2022-02-18 12:18OeEB
Oesterreichische Entwicklungsbank - OeEB
Trending challenges climate & gender: from conflicting to complementary!
How might we operationalize the two seemingly conflicting, cross-cutting strategic focus topics “climate” and “gender” in order to meet gender targets in the Renewable Energy Sector by 2030?
OeEB has set itself the goal to increase gender relevance of its projects across its entire portfolio, whilst also maintaining the focus on the renewable energy sector, as Austria’s biggest contributor to climate finance. However, projects in the renewable energy sector do not have an explicit gender focus and therefore do not contribute to OeEBs share of gender relevant investments. There are various reasons for it: renewable energy projects typically are not labour intensive (once operational), located in remote areas and data gathering is focused on climate indicators rather than gender related metrics. Additionally, it is challenging to grasp the disaggregated demographics of beneficiaries to design appropriate action or technical assistance programmes.
Therefore, OeEB strives to find innovative solutions on how to best address both strategic focus topics at the same time.
OeEB has set itself ambitious strategic goals in the cross-cutting topics climate and gender. We have developed action plans and defined roadmaps on how to reach these strategic goals. The gender action plan consists of action points that need to be taken to strengthen internal and external resources and capabilities to integrate gender awareness and meet gender targets more consistently. The climate roadmap was designed to further increase OeEBs impact through climate finance. These action agendas have provided us with initial insights on how to further progress on both cross-cutting topics, while raising internal awareness for their potential impact, but are currently not interconnected.
We already know that our RE clients struggle to attract female talent for their workforce. Further, we find it challenging to identify means to mobilise female community members as agents of change.
The potential consequences of not finding a solution is maintaining the status-quo and thereby missing valuable opportunities, as well as neglecting the potential for increased impact of a relevant part of our current investment portfolio. Moreover, we consider overlooked risks – blind spots – due to lack of gender awareness as potentially creating a problem for the future.
We would define a successful collaboration as gathering out-of-the-box ideas and insights from the start-up community on: what to take into consideration and what instruments, products, approaches there are to sustainably increase the participation of women in the renewable energy sector. We do not want to limit this to the workforce only, but also take into consideration and possibility of beneficiaries turning into agents within their communities. There are several metrics that can be used further down the road to measure success, like: amount of female employees/ share of female employees in the workforce, share of female beneficiaries resulting directly from the project (might be employee, community or else) and increased equal opportunity perception throughout the project phases/environment/surroundings.
In terms of Output:
We would like to step outside of our development finance institution bubble and listen to what other actors and fresh minds have to say concerning our challenge. We are mainly interested in a productive brainstorming, that leads to inspirational ideas and mutual learning. In the best-case scenario, we can narrow down ideas, that we are able to pilot within the bank and selected clients.
In terms of Outcome:
Our goal is to reach gender equality in the workforce and in the community participation in newly financed RE investment projects. This may serve as an example for other financial institutions as well.
We are open to any solution format that enables us to achieve our desired outcome.
If the Impacthon leads to a promising idea for a pilot project/process, the start-up could be a potential implementation partner or collaborator. A pilot would be ideally tested with one of our existing clients. Furthermore, we are happy to share insights in the development finance industry.
Internal stakeholders:
- OeEB Employees – all departments
- OeEB Owner – OeKB
- Government / Ministry of Finance – as a state-mandated bank
External Stakeholders
- European Development Finance Institutions (EDFI) Community
- RE clients
- NGOs
- Society
- Beneficiaries