At the Women’s International Green Summit and Exhibition (WIGSE-26) in Lagos, experts, policymakers, researchers and entrepreneurs converged around a common message: Africa cannot achieve an inclusive and sustainable green transition while women remain excluded from energy production, investment and decision-making.

Held under the theme, “Empowering Women to Lead Africa’s Green Transition: Enhanced by Innovation, Inclusion and Impact,” the summit brought together voices from across the energy, environmental, finance and development sectors to examine the opportunities and barriers shaping Africa’s transition to a greener economy.

For Dr Emem Okon, Executive Director of the Kebetkache Women Development Resource Centre, the challenges facing women in the Niger Delta are inseparable from the region’s environmental crisis.

She described how decades of oil spills, gas flaring and the contamination of water and farmland have devastated livelihoods and exposed communities to persistent environmental risks. Yet, despite women’s heavy dependence on energy in their daily lives, they remain largely excluded from energy production and the decisions that shape the sector.

Her organization has responded by training women in environmental remediation and working to expand mangrove restoration across the Niger Delta.

“Women will lead the way,” Okon said, while calling for greater access to clean energy for women in rural communities, many of whom remain underserved by existing energy systems.

The question of representation also featured prominently in the remarks of Jochen Rudolph, who coordinates Just Transition and Inclusion at the Nigeria Energy Support Programme.

Rudolph argued that a genuinely just energy transition is impossible without women participating meaningfully in the decisions that shape it. Through German Development Cooperation and GIZ, his programme has supported mentorship and internship opportunities designed to increase women’s participation in renewable energy careers. It has also contributed to efforts to develop a national gender-mainstreaming policy for Nigeria’s energy sector.

His argument was straightforward: when women have greater influence over investment and policy decisions, the benefits of the energy transition are more likely to be distributed equitably.

For Dr Ghada Fouad, Director of the African Centre for Research and Strategic Studies in Egypt, the challenge is also financial.

She noted that many women-led energy initiatives struggle to attract international capital because they lack the measurable and standardized frameworks often required by green-finance institutions and investors.

Developing such frameworks, she argued, could help transform small, community-based initiatives into credible investment opportunities, allowing women-led enterprises to gain access to climate finance that has largely remained beyond their reach.

While much of the summit focused on policy, finance and inclusion, Deborah Graham-Wilson, Head of Communications and ESG at Eland Cables, brought the discussion down to the technical foundations of renewable energy projects.

Her message was that sustainability ambitions must not come at the expense of sound engineering.

“Specification, electrical performance, and suitability for that installation must come first,” she said.

A product may be marketed as environmentally friendly, she argued, but if it is poorly suited to the application, its environmental benefits can quickly be undermined by premature failure, replacement and waste.

“There is nothing less sustainable than a cable that fails after five years because it wasn’t properly specified for the purpose.”

Properly specified cables, she noted, can remain in service for more than 25 years, reducing the need for repairs and replacements while limiting project disruptions and additional costs.

Graham-Wilson also urged developers to think beyond the installation phase and consider the entire lifecycle of materials—from transportation and durability to eventual decommissioning, waste management and recycling.

Such considerations, she said, are often overlooked until they become expensive problems. Planning for surplus materials, ageing infrastructure and end-of-life disposal from the outset, she argued, can improve both the environmental and economic performance of projects.

The choice between materials also illustrates the complexity of sustainable development. Aluminium, for instance, is lighter and generally less expensive than copper, making it attractive for some applications, but it can carry a higher carbon footprint. For Graham-Wilson, the lesson is not that one material is universally sustainable, but that developers must assess the trade-offs in each application.

But sustainability, she stressed, extends beyond technology and materials.

It is also about who benefits from the transition.

Graham-Wilson encouraged companies to support women-led businesses, promote fair labour practices and strengthen local economic participation through their supply chains. Small interventions, she argued, can accumulate into significant social and environmental gains.

“Small cumulative actions build to a larger impact, be that in the community or on an individual project,” she said.

She also warned that postponing the procurement of specialized sustainable products can increase both the financial and environmental costs of projects. Developers, she urged, should demand evidence for sustainability claims rather than accepting them at face value.

By the close of WIGSE-26, the message running through the different discussions was clear.

Whether the conversation centered on environmental restoration in the Niger Delta, women’s participation in the energy workforce, access to green finance, government policy or the technical choices behind renewable energy infrastructure, the speakers arrived at a common conclusion: Africa’s green transition will not be truly sustainable or inclusive unless women are recognized not simply as beneficiaries of the transition, but as leaders in shaping it.