Gender Justice - Rights + Resources - Supporting Forest Tenure, Policy, and Market Reforms

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 in 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 include:

Strengthening coordination and peer-learning in tenure advocacy initiatives among Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and community women’s networks in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Positioning women as leading voices on national level as well as international platforms.
Creating 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.
Issuing 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.
Facilitating the Women in Global South Alliance for Tenure and Climate, 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 engagement on global as well as regional platforms. The group also organizes periodic cross-regional gender workshops to strengthen coordination and connection among RRI’s women’s networks across the world.

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Cross-Regional Workshops

RRI’s cross-regional gender justice workshops have brought together over 75 organizations in Africa, Asia and Latin America to strengthen coordination, peer to peer learning, connection and solidarity among Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and community women’s networks while positioning women as agents of transformation.

Our workshops help these networks identify common priorities and strategies among their advocacy agendas to influence policy reforms and implementation at the national levels and international spaces like the UN climate and biodiversity platforms, among others. They have also helped convene a women’s focus group to review and provide insights on a forthcoming update to RRI’s seminal analysis on gender and depth of land and resource rights, Power and Potential.

See materials from RRI’s previous gender workshops.

*Indigenous, community and Afro-descendant women leaders celebrate the launch of their global call to action for gender-inclusive finance at UNFCC CoP27 in Egypt, held December 2022.*

Our recent workshops have covered the following themes:

Access to flexible funding for women’s organizations
Women’s contributions to community livelihoods, food sovereignty and security, local economies, and territorial governance
Women’s roles in climate change adaptation, environmental restoration, resilience, and conservation
Intergenerational leadership formation and representation
Recognition of women’s roles as forest/land defenders and creation of mechanisms for the protection of women at the frontline.

Helpful Reading

Global Call to Action: Urging donors and policymakers to support gender-inclusive climate finance
Power and Potential: RRI’s Analysis Comparing National Laws and Regulations on Women’s Rights to Community Forests
Legislative Best Practices for Securing Women’s Land Rights (Brief)
Ten Factors Contributing to Successful Initiatives on Indigenous and Rural Women’s Rights (Brief)
How local and ethnic women are transforming their economies in Latin America (Blog)
Gender-differentiated impacts of Large-scale Land Acquisitions in Liberia (Study)
Using International Law to Advance Women’s Tenure Rights in REDD+ (Policy Brief)

Email us with your questions!