Gender Justice

Our Work in Gender Justice

Gender justice is essential to effective climate and conservation action. That’s why we center the priorities, rights, and realities of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women. Our cross-cutting approach is grounded in the understanding that secure tenure, economic empowerment, and political participation are inseparable and mutually reinforcing. We work to advance all three across regions and contexts.

Our experience and data show that when Indigenous, Afro-descendant, pastoralist, and local community women are recognized as equal stakeholders and have secure collective tenure rights, direct finance, and an equal voice in governance, they are better positioned to lead sustainable livelihoods and lead as land and environmental defenders. The result is stronger territorial governance, resilient local economies, and improved climate and conservation action. ​

Our Goals

• Promote and consolidate women’s land tenure rights: We support women’s land tenure rights through building evidence advocacy, and empowering women to lead decisions regarding forests and natural resources.
• Increase women’s meaningful participation: We tackle systemic barriers that prevent women from meaningful participation across national, regional, and global platforms.
• Transforming global funding systems for women: We support global finance reform efforts to enable women’s direct access to finance, transforming how climate and conservation funding reaches women’s organizations.

Our Approach

• Connect and convene: To build a global movement, we focus on amplifying and strengthening Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women’s collective wisdom and skills through strategic convenings, peer-learning exchanges and knowledge sharing platforms and networks.
• Promote bottom-up research and evidence-based analyses: We develop advocacy tools and promote women’s engagement in research and analysis to strengthen and amplify women’s calls for their tenure rights. We highlight women’s diverse voices and rights-based agendas for justice and recommendations to drive systemic change from the ground up.
• Advocate and engage: Through our grassroots efforts and bottom-up knowledge production, we boost collaboration for stronger advocacy and policy engagement.

Stronger Together: Our Role in Global Networks

We believe that greater impact can only be achieved through strong collective action at different scales and with a combination of a diversity of voices, skills, knowledge and capacities. That’s why we support global initiatives, alliances, and solidarity networks with common gender justice and transformative goals.

Women in Global South Alliance:
WiGSA is a united cross-continental solidarity network of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women that work to catalyze changes to existing structural inequalities, historical injustices, and global funding regarding women’s tenure and human rights. RRI strengthens WiGSA’s governance, visibility, and capacity to represent Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women in global decision-making spaces.

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