Four women-led projects improving lives around the world
From all-woman solar panel teams to empowering women to overcome gender-based violence, here are four inspiring stories of research projects led by women across the world.
1. How The Gambia’s largest solar array was installed by an all-woman team
In The Gambia, risky work is seen as men’s work. But in the leafy town of Fajara, on the coast, at the main base of the Medical Research Council Unit The Gambia, an entirely female solar panel installation team has been breaking those barriers.
The Gambia’s national electricity supply is unreliable. It runs on heavy fuel oil power plants, with diesel generators for backup in case of outages.
Azimut360 — a Spanish non-profit organisation that works on renewable energy projects and social justice, working with Gambian sustainability organisation the Mbolo Association, designed and commissioned a solar panel project for the unit.
It involved establishing a women only solar energy installation team, trained in the theory, design and installation of photovoltaic power systems by Fandema — one of Mbolo’s training centres.
Meaning ‘self-help’ in Mandinka, Fandema works to provide vocational skills and education to women and girls in careers that are traditionally seen as male-dominated.
More than 1,600 solar panels were installed with a total capacity of over 500 kilowatts at peak power. By generating solar energy to feed its internal grid, the unit transformed the reliability and cost of its electricity supply, and saved an estimated 290 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.
But the project’s social benefits, building the capability of local women and providing them with the opportunity to develop new skills, have been life changing.
“The reason I chose renewable energy is because I want to break the gender difference. Normally Gambians believe that any risky job is for men, not for women. In my family it changed my lifestyle. Now, at home, any electrical problem they will say ‘let’s see if Saffi has a clue about it.’ — Saffi Saine
The women’s work on the sustainability project and training on the course has shown their friends and family that they have the technical knowledge and capacity to work in this male-dominated field, and given them a sense of pride in their skillsets.
Meanwhile, Mbolo Association and Fandema continue to support women breaking through in sustainability and technical work in The Gambia, with the shining solar panels across the unit’s roofs an energetic testament to what women are capable of in any STEM setting — when opportunities are made.
2. Who decides who gets to use water?
In Burkina Faso, small reservoirs are lifelines for rural communities in dry seasons. But in some regions, reservoirs are shrinking and tensions rising as different parts of the community battle for access to water.
In the eastern Boulgou Province, 16 villages relied on just 2 local water sources — the Bidiga and Lagdwenda reservoirs. Many users were shut out of the decision-making processes, including women who needed water to grow food, herders and fishers.
A project called Pathways out of poverty, or Project POP, explored how the water reservoirs could be effectively managed by diverse community members across the villages.
The answer was ‘Innovation Platforms’: meeting spaces for the different user groups to exchange views, explore other viewpoints and negotiate equal access to water.
Rokia Traore is a researcher who worked on the project. Her work involved mobilising and coaching women, building their self-confidence and leading them to take part in reservoir management committees, which enables them to have a voice in the decision making.
She said: “Controlling the source (the reservoir), means to have a dominating power over the other (notably the female); it’s also a means to exercise control over economic activities. Some men said that women have nothing to do with the reservoir management, it’s too technical for them, they just use them. Which explains why there were no women on the local water committees responsible for reservoir management.
“The women wouldn’t have dared participate in reservoir water management meetings because they say, ‘we think it’s men’s business, that’s what the men tell us.’ Thanks to Project POP, they now attend meetings and are candidates in the setting up of water management committees and other offices.
“If they’re well represented, women and young Burkinabes are capable of reaching their full potential and powering a deep transformation in our societies — as long as the conditions are created to allow them access to factors of production.
“If they’re strongly represented, they can better express their needs and can support each other through networking to challenge the pre-established agendas which generally limit their access to resources.
“If women don’t participate, there won’t be any deep transformations. Gender participation (male and female) is an essential condition for reducing inequality and driving economic, political, environmental and social changes within our societies.”
3. The star of the story
Dr Mariela Massó Reid is part of a project to build a gravitational wave observatory in rural India.
She saw an opportunity to inspire the country’s children to take an interest in the laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory (LIGO).
So, she collaborated with a writer, illustrator and Indian scientists to write a book, called Listen to the Universe, to explain gravitational waves to their young neighbours.
Dr Reid, an astrophysicist from the University of Glasgow’s Institute for Gravitational Research, said that having a female central character was key.
“The idea of writing this book and the concept of a female character being the lead went hand in hand. In science we, particularly in the STEM subjects, still see a small ratio of girls so it became very important to show that the strong/knowledgeable character was female and also an aspiring scientist, in the hope that girls will see themselves in that character and aspire to be in the world of science.”
COVID-19, of course, threw some challenges in the pathway of the project.
She said: “The storyline and partnership with my co-author Dr Dimitra Fimi were all very organic and effortless. Dimitra is a very experienced writer, working with her was an incredible experience. Oliver Dean, our illustrator, understood the direction we wanted to take with the book from the beginning and brought our story to life.”
But printing was delayed for several months due to COVID-19. Once the books made it to the UK they were kept in the Physics building in the University of Glasgow for a couple of months before India opened its borders again. The books eventually arrived in India but due to COVID-19 cases rising, different states kept closing their borders, further delaying the delivery of the books to the children.
“The biggest challenge was definitely getting the books to the kids but our colleagues in India. Samir Dhurde, Dr Manasadevi Thirugnanasambandam, Professor Debarati Chatterjee and Shivani Pethe were very involved, helpful and supportive through the whole process and in delivering the books to the children in the various schools.”
4. One petal, many stones: how storytelling is helping women deal with gender-based violence
UKRI Future Leaders Fellow Dr Jenevieve Mannell has been working to help victims of gender-based violence across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. The project brings together medical experts, poets and organisations to develop a narrative storytelling approach.
She said: “In countries with a high-prevalence of gender-based violence, there is a lack of culturally relevant evidence-based resources to support the mental health of women and girls.
“Medical sciences tend to dominate the response with huge amounts of money committed to schemes that train psychologists and psychiatrists. While this is extremely important of course, in countries with limited resources and only a handful of trained professionals, thousands of people still go without adequate support.
“Bringing the humanities into our collaboration helped to address this gap by opening up the range of possibilities for what we could do to help women and girls experiencing gender-based violence.”
The team developed a narrative storytelling approach, called SHAER (Storytelling for Health, Acknowledgement, Expression, Recovery) — merging the world of stories with psychiatric/ psychological knowledge on supporting mental health. This gives women and girls experiencing violence an alternative when professional mental health services are not available.
Dr Mannell said an image from the pilot SHAER intervention in South Africa has always stuck with her: “The local project coordinator sent me a picture from one of the activities that has always stuck with me.
“It showed a collection of rose petals and stones put together by one of the women to represent her personal story. The petals represented good moments in her life while the stones represent negative or difficult moments. In the picture, there was only one petal and many many stones.
“This said so much about the difficulties of black women’s lives in peri-urban South Africa today, and the importance of narrative storytelling in the absence of the urgent psychological support that is clearly needed.”
In Afghanistan, SHAER worked with a small group of women who were living in a safe house in Kabul.
Dr Mannell said: “These women are offered regular meetings with a psychologist, however we wanted to explore whether the humanities, and storytelling in particular, could help them come to terms with their experiences and stop blaming themselves for the violence they had experienced.
“The 6 women who participated in these group activities talked openly about how expectations of women in Afghan society were the reasons why violence happened. This is a conversation that rarely happened in the safe house and we were able to facilitate it through talking about stories — from the media, from oral histories and from poetry.
“In Turkey, we worked with activists belonging to the ‘We Will End Femicide’ platform to understand how personal stories of violence have played a role in advocacy efforts.
“Through interviewing activists, we were able to show that their personal stories of gender-based violence can be instrumental in challenging widely held social norms that condone such acts. But there still needs to be supportive social contexts where women’s stories can be heard. Our hope is that this piece of work will help to support activists in other countries by highlighting the potential for narrative storytelling to be used in activism.”
In South Africa the team piloted the SHAER intervention with women who had experienced gender-based violence. This helped the women develop a new sense of self and interpret their experiences of violence through a broader structural lens — like the women in Afghanistan, they were able to see the problem of GBV as not about them as individuals, but as something that is caused by the broader context in which they live.
SHAER is a cross-country piece of research. Dr Mannell says that working across borders has given her a better understanding of the similarities that underpin gender-based violence, and that those similarities aren’t always what we’d expect.
“Contexts with a high-prevalence of gender-based violence often have limited resources for mental health, which means that traumatic experiences from childhood abuse, armed conflict, or sexual assault are left unresolved and therefore re-produced.
“From my own research, this appears to be linked as much to high rates of homicide and unequal gender norms at the national level, as it is to a country’s history of colonialism. Through looking across contexts, we can learn more about gender-based violence and its underlying drivers. This provides us with better insight into how we can prevent it in the first place.”
Want to know more?
If you’re a UK taxpayer, your contributions helped fund this work, via UK Research and Innovation — the UK’s largest public funder of research — and the Global Challenges Research Fund, the Medical Research Council, STFC and the Economic and Social Research Council. You can read more about what we do here.
For more on the Pathways out of Poverty project, visit their hub site. You can read more about the Gambia solar project here and the Listen to the Universe project here.
You can read about Dr Jenevieve Mannel’s continuing work on gender-based violence here. Or listen to her talk about her current project which focuses on researching prevention-based strategies for targeting high rates of intimate-partner violence on the Next Generation Research podcast.
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