Community Energy Malawi (CEM), with support from Hivos, is implementing a project called Malawi for Green, Localised Inclusive and Decentralised Energy (Malawi GLIDE) in Balaka, Chitipa and Ntchisi districts. The Project aims at facilitating the mainstreaming of energy in the decentralized development planning and implementation processes as one way of building community awareness and capacity in energy. Its ancillary purpose is to utilize the evidence generated to influence the adoption of green and inclusive energy policies at both local and national levels in Malawi.

As one way to achieving this, the project devised a way of utilizing the Renewable Energy Toolkit for Malawi in community energy planning within the already existing framework of Village Action Planning (VAP) process. The aim is to ensure adequate planning of energy nexus with other development priorities. Eventually this will result in energy being featured in the village and district level development and budgetary processes.

To achieve thiis, CEM in conjunction with the implementing partners (District Councils of Balaka, Chitipa and Ntchisi), had a workshop to strategize on how best to implement the process considering the paucity in knowledge on energy by development workers who facilitate this process.  It is during this workshop that the following common energy challenges were unveiled:

1. Absence of energy officers at district level
2. Lack of information on energy issues
3. No extension workers at community level to promote energy issues
4. Lack of markets for reliable energy technologies
5. No guideline policies on mainstreaming energy issues at district and community level
6. Energy issues not adequately mainstreamed in planning documents
7. Negative attitude towards other sources of energy e.g. biogas
8. High cost of alternative energy technologies e.g. solar

The output of the workshop was the guidelines for incorporating energy issues in the VAP process. This is one step towards addressing these challenges. The training for development workers was then held to make sure that they (development workers) are drilled in mainstreaming energy at grassroots level. 60 development workers from Balaka , Chitipa and Ntchisi successfully completed the training. 16 of them were females while 44 were male.