The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is Embracing Equity. This is the concept that providing people who are marginalized or disadvantaged economically, socially, culturally and politically with equal opportunities does not necessarily bring about an advancement in their status and condition, given that these groups often need extra support to enable them to access benefits available for the promotion of equality. For this reason, it is important to create enabling environments or conditions that allow marginalized groups to take advantage of policies, funding, and other kinds of support.
WOCAN’s theory of change puts a focus on building the enabling conditions for women and women’s groups to thrive, to achieve gender equality in the agriculture and natural resource management contexts. The recent upsurge of interest in gender in relation to climate action and especially in climate finance provides new opportunities to do so. And yet, within the world of both public and private sector investors, there is often not an understanding of HOW to do so.
WOCAN believes that women’s collectives, be they formal or informal, for providing services or generating revenue, can provide the solutions that are needed. Our mapping of rural women’s organizations and enterprises engaged in climate adaptation, and the institutions that support them is confirming this thesis, as we aim to identify strategies for enabling women’s organizations and enterprises to thrive as vehicles for increasing women’s climate resilience with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. GROOTS Kenya, for example, tells us that the activity they see with the greatest value for rural women is movement building, building capacities for the organization of collectives, and capacities for learning (digitally as well as otherwise). And yet funders do not support these activities, preferring instead to support activities with concrete OUTPUTs.
Let’s move the emphasis to the measurement of OUTCOMES instead of OUTPUTS to support “Embracing Equity” to support transformational change, that recognizes and rewards women’s collectives for their existing and potential climate mitigation and adaptation actions. The W+ Standard provides one way to do so; funders should consider ways to support and invest in women’s collectives that can produce wide-ranging benefits to communities while reducing risks for investors.