Women are fighting climate change in the south Pacific, but need money

Many, like Rita Kaltong, a mother of four living in Epao village on Efate island, are involved in disaster response and resilience projects but in a volunteer capacity. When a tropical cyclone hits, Kaltong is one of three women in the village now trained and charged with ushering her community of around 180 people to the nearby evacuation shelter, a sturdy, one-story school building beside the main road.

“Often [women] are not paid yet the community needs this work,” said Margaret Alston, a professor at Monash University who is researching how disasters impact women differently. Following Cyclone Pam in 2015, the estimated cost of the women’s unpaid extra work in making repairs, finding food, and taking care of family members was $3.7 million.

It has been gauged that only 10% of global climate finance goes to local communities globally. Only 0.01% of global climate finance goes toward projects tackling both climate change and women’s rights, according to UNDP. Vanuatu itself receives little climate finance. Across 2018 and 2019, it received $54 million, while elsewhere in the region, the Solomon Islands received $240 million and Papua New Guinea received $198 million. Figures for resource allocation for joint gender and climate programs in the country are currently not available. 

“Normally, there’s a general project proposal that comes in to support local civil society, but no statements to highlight the importance of the allocation of subgrants to women, which is one of the reasons why we still have a lot of disparities in terms of women's leadership [versus that of men],” said Anne Pakoa, a renowned local women’s rights activist. 

Yet investing in local women-led climate initiatives is likely to yield gains not only in global goals on climate but also in gender equality. Research by the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction shows that having Pacific women in disaster leadership roles challenges mindsets around the traditional role of women.

In Vanuatu, traditional roles are still the norm. In the capital of Port Vila on a Friday night, of the 30 patrons at a collection of roadside bars and eateries, only two are women. This is normal, according to locals, who explain that social norms are slowly changing but women will still often be at home. As it stands, communities remain governed by male chiefs, traditional kastom practices prevent women from inheriting land, and 60% of women who have been in a relationship have experienced gender-based violence. Earlier this year, Amnesty International said the country was a leader on climate but lagging on gender.

Additionally, like elsewhere in the world, ni-Vanuatu women are disproportionately affected by the socioeconomic effects of climate disasters. As Cyclone Pam approached the volcanic islands and coastal atolls of Vanuatu in 2015, some men deterred women from seeking shelter in the evacuation centers while in the weeks afterward widows and people with disabilities were forgotten in the distribution of food, according to UN Women. When twin Cyclones Judy and Kevin hit in 2023, incidents of gender-based violence increased.

When work is done around mutual threats like climate change, it can have an impact on the barriers to gender inequalities as well, Simone Clarke, CEO of UN Women Australia, said.

The Women I TokTok Tugeta, or WITTT, network, created by ActionAid and Vanuatu’s Department of Women’s Affairs following Cyclone Pam, has engaged over 9,000 women across five islands in local climate action while also addressing discrimination and gender-based violence. The forum follows a train-the-trainer model, with local staff educating women, like Epao village’s Kaltong, from different areas on how to better prepare for and respond to cyclones, droughts, and floods.

WITTT also runs a watchdog to support those affected by gender-based violence, educates women on their rights, and has promoted the creation of fruit and vegetable gardens, like the one running parallel to Kaltong’s chicken pen, sectioned off into a part for family use, another for produce to sell, and another for produce to store in case of disaster. 

The selling and storing of grapefruit, coconuts, and bananas provide a means for women to protect livelihoods and can reduce the chance of domestic conflict, Kaltong said. She plans to resume selling eggs once her chickens begin to lay. The last 500 she owned were killed in the 2023 twin cyclones.

But just being part of a forum where women are able to openly speak, are seen as having a role outside of the home, and are able to take action that saves lives is transformative, said Tamata, speaking to Devex from ActionAid’s Port Vila headquarters.

A similar idea is behind Sista’s work in promoting women's leadership and participation in decision-making processes related to climate change and the government’s community disaster and climate change committees in which it is mandated that over a third of leaders be women. However, this quota is yet to be achieved. The Vanuatu Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction Policy 2016-2030 stipulates the need to include the perspectives of underrepresented groups such as women and people with disabilities.

On the island of Santo, this is happening to some degree as UN Women supports the training of women in post-disaster data collection on solar-charged tablets. The idea, Clarke said, is to fill a data gap on how these incidents are affecting people, including underrepresented groups, to better inform responses. The U.N. agency also upskills women so that they can design climate solutions before supporting them in presenting them to the government as examples of what works.

“[Women] are understanding of the culture and barriers, and then we work together to determine how we address those barriers and because we are external to the community we have different levers that we can pull to help create entry and give women the voice and agency they need to be heard at a very basic level,” Clarke explained.

In Tafea and Penama provinces, CARE also supports the creation of climate change committees that equally represent men and women and works with community chiefs to stress the importance of equal representation, said Lindah Peter, resilience and response portfolio manager at CARE. In instances where equal representation models have been rolled out, “women contribute a lot to the development of disaster planning and initiate ideas on how to mitigate a disaster risk,” Peter said.

The ability to scale some of these initiatives and for women to establish their own collectives is limited by a lack of financial backing. ActionAid would like to scale WITTT to the majority of inhabited islands but is restricted by financial constraints. For those organizations just starting, Bjornum shared that the initial hurdle is in being able to demonstrate to donors that the NGO can be trusted.

“There is a lot of funding available, but it’s a matter of capacity for smaller organisations and groups to access. Do they have policies in place? Do they have a finance system? Do they have a board and staff who can handle the human resources, admin, and finance, with a team to implement?” Bjornum said.

Additionally, “there's no specific allocation for women,” said Pakoa, who believes a percentage of international NGO funding should be set aside for women-led local initiatives like the three she’s been able to set up, which focus on professional development, women’s participation in policy, and human rights. 

Research by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change highlighted the struggles women’s groups in the Pacific islands can have in navigating proposal applications because of a lack of capacity. It called for the implementation of flexible funding mechanisms that are easily accessed.

The newly launched Women's Peace and Humanitarian Fund could help in this regard. Women civil society members from select countries, including Vanuatu, are now able to apply for flexible funding to support locally led work on climate action. And the Green Climate Fund, the first climate finance mechanism to mainstream gender perspectives, has allocated a $26.2 million grant to Vanuatu to help rural and coastal communities adapt to the climate crisis.

In a culture which, according to Tamata, is “male-dominated,” having such safeguards formally in place could allow the women-led groups to establish themselves and grow.

“Our work should be recognized and should be financially supported by governments, whether with our national government or with any donor governments or partners coming in,” Pakoa added. “If we don't start talking about it, then we will continue to have these financial struggles.”

Photos by ©EIF / José Carlos Alexandre, Shutterstock, and Rebecca L. Root.
Produced by Patricia Guerrero.

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