The Africa Energy Indaba is pleased to announce the launch of the Women in Energy Network (WIEN) for the benefit of African women in the energy sector. 

The Africa Energy Indaba has successfully hosted the annual Women in Energy conference for the past 3 years and was the first energy conference on the continent to launch a specialised event for the promotion and empowerment of women in the African energy sector with a focus on “Developing African women Leaders to create our energy future”.

The vision of WIEN is to educate and develop women across Africa working throughout the energy value chain.  WIEN will develop programmes to provide networking opportunities and to foster career and leadership development of women through structured skills training, mentoring and online training programmes to reach women across the continent. 

It will be important to help women overcome the barriers they face and to move them into positions of leadership.

Liz Hart, Managing Director of the Africa Energy Indaba commented,
“It is important for women to play a bigger role in the workplace in Africa, where women play a disproportionately active role as breadwinners and caretakers of the future generations on the continent.

If more women were represented in the continent’s energy sectors, which are responsible for providing electricity access to improve the quality and standard of living, then many more people would have access to quality education and healthcare.  As South Africa celebrates Women’s month this August, we feel the time is right to launch WIEN!”

It is time to empower women to leadership positions in the energy field in Africa and to tap in their valuable contributions, skills and competitive advantage to solve Africa’s huge challenges of energy shortage. 

Energy is a very wide field and opens enormous job opportunities for women at all levels to show and use their talent, be it in traditional means of generating energy or renewable or gas and fuel.

Access to energy is essential to unleashing the true potential of women!