May 08, 2022
A new study co-led by the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) and the World Bank, has published its findings on how the Dedicated Grant Mechanism empowers indigenous women to be agents of climate action in forest governance.
Globally around 100 million indigenous and local (IPLC) women are dependent on forest resources from which it is estimated up to half of their income is generated. It’s also been shown that they assume greater responsibility for the provision of household food and supplies from forests. IPLC women represent powerful change agents in the larger fight against climate change through their unique implementation of local knowledge and practices. Women’s indigenous knowledge of forest resources is crucial for household resilience to shocks such as drought and food shortages, and in the ongoing fight against climate change. It’s women who have led programs to combat deforestation by establishing tree replanting programs among many other instances of forest restoration innovations.
Despite this, indigenous and local women often experience three-fold discrimination due to their intersecting identities and complex gender-politics. Their participation in, benefit from, and ability to influence decision-making around forestry management is inextricably tied to the social, cultural, historical, and political contexts of the communities where these efforts take place. Indigenous women face barriers to accessing forest resources including less agency in forest governance and limited participation in forest product value chains. Land tenure presents a further formidable barrier. While indigenous communities are gaining greater influence over their traditional lands, collective land tenure systems may not be necessarily inclusive of women.
Gender in climate finance
CIF’s Dedicated Grant Mechanism (DGM) for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) was designed to tackle these inequalities by taking a socially inclusive, gender-responsive approach to delivering climate finance for sustainable forest management initiatives. The DGM is investing $80 million to benefit more than 200,000 people in 12 country-level programs designed and implemented by indigenous groups themselves.
The study drew on women’s experience in existing DGM programs to ascertain evidence of gender transformation, identify signs of broader systemic and societal changes, and make recommendations to improve future programs.
The study found:
- DGM projects provide direct funding to IPLCs through subprojects. Around 24% of these are awarded to women. DGM projects used gender targets for women-led subprojects in countries such as Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Mexico and used targeted approaches to proactively reach women and support them to apply for subprojects. Thanks to these efforts, these programs achieved significant results – in Ghana 42% of individual grants are women-led, and 34% of those are migrant women; in Burkina Faso 81% of livelihoods-focused subprojects are implemented exclusively by women; and in Mexico 85% of community initiatives are women-led while 87% of beneficiaries under the Social Inclusion window (VIS) are women.
- DGM’s governance mechanisms at global and national levels fostered women’s climate leadership. The Global Steering Committee (GSC), had no specific guidance or requirements on gender composition. Despite this, as of July 2021, the GSC consists of 5 women and 8 men as voting members (36 percent women) and a male and female have served as co-chairs since inception of this global governing body.
- National steering committees (NSC) set up to manage the DGM within beneficiary countries also elevated IPLC women’s leadership. Overall, approximately 24% of all NSC seats across the DGM projects are held by women. DGM’s focus on improving women’s leadership, particularly through NSC membership and subprojects, provided a space for women to engage within the country context and NSC contributed to elevating and legitimizing women's voices and agency at the national level.
- DGM’s success in enhancing women’s voice and agency through its governance mechanisms also started to shift community-level gender norms. In Ghana, for example, both female and male community members describe how women have a greater voice and influence at the household level and at the community level, where both native and migrant women are more likely to engage in discussion and decision-making.
- Many DGM country projects delivered specific capacity building to support gender integration and women-led/focused subprojects from the beginning.
- Indonesia: Dedicated gender advisor worked with organizations and communities looking to submit subproject proposals to strengthen their gender sensitivity.
- Burkina Faso: Targeted capacity building support for women was provided to develop and submit their subproject proposals, as well as ongoing capacity building once their project had been selected.
- Ghana: The project also utilized the local Queen Mothers--women leaders who are well respected—to influence other women and by training and engaging the Queen Mothers, the project was able to encourage other women to participate in the project.
- Mexico: Targeted communication and information about the subprojects was provided to women and women’s organizations through special events, as well as providing social promoters to work closely with proponents to create technically sound proposals. In this way, the DGM Mexico found a way to achieve one of the highest rates of women-led proposals being awarded by a DGM funding program, despite an NSC that had few women leaders.
The findings acknowledged that stepping-stones to gender transformative change had been observed and progress achieved. To build on the lessons learned from DGM, the study makes recommendations for future DGM operations, REDD+ programs, community-driven development approaches, as well as other locally led climate finance delivery mechanisms:
- defining an explicit gender strategy that focuses on structural inequality
- building and deepening the established good practices of the DGM
- specifically and holistically building the next generation of indigenous women leaders.
Read the full study here.