Gender Justice

Our Gender Justice program leverages Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women’s capacity to transform social, economic, and environmental agendas, ultimately supporting inclusive and equitable development, sustainable natural resource governance, and effective climate action.

We work to achieve the following outcomes for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and community women in Asia, Latin America and Africa:

• They participate actively in the creation and implementation of policies that affect their land and resource rights in laws and customary systems.
• They exercise their leadership, participation, and decision-making rights in national and global platforms on land, forest, and resource management, climate change, and biodiversity.
• They have the knowledge, tools, and training to promote their economic models and food security. ​
• They create and promote mechanisms to prevent and reduce criminalization and violence against women.​

Our Strategies

• Strengthen coordination and peer-learning in tenure advocacy initiatives among Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and community women’s networks in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
• Position women as leading voices at the national level and on international platforms.
• Create conditions at the national level to advance gender-inclusive policies that recognize women’s land and resource rights and their contributions to local economies, food security, conservation, and climate efforts.
• Issue a global Call to Action for gender-inclusive climate finance to ensure and facilitate women’s access to the US$1.7 billion Pledge made by governments and donors at COP26 in 2021.
• Facilitate the Women in Global South Alliance, a new network of women’s organizations, groups, and associations in the Global South working to scale up direct climate finance for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women and girls.

To fully integrate gender justice into its strategies, RRI’s coordinating body has created gender justice focal points in each of its programs. The group ensures that gender is a cross-cutting theme across RRI’s broad programmatic engagements at the regional and international levels. The group also organizes periodic cross-regional gender workshops to strengthen coordination and connection among RRI’s women’s networks across the world.

The Women in Global South Alliance (WiGSA)

At CoP27 in Sharm-El-Sheikh, Egypt, women’s organizations from Asia, Africa, and Latin America launched a new advocacy network called the Women in Global South Alliance for tenure and climate (WiGSA). It is an alliance of women’s organizations, groups, and associations in the Global South working to scale up direct climate finance for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women and girls.

RRI’s Gender Justice program strategy on cross-regional peer learning mobilized more than 75 Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community grassroots women’s organizations and networks from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The cross-regional exchanges became unique spaces for identifying ongoing local efforts to advance systemic changes regarding women’s tenure rights. This strategy had two significant results: i) the creation of a new advocacy tool called Our Call to Action; and ii) the formation of a Global South Alliance between Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women.

WiGSA was formed to enhance women’s strategic advocacy at national and international levels focusing on influencing government, donors, and the international community to increase and secure direct climate finance for Indigenous, Afro-decendant, and local community women’s rights agendas.

Learn more about WiGSA and its strategies and priorities on The Land Writes Blog, including summaries of its annual meetings in 2023 and 2024.

WiGSA and the CBD COP16

At the Biodiversity COP16 in October 2024, RRI and WiGSA hosted a side event titled, “Women’s Voices on Rights-based Conservation: The Role of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Pastoralist Women in Protecting the World’s Biodiversity.” The event aimed to address the crucial role that Indigenous, Afro-descendant, local, and pastoralist women play in conserving natural resources and leading climate change action. We presented the strategies that WiGSA is developing to i) respond to the dual biodiversity and climate crises; ii) transform the structural gender-based discrimination and exclusion that renders women’s leadership invisible; and iii) shine a light on the inequalities women experience that limits their right to participate in decision-making spaces.

RRI and WiGSA also launched a new brief on Is global funding reaching Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Local community Women? This brief aims to identify how climate change and conservation funding is reaching Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women on the ground and whether this funding responds to their rights-based agendas. The event was a huge success, with media articles appearing in The Guardian, Mongabay, Delfino, Context News, El Tiempo, Tehelka, and El Espectador alongside posts on social media from donors and allies.