Lindiwe Sibanda's presentation for Forest Day 5 on 4th December 2011,

1. Gender, food
security, forests and climate
change

2. Women are not foresters or
farmers – they are both, and more
Average
time in a Sleep
24 hour
day –
Leisure – social networking
southern
Zimbabwe Domestic work
Woodlands
Dryland crops
Vegetable garden

3. Women manage
livestock, crops and wild
resources

4. Women as integrators
Livelihood strategies involve
multiple activities - choosing
what to grow, raise, gather, or
sell is never a decision made in
isolation of other options

5. As an aside
 Therefore, Forestry cannot be decoupled from
Agriculture
 REDD+ recognises “agriculture as a driver of
deforestation” but has not thought through how to
integrate forestry and agriculture to enhance
livelihoods

6. Women‟s education and status
are key to child nutrition
 The first 1000 days of a child‟s life are the most
important in terms of their life-long
health, well-being and performance
 Countries‟ successes in improving child
nutrition are more strongly correlated with
women‟s education and status (>50%) than
with making food more available (36%)

7. Gender roles are linked to climate
adaptation and mitigation
Globally, men and women tend to perform different
jobs/tasks
Climate change will alter what they can do, exposing
men and women to different risks and opportunities
Men and women have different access to
resources, including physical (e.g markets), social
(e.g. networks), financial (e.g. credit), natural (e.g.
land, water)
In times of change, they will have different options
and „safety nets‟ for coping with change

8. Differing sets of knowledge and skills
Men may know which seeds to plant when the
onset of rains is delayed; women may be able to
judge which tree species fare better in droughts

9. Yet, women often not as connected to the
formal networks and information providers
80
% of households with access to cell phones
70
60
50
40 Male-headed
30 Female-headed
20
10
0
Kenya Tanzania Uganda Ethiopia

10. Recent findings regarding weather
advisories
• Daily weather forecasts are reaching both men
and women, through radio for men and women
in some places; through church and groups for
women in most – but with limited use
• Seasonal weather
forecasts are rare, and
the current format is
problematic for
smallholders to
understand and use
Source: CCAFS-FAO Gender-CC study in Bangladesh, Uganda and Ghana

11. Challenges for climate-smart
livelihoods
• Learning visits to „climate analogue‟ sites is desirable
but problematic for women for various reasons
• „Climate smart practices are being taken up, but only
the easiest ones, and largely not by women
Source: CCAFS-FAO Gender-CC study in
Bangladesh, Uganda and Ghana

12. Yet women are marginalized
from ownership and decisions
 In sub-Saharan Africa women produce 80% of
the food but own less than 10% of land
 Participation in decision making and
politics, and access to decision makers is not
always equal for men and women

13. Women are poorly represented in
agricultural, forestry, meteorological and policy
professions (e.g. two recent CC meetings)
Meeting 1 overall Meeting 2 overall
attendance (n=250) attendance (n=188)
Women Women
Men
Men
Meeting 1 plenary Meeting 2 plenary
presenters (n=13) presenters (n=7)
Women Women
Men Men

14. What this means in the
context of climate change
Greater vulnerability of women:
• More extreme weather events: women and
children are 14 times more likely to die than
men during disasters
• Water scarcity will increase women‟s labour
Gender-specific abilities to act:
• Women determine family nutritional security
• Agricultural productivity increases radically
when women have equal access to inputs

15. Women as the key to family food
security and child nutrition
There is lots of evidence that interventions aimed at
women lead to enhanced child nutrition and food
security at the household level

16. Actions to empower women in
dealing with climate change
 Understand women‟s priorities when selecting
crop varieties, farming practices and natural
resource mgmt for adaptation interventions
 Strengthen women‟s resource tenure (also to
improve performance of REDD+ and access to
carbon markets)
 Link early warning systems to nutrition
programmes
 Invest in capacity of women professionals in
agriculture, forestry & climate change

17. Incorporating gender into local and
community-level actions
Use participatory approaches to involve all members
of the community in planning and improve
understanding of local gender roles and differing
vulnerabilities
Draw on local knowledge, which is linked to men‟s
and women‟s gender-differentiated roles; enhance
local capacity to adapt
Tailor science-based climate prediction information
to different groups‟ needs to make it more useful and
used by smallholders (co-creation of new knowledge)

18. Climate Change and Key Gender
Research Questions
1. How do the different types of climate change
impacts, such as more frequent droughts and
flooding, differently affect men and women?
2. In what ways do men and women adapt to
climate variability and extreme events?
3. How do men‟s and women‟s roles complement
each other when coping with changing climate
conditions?
4. How may gender roles change when climate
conditions change?