Gender equality and climate finance: from local realities to global commitments
Climate negotiator Joy Munthali, from Malawi, is part of IIED’s cohort of supported climate negotiators from the Least Developed Countries Group. She leads a non-profit organisation that addresses the challenges girls and women in Malawi experience due to climate change. As International Women’s Day approaches, Joy highlights the barriers women face in accessing funding for climate action, and explains why it’s time to make climate finance truly gender-responsive.
Group of local women during a regular meeting on women-led fish farming, supported by World Fish (Photo: WorldFish, via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Climate finance has been a cornerstone of global climate action, yet women-led initiatives in the least developed countries (LDCs) remain systematically underfunded. Despite global commitments to gender equality being expressed in climate policies and in countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions, access to financial resources remains one of the most significant barriers for women at the forefront of climate action.
At last November’s COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, world leaders reaffirmed their commitment to addressing this gap by adopting an enhanced Gender Action Plan (GAP) under the Lima Work Programme on Gender. However, translating these commitments into tangible financial support remains an uphill battle.
Gender and climate finance: a persistent disparity
Women play a critical role in climate adaptation and resilience-building, yet financial mechanisms remain largely inaccessible to them. This is especially true in LDCs, where grassroots women-led organisations provide innovative solutions but struggle to secure funding for their initiatives.
For instance, the UNFCCC Standing Committee on Finance’s report on climate finance highlights that only a small fraction of climate funds directly reach women-led initiatives. Similarly, the sixth Biennial Assessment and Overview of Climate Finance Flows underscores how gender-responsive financing remains a challenge, despite policy frameworks that call for its prioritisation.
These barriers are real and they are many. For instance, I remember attending my first UN climate change conference in 2019 (COP25). At the time I had just founded Green Girls Platform, a young women-led initiative working to address the unique climate challenges faced by girls and young women in Malawi.
Curious to understand how grassroots organisations like mine could access funding, I attended a high-level climate finance meeting. However, the discussions were dense with technical jargon and dominated by voices detached from the realities of women in my community.
I walked away frustrated, but determined to see change. If women leading climate action cannot access the financial resources needed to scale up our impact, then gender-responsive climate finance remains an illusion.
Some progress has been made between COP25 and COP29, but it remains slow. For instance, the Green Climate Fund’s Gender Policy is an important step in a positive direction, but it still misses out on the needs of women at the frontlines of climate adaptation and mitigation efforts.
COP29: a step forward?
At COP29 in late 2024, which I attended as part of the LDC Group of negotiators, parties decided to extend the Enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender for 10 years. This decision reaffirms the programme’s important role in advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment in the UN climate change process, building on previous efforts to bridge the financial gap facing women engaged in climate action.
Other key takeaways from COP29 include:
- Commitments to enhanced direct access funding: the Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund pledged to simplify access to funding for grassroots women-led initiatives
- Capacity-building for gender-responsive finance: more training programmes were announced to equip women’s organisations with the financial literacy and technical skills necessary to navigate complex funding applications
- Stronger accountability measures: governments and financial institutions will now be required to report on how their funding mechanisms support gender-responsive climate action, and
- Integration of gender into loss and damage financing: the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage committed to ensure that the gender-differentiated impacts of climate change are considered in climate-related disaster responses.
While these commitments are a step in the right direction, implementation remains a key challenge. When applying for climate finance, women-led initiatives still face bureaucratic hurdles, technical barriers and a lack of direct funding mechanisms.
Key challenges and solutions
I have firsthand experience of navigating these challenges. As such, I know that despite the progress made through international agreements, many local organisations struggle to translate these policy wins into actionable funding opportunities. The system is not broken: it was simply never designed with grassroots women-led initiatives in mind. This needs to change.
For gender-responsive climate finance to be truly effective, four things are needed.
- Deliberate climate finance allocation to women-led initiatives: governments and financial institutions must intentionally dedicate a greater share of climate finance to women-driven solutions
- Simplified application processes: the bureaucratic red tape that limits access to funding must be streamlined, making it easier for grassroots organisations to apply for funding
- Prioritise financial literacy training for women-led initiatives: governments, financial institutions and development partners must prioritise training programmes that equip grassroots organisations with the skills necessary to successfully navigate the complex climate finance landscape and mechanisms, manage funding applications and ensure effective project implementation, and
- Strengthened partnerships: collaboration between governments, financial institutions and civil society is essential to enhance the effectiveness of gender-responsive climate finance. For instance, this could look like facilitating mentorship sessions between grassroots organisations and those organisations that have already acquired complex funding, so they can learn from each other or partner to access climate finance.
From rhetoric to action
The Enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender provides a crucial roadmap, but it must be backed by political will, funding and implementation mechanisms that leave no one behind.
Governments, financial institutions and development partners must move from rhetoric to action and ensure that women-led climate solutions receive the support they deserve. Until financial flows align with policy ambitions, gender-responsive climate action will remain an unmet promise for women and girls in countries like mine and across the world.
