Gender Equality and Social Inclusion are essential for ensuring equitable access to energy resources and services. Energy impacts people differently based on intersecting factors such as income, gender, ethnicity, disability, age, and geographic location. Women often face greater challenges due to their roles in households and communities, bearing disproportionate adverse effects from energy poverty. Persons with disabilities encounter systemic barriers to energy access, youth navigate precarious participation in informal energy economies, and informal settlement residents experience distinct energy vulnerabilities through illegal connections, frequent outages and safety risks. GESI frameworks help address these inequalities and promote fairness. However, effective integration requires understanding how socio-economic factors and existing social and institutional structures interact to determine individuals’ experiences with energy. 

Kenya has made significant progress in energy policy development, establishing frameworks such as the Energy Act (2019), Gender Policy in Energy (2019), and the Kenya National Cooking Transition Strategy (2023) to promote inclusive energy access. Despite these advances, marginalized groups remain systematically excluded. Current policies treat women, persons with disabilities, youth, and informal settlement residents as homogeneous categories, failing to recognize how multiple identities intersect to create compounded disadvantage. This research examined how intersecting vulnerabilities shape energy access experiences, with particular focus on informal settlements, which account for over 60% of Kenya’s urban population. 

The study focused on three critical areas: how current gender-neutral and single-identity policy frameworks mask complex patterns of exclusion; the distinct energy poverty conditions in urban informal settlements compared to rural areas; and the barriers preventing effective implementation of GESI commitments within energy sector institutions. An intersectional framework was applied to analyze energy access, moving beyond single-axis approaches to examine how power relations, social hierarchies and structural inequalities combine to produce differentiated energy outcomes. This approach situated energy policy within Kenya’s broader social, political, and institutional context, revealing how employment security, gender, age, disability and location interact to produce energy vulnerabilities that conventional approaches consistently fail to capture. 

The project contributes to advancing equitable energy transitions by providing evidence-based recommendations for operationalizing intersectional frameworks through disaggregated data systems, spatially targeted interventions, participatory governance models, and accountable institutional mechanisms.