Archive for: Women's Empowerment


Climate finance should flow to women’s organizations, gender-related groups, and feminist organizations working at the intersection of gender equality and climate change. Efforts toward enhanced gender-responsiveness of climate finance must include the groups, organizations, and networks best positioned to realize gender equality on the ground, contributing to more robust climate solutions and outcomes. These truths are undeniable, but we know that practice has not yet caught up to the ideal. In response, Prospera, the International Network of Women’s Funds, and WEDO have been working to identify the best engagement pathways for organizations to ensure the four primary public climate funds begin to make this a reality. This report is one piece of the ongoing work and advocacy undertaken by many colleagues and collaborators, to transform our climate finance system into one that is gender-responsive and equitable.

Year: 2019

Source: Women’s Environment and Development Organization | Prospera

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    The Global Environment Facility (GEF) is one of the major international climate funds, they’ve increasingly been incorporating a stronger gender perspective (to be more “gender responsive”) in their work. Their Small Grants Programme (SGP) launched this paper at the GEF Dialogue with Civil Society meeting . The paper attempts to “document good practices featuring women as environmental stewards and focuses exclusively on projects led and implemented by women.”

    Year: 2018

    Source: Global Environment Facility Partners

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      A hugely diverse alliance of over 150 organisations working in 170 countries support the Thriving Together statement. Whether their work has a focus on conserving endangered species, providing family planning services, restoring habitats, promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights or a range of other human and environmental health issues, they all agree with the Thriving Together statement. At the heart of the statement is the widespread agreement, for the first time, that removal of barriers to family planning is critically important not only for women and girls, but also for environmental conservation and biodiversity. The Trust’s paper “Removing Barriers to Family Planning, Empowering Sustainable Environmental Conservation: A Background Paper and Call for Action” summarises why removing barriers to family planning is critical for women’s and girls’ health and empowerment, and sustainable environmental conservation.

      Source: Margaret Pyke Trust

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        In this commentary, the authors explain how family planning can accelerate progress across the 5 SDG themes of People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnership and why it is critical to achieving the goals and the post-2015 development agenda. Empowering women to choose the number, timing, and spacing of their pregnancies is not only a matter of health and human rights but also touches on many multisectoral determinants vital to sustainable development, including women’s education and status in society. Without universal access to family planning and reproductive health, the impact and effectiveness of other interventions will be less, will cost more, and will take longer to achieve. Global strategies and partnerships—and health decision makers at all levels—must leverage the abundance of available research, evidence, and the range of justifications presented here to prioritize family planning as a foundational component of health, rights, and long-term development strategies.

        Year: 2016

        Source: Global Health: Science and Practice

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          The overall goal of the The Health of People and the Environment in the Lake Victoria Basin (HoPE-LVB) Project is to reduce threats to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem degradation in the lake basin, while simultaneously increasing access to family planning and sexual and reproductive health to improve maternal and child health in project communities. This brief describes how the energy-efficient stove campaign exemplifies the power of this integration and the HoPE-LVB project.

          Year: 2016

          Source: Pathfinder International

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            The purpose of this review is to highlight recent evidence that family planning, readily accessible to all who seek it and exercised as a human right, can contribute to environmental sustainability. As global concern increases about the health of our planet, better understanding of the role family planning programs play in maintaining a sustainable environment could bolster public and policymaker support for access to family planning.

            Year: 2018

            Source: Current Opinion in Obstetrics and Gynecology

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              This WWF-Nepal case study explores the impact of the PHE component of the WWF-Nepal Terai Arc Landscape (TAL) Project on women’s empowerment. The key research questions focus on 1) how PHE activities contribute to women’s empowerment and (2) how empowered women contribute to conservation outcomes. This case study piloted the WWF Women’s Economic, Social and Political Empowerment (WWESPE) Tool. The aim is to help conservation and/or other PHE project staff understand how their PHE (or conservation-only) projects contribute to women’s empowerment and the conservation outcomes and learn how to enhance these women’s empowerment impacts. The case study found that the TAL and TAL-PHE approach helped to advance women’s empowerment and their involvement in conservation in project communities. The report found that the extent and pattern of women’s economic, social and political empowerment varied within project communities, but the use of adult and youth peer educators and inclusion of a gender module in the peer educator trainings successfully contributed to women’s empowerment.

              Year: 2010

              Source: World Wildlife Fund

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                The Population-Health-Environment (PHE) Alliance Project, implemented by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) from 2008 to 2011, with support from the United States Agency for International Development’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health and Johnson & Johnson, aimed to change that practice, and by doing so, deepen the sector’s understanding of the value of the PHE approach for conservation, and how the sector could better measure that value. The following learning brief explores the role of women’s empowerment in site-based conservation through the PHE approach, using case studies from two PHE Alliance project sites – in Nepal and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The brief concludes that women’s empowerment is a viable justification for implementing PHE projects to improve conservation outcomes, as well as an end in itself. The case studies highlight positive women’s empowerment outcomes and suggest that in the future, the PHE approach might emerge as a powerful strategy for ensuring: women’s meaningful involvement in conservation, women’s ability to derive tangible benefits from conservation, and more sustainable conservation successes.

                Year: 2011

                Source: World Wildlife Fund

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