Dr Marlies Hesselman and colleagues awarded funding for Women in Solidarity for Energy (WISE) project

The Women in Solidarity for Energy (WISE) project, led by Dr Marlies Hesselman of the Faculty of Law among others, has been awarded funding from the European Union's Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) funding system.

Increased awareness of single women’s energy rights

Single women and mothers experience great difficulty participating in the equitable and clean energy transition and are often overrepresented among households living in 'energy poverty'. Often these women have little control over their living situation and struggle with scarce resources to meet their family's basic needs, including using energy for heating, lighting and other necessary needs, or increasing energy efficiency. Living in energy poverty affects the human rights to a dignified life, access to adequate services, health and housing, as enshrined in the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights (CFREU) and the EU Pillar of Social Rights.

The Women in Solidarity for Energy (WISE) project has three overarching goals:

• Creating awareness of the right to energy and energy justice for women among 700 to 1,000 EU citizens
• Increasing energy knowledge of single women
• Empowering over 140 single women through training to participate in developing policies for a more equitable energy transition.

‘Right to Energy’

WISE involves researchers and non-profit organisations from the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria, Italy and Greece. Hesselman will lead Work Package 3 of the project, which will guide the concept of the 'Right to Energy' in EU Law. Work Package 3 will be used to produce a series of materials on this new right, supporting the implementation of the project.

The materials produced will be translated into more than 15 EU languages through a 'Translate-a-thon' for UG students, so that they can become involved in the project and be linked to professionals working on the energy poverty theme.

Building on a network and work package

One of the resources being updated and translated for the WISE project is the ‘Right to Energy Toolkit’. Hesselman previously produced this toolkit as part of the European COST Action Network: ENGAGER - European Energy Poverty: Knowledge Innovation and Agenda Co-Creation, funded between 2017 and 2022 by the Cooperation for Science and Technology Scheme of the European Union. As part of the network, Hesselman led the work package on interdisciplinary dialogues on energy poverty for four years. The WISE project builds on this, with a focus on the right to energy and the gender dimension.

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This article was published by the Faculty of Law.