Ishara Mahat

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• PhD
• Professor at University of Ottawa

The concept of “reproductive health” acquires different meanings to different people and especially to the vulnerable groups of the developing world, it gets integrally connected with an entire range of socio-cultural taboos. In its most commonly accepted form at the global level, ‘reproductive health’ focuses on the following indicators: (1) every...

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Poverty is often seen as having low income and inability to access standardized services for living. However, poverty measures have failed to measure the deprivations which are more detrimental in achieving the human well being. Accordingly, development goal is intended to achieve the benefit that are materially sufficient and disregards the resour...

Rural women in general, and mountain women in particular, are greatly involved in managing household energy systems in Nepal. Alternative energy technologies have a high potential to reduce women's workloads and improve their health status, as well as increasing efficient energy supply. Interventions in rural energy are primarily aimed at reducing...

Rural energy in general and biomass in particular, has a great impact on people’s wellbeing especially on the life qualities of rural women in Nepal as they are directly involved in production and management of household energy. Energy poverty involves multiple deprivations such as economic, social, cultural and ecological. Low access to better ene...

This paper aims to analyze two conflicting views on happiness that are being debated in contemporary societies using the data from General Social Survey (2003) in Canada. While well being demands for objective indicators (such as income and education) to be maximized as a means and an ends of happiness, satisfaction is judged on the basis of subjec...

This paper aims to analyze the different perspectives of research methodologies and the practical issues that have been raised during my fieldwork in Nepal. The major goal of my PhD research was to explore gender implications of rural energy technologies especially in terms of saving women’s time and labor in the management of household energy syst...

This paper analyzes whether alternative energy technologies have been able to lift the socio-economic status of rural women in Nepal, and mountain women in particular, in terms of saving their labour and time spent in managing household energy. It also examines if these technologies have provided increasing opportunities for women to be involved in...

Ishara Mahat Mountain women in rural Nepal are heavily involved in managing the household energy system. Energy is needed for cooking, heating and processing grain and women often spend about 15 hours per week collecting fuelwood and 15 -20 hours per week processing the grain needed for family meals. Access to electricity in rural areas of Nepal is...

Women in rural Nepal are heavily involved in managing household energy systems. They spend a large proportion of their time and energy in collecting firewood and processiong food grain. For instance, a woman in Nepal's rural mountainous area spends four to six hours in collecting a bundle of firewood. Being the primary users and managers of househo...

Alternative energy technologies (AETs) (such as biogas plants, micro-hydro plants, solar photovoltaic systems and improved cooking stoves) have been deployed in Nepal with a view to provide efficient energy services. The AETs, which are friendly to the environment, have a potential to increase social and economic opportunities at the local level an...

Nepal is a country where the rural infrastructure is extremely limited, especially in the transport, communication, and electrification sectors. Due to the mountainous geography of the country, many rural villages have no access to grid electricity. Only 1% of the total energy consumption in the country comes from electricity. Only 14% of the total...

Conflicting Views When I started writing this paper, I asked myself, is it worthwhile to link empowerment with rural energy technologies? John Friedmann (1992) defines empowerment as providing social, psychological and political power. Can rural energy technologies provide all these powers to rural women? I argued with myself, women are always dise...

In much of the literature, it has been argued and proved that women are the primary managers of household energy. Women collect and use fire-wood resources effectively and effi-ciently, and process grain with tradi-tional technologies using their own energy. Women as the primary users of household energy, have expertise in local biomass resources,...

The status of Nepalese women—and rural women in particular—lags far behind that of men. The strong bias in favor of sons in the country means that daughters are discriminated against from birth and do not have equal opportunities to achieve develop-ment. The situation for women is characterized by low levels of access to education, healthcare, and...

This was an interview from one of the experts form ENERGIA focusing on the gender and energy issues in ASIAN perspectives. This presentation provides some of the critical issues during my Ph.D. fieldwork in Nepal, the methods I used for conducting gender and energy research, and some of the limitations when doing research on gender and energy issue...