Women-led Indigenous, Afro-descendant and local community grassroots organizations struggle to access global funding to fight climate change impacts due to structural barriers and stereotypes, a recent report shows.
Total government aid, or official development assistance (ODA), for NGOs and women’s rights organizations declined from $891 million between 2019-2020 to $631 million between 2021-2022, according to the report by global coalitions Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and Women in Global South Alliance (WiGSA). That means these organizations continued to get less than 1% of overall government spending, with little improvement compared to funding from 2011 to 2020.
“Women from the grassroots are severely underfunded,” Omaira Bolaños, director of RRI’s gender justice program, told Mongabay via email.
“[M]ost women-led groups do not exceed $500,000 in funding,” Bolaños said, adding that “access to financial resources is highly limited, especially for women-only organizations compared to mixed organizations, which often have male leadership.”
The report identified several barriers and stereotypes that stand in the way of women-led grassroots organizations accessing global funds, including donors’ “lack of knowledge” of the on-the-ground realities that women face. For example, donors tend to request figures such as number of hectares conserved to measure conservation or climate change progress. “Many women do not have formal land rights or access to land ownership data, making it difficult for them to meet such criteria,” Bolaños said.
Calls for funding proposals are also often in English or French, Bolaños said, making it difficult for grassroots organizations that operate in various local languages to apply. Women also face higher scrutiny due to the “perception that women lack organizational and administrative capacity,” she added.
Those who do manage to get funding often have it channeled through international or national NGOs. This means “a substantial portion of the funding typically goes to the intermediary organizations for administrative costs,” Bolaños said.
She added that donors should instead find ways to directly fund grassroots women’s organizations to help build their capacity and support their long-term growth.
The report recommends that donors make funding easier to access in terms of language and deadlines, and specifically focus on women and Indigenous groups on the ground, “not just those that already have the capacity to meet and respond to complex requirements.”
At the same time, Bolaños said working on the report has allowed WiGSA members from Africa, Asia and Latin America to understand the barriers they face, and develop new strategies to access global funding.
RRI and WiGSA, which used data analysis, literature review and surveys to produce their report, are planning to expand on it by collaborating with more organizations.
Bolaños said such efforts aim “to bridge the gap between donors and women-led organizations by offering practical recommendations and creating opportunities for more equitable funding that directly reaches women on the frontlines of climate action and biodiversity conservation.”
Banner image of Turkana women from Kenya by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
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