Improving climate resilience and rural people’s wellbeing by promoting gender transformative results

Challenging gender norms and addressing gender inequalities in agriculture and rural development requires innovative strategies. Given that climate change disproportionately impacts women and girls, a “gender transformative” approach is crucial for sustainable climate resilience.

The Gender Transformative Mechanism in the context of Climate Adaptation (GTM) supports and incentivizes IFAD’s partner governments to increase investment, capacities, and activities to achieve gender transformative results at scale in rural areas.

By 2030, the GTM aims to empower over 20 million rural people across 27 projects and 20 countries to achieve gender transformative results in agriculture, strengthen climate resilience, and improve rural people’s wellbeing.

GTM objectives:

• Strengthen government’s agency for gender transformative results while enhancing their ability to address the interaction of climate-induced vulnerability and gender.
• Leverage innovations and scale up successful interventions through IFAD’s investment portfolio, climate funds, and evidence-based policy engagement.
• Generate knowledge on what works and how to influence the global development policy dialogue on gender equality and women’s empowerment in the context of climate change.
• Attract funding and expertise from government, climate finance, and donors as they see the benefits of investing in gender transformation and climate resilience.

The GTM currently is working with two country investments:

• In Burkina Faso, the Agricultural Value Chains Support Project in the Sud-Ouest, Hauts-Bassins, Cascades, and Boucle du Mouhoun Regions (PAFA-4R) improves farmers’ food security and incomes. The GTM funds the scale-up of gender transformative approaches and finances interventions on behavioural change, women in leadership positions, and women’s participation in higher-return value chains.
• In India, the Maharashtra Rural Women’s Enterprise Development Project (Nav Tejaswini) enhances gender equality and women’s empowerment by scaling up successful gender transformative approaches. The GTM will develop of a Centre of Excellence to share expertise and good practices for gender transformative results within Maharashtra, India and internationally.