^{How GCF is putting gender equality at the heart of climate action}

This story about a GCF project with UNDP is adapted from original materials written by UNDP.

At GCF we know that the impacts of climate change affect women and men differently. Women are often the hardest hit by dramatic shifts in climatic conditions. GCF was the first climate fund to mainstream gender perspectives right from the start of its operations, recognizing the need to ensure all its projects and programs benefit women and men. 

Sylvia Chiinda knows what it is like to live on the edge of desperation. Climate change and economic hardship have proved a potent combination for this 47-year-old single Zambian mother of seven. Her struggles to keep her family afloat by growing maize and groundnuts after the death of her husband several years ago were dashed by unseasonal weather patterns.

Following the failure of her crops, Sylvia started running a makeshift grocery shop in her village of Kanakanatapa in eastern Zambia’s Chongwe District. But her income – just 300 Zambian Kwacha (USD 15) in a good month – was barely enough to meet her family’s basic needs.

Gender Action Plans

Every project funded by the Green Climate Fund includes a Gender Action Plan. This action plan sets out in detail how the project supports and trains women, and how women will benefit. GCF investments are supporting at least 183 million women beneficiaries over the lifetimes of our projects. The gender action plan for this project sets out activities that will specifically address the gender dimension. It includes targets and indicators, and a budget for each action. For example, the work to increase access to climate-resilient crops is tracking how many female farmers receive the seeds, soil kits, and training needed.

In least-developed countries like Zambia, poverty forms a trap around rural families as strong as any prison walls as they struggle to obtain access to finances. When climate change hits in the form of unseasonal rains, droughts, and floods – destroying crops and killing livestock - they are unable to spend their way out of trouble. Because rural farmers are poor, they are viewed by potential investors as too high risk. Poor farmers’ inability to receive bank loans essentially cuts off their access to alternative livelihood options. And some villages do not even have commercial banks.

“Banks in the city won’t lend us money because we have no land title to put up as collateral,” explains Sylvia.

Escaping the poverty-climate quagmire

Women often find it particularly difficult to free themselves from domestic climate-economic crises because of lingering gender bias. This can take the form of patriarchal traditional communities, where age-old customs dictate a woman’s life. Sylvia’s ability to turn her life around, however - with a bit of outside help – offers a beacon of hope for other women trapped in the quagmire of poverty and ever-worsening climate effects.

Sylvia’s life has improved during the past few months following the implementation of a Green Climate Fund (GCF)-funded initiative with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to help smallholder Zambian farmers adapt to climate change. Sylvia is among more than 8,000 beneficiaries – mostly women – who have been taught how to raise goats. Each beneficiary has received five goats, along with training on how to breed them and keep them healthy, as well as being taught how to construct goat sheds.

Sylvia quickly built up her herd after buying additional animals from the sale of goat manure. She now has 30 goats. This follows the sale of 10, earning her 5,000 Kwacha (USD 238) which she has used to buy fertilizer and pay her children’s school fees. She has given away five kids from her goat herd to other local women.

“I’m now planning to invest in more goats and save enough money to buy my own land,” says Sylvia as she herds her goats into a field to graze.

Promoting women leaders

One aspect of GCF’s gender action plan is its focus on promoting women leaders so that successes like Sylvia’s can be replicated. As well as providing business-skills training, the project supports activities that increase the number of women in leadership and decision-making roles.

As part of wider efforts by the Zambian Government, a UN coalition bringing together UNDP, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the World Food Programme (WFP) - with GCF funding – has joined with Zambia’s Ministry of Agriculture and Meteorological Department. Working together, these partners are helping climate-stressed small-scale farmers in Zambia tap a booming, and drought-resistant, source of income – goat rearing.

In Zambia, goats are good business. While in the capital, Lusaka, they sell between the equivalent of USD 25 and USD 30, there is huge demand from Saudi Arabia, which now wants to import as many as 1 million Zambian goats a year. Considering Zambia only has approximately 4 million goats being reared largely by small-scale farmers, future prospects for this industry look good.

Linking livelihoods and climate resilience

The link between livelihood diversification and enhanced climate resilience is clear. Attempts by farmers to continue with agricultural methods that are being severely impeded by climate change results in both further land degradation and an accelerated slide into penury. This GCF-funded project, Strengthening Climate Resilience of Agricultural Livelihoods in Agro-ecological regions (SCRALA), provides a way out of this negative spiral. The climate finance initiative does this by supporting climate-resilient farming by promoting diversified livelihoods to improve food security and income generation.

There is not a moment to lose as Zambia is being hit hard by climate change. Since a drought in 2019, the devastating effects of prolonged dry spells coupled with the late onset of the rain season has impacted agriculture severely - reducing food availability and contributing to acute food insecurity across the country.

“Climate change is one of the major factors and challenges contributing to the low productivity of farmers, especially at the small-scale level,” says Ministry of Agriculture Permanent Secretary Songowayo Zyambo.

“As a government, we are therefore pleased that our partnership with UNDP and GCF, under the SCRALA project, is supporting farmers, especially women, with opportunities and sustainable lifelong solutions to help boost productivity and adaptation to climate change effects.”Lionel Laurens, the UNDP Resident Representative in Zambia

Lionel Laurens, the UNDP Resident Representative in Zambia, said extra incomes from goat rearing will help farmers pay for school expenses, better diets, and medical costs. This will provide beneficiaries with “power over their lives and the means to lift themselves out of extreme poverty,” he added.

From climate victims to rural entrepreneurs

A major part of this project is empowering Zambian women on the front line of climate change like Sylvia. It does this by transforming women from being climate victims to becoming rural entrepreneurs and agents of positive change by providing them with economic opportunities. Charity Lungu, a mother of four who lives in the Luamba Agriculture Camp in eastern Zambia, explained that before her children would go to school hungry. “They are now able to focus on school, not on hunger,” she said while tending her bleating goats in her backyard.

“I am not worried anymore about my children going hungry or falling ill,” said Anna Mumba, 48, of Luangwa District’s Sipopa Village - which has been particularly hard hit by recurring drought and dismal harvests in recent years. “I can always sell a goat if we have needs.”

“I am not worried anymore about my children going hungry or falling ill.”Anna Mumba, 48, of Luangwa District’s Sipopa Village

Seblewongel Negussie, GCF’s Gender, and Social Specialist said the Zambian climate adaptation project shows the importance of gender mainstreaming in project design and implementation. “It does this by strengthening the climate-resilient value chains for smallholder farming, which opens up new and relevant economic opportunities - as well as social benefits - for Zambian women. This aligns with GCF’s emphasis on inclusive climate action so that all our projects promote gender equality and women’s empowerment.”

Mainstreaming gender

GCF is the first climate finance fund to mainstream gender perspectives from the outset in making decisions about deploying financial resources. That is because while women may hold up half the sky, they are bearing more than their fair share of the brunt of climate change. Their mortality from climate-related disasters is higher than that of men. And women tend to rely more on natural resources for their livelihood. So any decline in land and biomass productivity affects women, especially in rural areas.

How to mainstream gender in climate activities

Gender mainstreaming is central to the GCF’s objectives and guiding principles, including engaging women and men of all ages as stakeholders in the design, development and implementation of strategies and activities to be financed. GCF has written a manual on Mainstreaming Gender in Green Climate Fund projects. Developed with UN Women, this toolkit guides GCF partners on how to include women, girls, men, and boys from socially excluded and vulnerable communities in all aspects of climate finance

An increasing number of studies are showing that women are generally more vulnerable to climate impacts. Marina Andrijevic, a Climate Analytics researcher and lead author of one of these recent studies, states this “is not because there is something inherently vulnerable about women, but because of socio-cultural structures that deprive women of access to resources, decision-making, information, agency…”

At the same time, new research (published in the scientific journal Nature Communications) shows that empowering women through improved healthcare, education, and representation in government could help societies adapt more quickly and easily to climate impacts.

GCF’s focus on enhancing climate adaptation will continue to ensure women and girls are a central part of the solution not the problem, especially in rural Africa. In many developing countries, nearly 80 percent of women are engaged in farming - and in Africa, they manage 90 percent of household fuelwood and water supplies, notes Verania Chao, a UNDP gender and climate change specialist. Rearing goats is one way for female farmers to escape from a poverty trap exacerbated by climate change. GCF will continue to fund these and other ways of female empowerment to overcome the climate challenge.