Targeting support to women

Supported negotiators are encouraged to document their experiences by writing blogs. In Eva Peace Mukayiranga’s, she explains how she will take forward skills learnt at the UN climate negotiations. 

Other women delegates have highlighted how our support helps them improve their preparation for and participation in the negotiations: 

Gender-balanced workshops to increase women’s participation

During our regional training workshops in 2016, we noticed we weren’t seeing equal numbers of male and female participants. Like the UN climate negotiations themselves, most of the delegates the governments elected to send were men.

In response, we revamped our approach. In the invitation letters, we made clear the importance of nominating a gender-balanced group of participants. At the end of each workshop, we distributed certificates stating the skills the participants had gained and invited them back to attend the following year.

With these efforts, we attracted more female participants to our trainings workshops. A review of our work between 2016 and 2018 showed promising results: we trained the same number of women and men.

After five years of workshops, 48% of our participants were female. When we compared this against the ratios in the negotiations process as a whole, using the UNFCCC  ‘report on gender composition’ (PDF) that in 2019 stated that 37% of delegates were women, we saw that our trainings were surpassing the gender balance of the negotiations process overall, and helping increase the chances that women will be part of their countries’ delegations at the international climate negotiations. 

Tracking participation in negotiations

Equipping delegates with the skills they need to participate in the UN climate negotiations is just half the story. We also want to see how many of our participants, having been trained, are put forward to represent their country at the international negotiations. Were the rates different for men and women? Do they remain so?

In 2019, Brianna Craft and Samantha McCraine looked at how well women are represented in spaces where international decisions on climate change are made, and in 2020, the duo detailed further efforts to bring more women to the UN climate change negotiations.

We scoured UNFCCC attendance lists and found that around half of those we had trained, and equal numbers of women and men, went on to join their country delegations.

The key to meaningful engagement is continuity, so we also tracked who participated in multiple sessions of the climate negotiations.

Again, of the men and women we trained, the number chosen to continually participate was relatively equal: 19 of the women we trained (24%) attended two or more negotiating sessions, compared to the 31 men we trained (30%) who attended more than twice. Notably, the three participants who attended all seven UNFCCC negotiations from 2016-18 were men.

As regional training workshops recommenced in 2023, we will continue to track how many delegates reach the negotiations, noting how these numbers compare for women and men. 

Further reading: 

• Winifred Masiko demanded an increase in finance to enable women to participate in climate planning
• The chair of the LDC Group discussed what is needed to enable greater representation of women from the least developed countries in international climate decision-making spaces
• Junior negotiator Prakriti Koirala wrote about the nitty gritty of how the loss and damage fund will work
•  Eva Peace Mukayiranga described challenges and highlights from the negotiating rooms in Glasgow
• Xaysomphone Souvannavong and Fatima Athoumani wrote blogs that charted the sharp learning curve of an LDC negotiator and how they learned to make their voice count at the UN climate negotiations.
• Danise Love Dennis, from Liberia, who wrote a diary about her year-long learning journey