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 toward the following outcomes:
- Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and community women 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, livelihoods, and food security.
- They create and promote mechanisms to prevent and reduce criminalization and violence against women.
Our strategies include:
- Strengthening coordination, peer-learning and joint initiatives in tenure advocacy 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 rights to land and resources and their contributions to livelihoods, 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 at the UNFCCC CoP26 in Glasgow.
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 platforms as well as in Asia, Latin America and Africa. The group helps organize periodic cross-regional gender workshops to strengthen coordination and connection among women’s networks.
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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.
These workshops 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.
The themes covered in recent workshops include:
- 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.
See materials from previous workshops here. For questions, reach out to us at genderjustice@rightsandresources.org.
Additional Resources
- Global Call to Action: Calling upon donors and policymakers to support gender-inclusive climate finance
- Power and Potential: A Comparative Analysis of National Laws and Regulations Concerning 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)