Shaping resilient futures for rural women in East and Southern Africa with Beijing+30

Thirty years after the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action, the commitment to advancing women’s rights in environmental and sustainable development remains both urgent and unfinished. The Women and the Environment critical area of concern envisioned a world where women would participate equally in environmental decision-making, benefit from sustainable resource use, and be protected from environmental degradation. Across the East and Southern Africa region, women continue to be the backbone of rural livelihoods and natural resource management. Yet, as East and Southern Africa confront accelerating climate change, land degradation, and biodiversity loss, progress has been uneven and often superficial.

The Gendered Face of Drought, Land degradation and Desertification

In Africa, up to 65 percent of productive land is degraded while desertification affects 45 percent which undermines food production, water security, and ecosystem services. This disproportionately impacts women as they have weaker land tenure, own only 13 percent of land in Sub Saharan Africa, compared to 36 percent of men and have more limited access to inputs, credit, mechanization, irrigation and extension services, all factors that reduce their ability to invest in restoration or to adopt sustainable land-management practices. Evidence across arid contexts links increased livelihood stress from degraded lands to higher school drop-out rates for girls and, in some communities, higher child marriage as a negative coping mechanism (families facing income loss). As droughts increase and forest resources decline women and girls will continue to walk longer distances for water and fuelwood, limiting their ability to participate in education or income-generating activities. These issues are strongly interlinked with gendered social norms that influence land use, access, and ownership. 

Climate Induced Disasters Amplifying Women’s Unpaid Care Work Responsibilities

The increased frequency and severity of cyclones and floods in East and Southern Africa region such as in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe have produced one of the worst hunger crises in decades with at least 27 million people affected in these three countries. In times of crises the time women spend on household care responsibilities tends to increase, food scarcity increases malnutrition among women and girls (decreased frequency and quantity of meals) and higher incidences of negative coping (girls withdrawing from school and earlier marriage of girls). A UN Women study in these countries notes that women are reported taking on more paid labor and vending to purchase food items, adding to the labor burden they already have as the primary care givers and home makers from the disaster impact. These impacts show just how disasters directly affect women and the need for intentional gender integration in disaster risk reduction to minimize disaster impacts on women and other vulnerable groups to protect human capital asset, as the frequency and severity of climate-induced disasters increase. 

Climate Driven Food Insecurity, Loss of Livelihood, and Entrenched Poverty

With more than 25 percent of Africa’s Gross Domestic Product derived from agriculture, intense droughts, floods and cyclones have disrupted agricultural production and reduced food availability and subsequently food prices have risen sharply in East and Southern Africa countries. This necessitates short-term policy measures such as bans on exports of food crops, suspension of import tariffs on food imports to cushion against high food prices, cash transfer, and food subsidy programs and targeted distribution of agricultural inputs. The UN Women’s 2025 Gender Snapshot analysis estimates that in a worst-case scenario, climate change risks could push over 158 million more women and girls into extreme poverty by 2050, with nearly half of these in sub-Saharan Africa.

Women’s productivity and income from agriculture are substantially lower than men’s across East and Southern Africa countries as highlighted by UN Women and UNDP-UNEP-Poverty Environment Action studies on the cost of the gender gap in agricultural productivity. This series of studies found that some countries in the region are losing over USD 100 million in GDP per year due to gender inequality in the agricultural sector. Notably, the findings show that women’s limited use of climate resilient pesticides, fertilizers, agricultural machinery, lower tendency to plant high-value cash crops due to women’s responsibilities to provide food for their households are among other issues limiting women’s agricultural productivity. 

Biodiversity Loss -The Silent Threat

Accelerating biodiversity loss driven by deforestation, pollution, land-use change, overexploitation of resources, and climate change is threatening food security, incomes, and overall resilience. The UN Women Gender and Biodiversity Data Brief provides new evidence showing how these impacts are profoundly gendered and regionally acute across Africa. With women making up over 50 percent of the labor force in natural resource sectors such as agriculture, forestry and fisheries in Sub Saharan Africa, overfishing, habitat and ecosystems degradation, and resource depletion in coastal and inland waters is eroding women’s income opportunities and pushing women and girls further into poverty. Biodiversity loss is also impacting women’s health resilience as women’s access to medicinal plants, nutrient rich foods, and clean water sources diminishes.

The Green Transition: Promise and Peril

The regions’ transition to green and blue economies could create new avenues for women’s empowerment, but only if deliberate gender-responsive measures are adopted. Evidence from UN Women’s Green Jobs in Africa study shows that throughout the energy sector in sub–Saharan Africa, men hold majority of the jobs. Without targeted skills training, access to finance, and investment in women-led green enterprises, the shift to low-carbon economies could replicate existing inequalities instead of correcting them. Perceptions of gender roles, cultural and social norms and prevailing hiring practices (in turn influenced by social norms) as the main barriers for the entry and retention of women in the renewable energy sector.

A Seat At The Table, Not Just A Token

Women remain largely underrepresented in climate governance and environmental decision-making structures from local to global levels. Despite efforts to integrate gender into national climate policies, women make up less than 25 percent of members in natural resource and water management committees in several East and Southern African countries. A survey on United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 29th Conference of Parties (COP 29)’s African representation reveals that only 32 percent of African delegates were women. This underrepresentation undermines the inclusivity and effectiveness of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, especially since women possess localized ecological knowledge critical for resilience-building.

Beijing+30: A Call for Transformative Action

Beijing+30 is thus a pivotal moment for East and Southern Africa. It calls for a deeper, data-driven transformation that places women at the center of environmental governance and climate action. 

Achieving this requires ensuring that climate finance reaches women farmers and entrepreneurs, dismantling structural inequalities, strengthening women’s access, control and use of land and productive resources to build their climate adaptive capacities, and guaranteeing their participation in climate and environmental decision-making processes; from local forest committees to national, regional and global climate processes such as the Conference of Parties. It also means systematically integrating gender from the onset in National Drought Plans, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), Land and Desertification Policies, and other mitigation measures, strategies and coping mechanisms. The UNFCCC Gender Action presents an opportunity to advance the implementation of Beijing +30 commitments.

Ultimately, the promise of Beijing+30 is not just about protecting women from environmental harm, it is about recognizing them as agents of environmental justice and sustainability. The data are clear: empowering women with equal rights to land, climate resilient productive resources and finance, investing in gender responsive green transitions, valuing women’s ecological knowledge through integrating this into climate science and policy design, reducing women’s unpaid care work and health risks through sustainable energy solutions is not only a matter of equity but a prerequisite for ecological resilience, inclusive development and the realization of the Women and Environment Agenda. 

As countries look beyond on Beijing+30, gender-responsive environmental action must be measurable, transparent and accountable – tracking funding, participation, and most importantly outcomes. This must include gender-disaggregated tracking of climate finance flows, from commitment to disbursement, to ensure women are not left behind in access to resources. Only by aligning financing with gender commitments can Beijing+30 deliver transformative, scalable change. The next phase of implementation must therefore move beyond policy rhetoric to measurable action grounded in evidence, driven by women, and accountable to the planet.