Women-Adapt: Amping up Gender Impacts in Climate Finance
About
The Women-Adapt project, supported by the Green Climate Fund and implemented by the World Food Programme, aims to empower women in the Poro Region in Cote d'Ivoire by integrating a gender lens into climate adaptation actions.
The project is centred around the understanding that women are key agents of change and holders of knowledge and skills that can contribute to climate resilience efforts. The project is also focused on proactively promoting activities intended to address the gender disparities due to existing patriarchal structures and gender-discriminatory policies, practices, and norms.
The project has a clear gender focus, specifically targeting the economic and educational empowerment of women and recognises that addressing gender inequalities is essential for effective and equitable adaptation strategies at the local level.
With a budget of nearly $10 million, the project aims to touch the lives of 70,000 smallholder farmers, 90% of whom are women, across 70 villages.
Type of actor
Public Sector
Investment type
Grant capital focused on climate resilience and adaptation
Operates from
Poro Region, Côte d'Ivoire
Sectors
Agriculture / Financial inclusion/ Livelihood
Approach
The Women-Adapt project is designed to address various challenges. It consists of three essential components, each playing a crucial role. The first component focuses on supporting communities by providing them with the necessary tools and knowledge to adapt to climate change. This includes adaptive measures like climate-smart land restoration, soil and water conservation and climate risk management tools such as climate information services and insurance products. The second component aims at empowering women smallholder producers through capacity-building and organisational support activities that promote greater adoption of adaptive practices across maize, rice, and vegetable value chains, where women represent 90% of the workforce. The third component seeks to overcome financial barriers faced by smallholder farmers, ensuring the availability of resources, financial inclusion and market development, such as promoting parametric index insurance schemes and providing increased access to credit.
Impact
Women-Adapt aims to directly improve the lives of 70,000 smallholder farmers, of whom 90% are women. This translates to 63,000 women who will benefit from enhanced adaptive capacities through climate-resilient agricultural practices and sustainable water management systems. The climate impact is complementary to its gender impact: by dismantling societal and cultural barriers that have historically hindered women's full participation in climate action, the project can drive gender equality.
The project contributes directly to multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including Zero Hunger, Climate Action, Gender Equality, and Life on Land. Its main goals are conserving water and groundwater resources, improving soil fertility, and restoring soil biodiversity. Alongside these environmental benefits, the project aims to raise awareness in the community about climate change impacts and potential adaptation measures for social co-benefits. Economically, it seeks to achieve advantages such as increased food production and reduced post-harvest losses while promoting financial inclusion through savings accounts and access to credit and insurance services provision.
The economic impact is also promising by bridging the gap that often hinders the progress of smallholder farmers, particularly as it supports women’s opportunities and access to financial services and boosts their financial inclusion. By doing so, Women-Adapt can be a game-changer, given the high percentage of women who, in the Poro Region, are completely excluded from access to finance.
Funding Approach
The grant capital helps build sustainability and long-term capacity focusing on improving the long-term drivers of climate resilience and financial inclusion so that a possible phase 2 could have a high potential of scalability and replicability.
In the long term, the project is designed to achieve several key milestones, including strengthening the technical, organisational, and financial capacities of Women’s Farmers Organisations; ii) institutionalise gender-sensitive policies within local governance structures by working closely with local authorities and community leaders; and iii) facilitate women's access to financial services by partnering with local financial institutions to develop gender-sensitive financial products.
What’s next?
The Women Adapt project helps demonstrate that interventions tailored to gender can advance gender equality outcomes. The project has ambitious plans to amplify its impact, particularly in the realm of women's empowerment; it has the potential to remove several barriers that have historically hindered women's full participation in climate action and sustainable agriculture, such as limited access to financial services, lack of decision-making power, and restricted access to climate-smart technologies and practices. Moreover, in the future, Women-Adapt can support greater evidence-building around what works well, and the final evaluation can gauge the key drivers, tools and resources that allowed for elevating women's social and economic status and consequently contribute to gender equality and social justice, and, ultimately, build climate resilience while reshaping societal norms and creating an enabling environment where women can thrive as leaders in climate action.
