As the climate crisis accelerates in Rwanda, its repercussions disproportionately affect women, girls, and other marginalised communities. Addressing the inequalities requires targeted resources and policies. Ensuring that governments and other key actors prioritise the inclusion of women and other marginalised communities in decision-making processes and resource allocation is essential for comprehensive and sustainable climate action.

Our research and discussions with women’s rights organisations in Rwanda have highlighted critical gaps in current funding mechanisms. These gaps underscore the need for more genuinely gender-transformative climate finance, ensuring that financial resources not only address climate challenges but also transform gender dynamics and empower women and other marginalised communities as key agents of change.

Women’s rights organisations are essential actors often working at the forefront of climate action. It is therefore vital that they can participate in climate financing decisions. They have the skills and experience to:

• Provide input in the design and implementation of projects to ensure they consider the specific needs of women and other marginalised groups who are disproportionately affected by climate change.
• Monitor and evaluate the impact of climate-relevant projects with a gender and intersectional lens to ensure that the available finance is driving gender-transformative climate action at the local level.
• Raise the awareness of local communities on climate change and gender inequality issues.
• Empower women and other marginalised communities through capacity-building and meaningful participation in climate action, including decision-making processes.
• Be the link between local communities and the national level to establish a bottom-up approach and strategic alignment between local and national priorities, and ensure that the voices and experiences of women on the frontline of the climate crisis are heard and the right policies can be enacted.
• Advocate for gender-transformative climate policies and budget allocation.

Evidence shows that funding women's rights organisations and movements helps deliver gender equality, and that women's rights' organisations play a crucial role in climate action. ^{[1] [2] [3]} Why, then, do they still struggle to access climate finance?

The evidence presented in this paper suggests that women’s rights organisations in Rwanda, as in many climate-vulnerable contexts, face significant barriers to accessing climate finance. These challenges include limited awareness of and access to information and capacity and time constraints. Moreover, there is not enough climate finance to meet the scale of the need. It is also difficult to disaggregate what is being marked as climate finance to identify what is specifically focused on delivering on the needs of women and girls. Existing mechanisms for tracking and allocating gender-relevant climate finance are inconsistent and differ across donors, making it difficult to calculate a holistic picture of gender-relevant climate finance.

In this analysis, we define gender-relevant climate finance (GRCF) as climate-relevant official development assistance (ODA) that integrates gender equality as a significant or principal objective. (See forthcoming appendix for full methodology.)

This policy brief aims to shed light on these issues and propose actionable recommendations for achieving gender-transformative climate finance. By targeting financial flows to the real needs on the ground, we can foster resilient communities and ensure that women and other marginalised groups are not only protected but also empowered in climate action.

Rwanda is considered highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. It has a high dependence on rain-fed agriculture and needs improvements in its road networks, health sector and water resource management. ^[5] In 2023, Rwanda’s debt as a percentage of GDP stood at 73.5%. Indebtedness already impacts the country’s ability to finance critical infrastructure. The impacts of climate change could worsen Rwanda’s debt distress risks if future climate change adaptation or mitigation interventions rely heavily on loans instead of grants (thereby increasing costs and leading to further debt). ^{[6] [7]} Climate and environmental crises in Rwanda have disproportionately affected women and girls, exacerbating existing gender inequalities. This is evident in various socioeconomic impacts as outlined in a previous report by the Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation which forms the basis of this section. ^[8] Further research is needed for a more comprehensive evidence base.

Agriculture and livelihoods: Women in Rwanda constitute 86% of the agricultural workforce, and are predominantly smallholder farmers. Climate change has significantly disrupted agricultural productivity due to unpredictable weather patterns, flooding, erosion, and drought. As agriculture becomes untenable and other livelihood opportunities are limited, women face immense pressure to sustain their families, especially in cases where men migrate to urban areas for employment.

Unpaid domestic work: Climate change has intensified the burden of unpaid domestic labour on women in Rwanda, who perform at least two-and-a-half times more unpaid household and care work than men. Traditional gender roles assign women the responsibility of cooking, cleaning, fetching water and firewood, and caring for children and other dependent relatives. Climate impacts mean that women have to walk further to collect firewood or water, meaning these tasks take longer and can be more hazardous to carry out. This results in more time spent on unpaid work and limits their time for paid employment or education.

Gender-based violence (GBV): Environmental crises have been linked to a rise in GBV in Rwanda. The strain on natural resources and economic instability leads to increased household and community conflicts, which in turn increase incidences of intimate sexual, emotional, and economic violence against women and girls. During periods of environmental stress, girls are often forced to drop out of school or enter into early marriages.

Sexual and reproductive health (SRH): Access to SRH services is essential for women, girls and households attempting to remain resilient to crisis and is acknowledged as a basic human right. However, it is often one of the first components of healthcare to be deprioritised during an emergency, leaving women and girls extremely vulnerable.

Furthermore, there is significant evidence that incidences of GBV increase during environmental and climate crises which, coupled with poor access to SRH services, is devastating for the physical and mental health of survivors. Women can be at increased risk of sexually transmitted infections, contracted as a result of having to rely on transactional sex for survival during environmental crises, or from men who return after migrating for employment opportunities. Limited access to contraception and awareness about reproductive health services results in early and unwanted pregnancies, exacerbated by an increased risk of GBV.

The stresses caused by environmental and climate crises can lead to family conflicts. Women might use family planning to limit family size, in response to climate change impacting their ability to support larger families. GBV has been reported when men find out about women using family planning in this way.

Economic constraints, such as an inability to afford health insurance due to environmental disasters, also limit access to health services, including family planning and menstrual hygiene products.

Disability: Persons with disabilities, especially women, are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. This includes access to food, water, sanitation, housing and forced displacement which carries an increased risk of GBV. Limited knowledge of climate change initiatives, together with a lack of accessible and user-friendly environmental and climate change education materials for people with disabilities, further exacerbates their vulnerability.

Infrastructure and safety: Poorly planned urban infrastructure disproportionately affects women, increasing their exposure to health and safety risks in disaster-prone areas. Examples include women needing to walk long distances to access energy sources, and lack of street lighting.

Limited access to information: Women are sometimes unaware of the environmental impact of their farming practices, believing that only large-scale agriculture emits significant greenhouse gases. However, small-scale farmers may use chemical fertilisers, rely on pesticides, and follow traditional farming methods that lack sustainability. For example, many women are unaware of regulations prohibiting tree-cutting without approval. Women cut trees down to use as an energy source, but doing so contributes to deforestation and soil erosion and impacts how sustainable their farm is.

Underrepresentation in environmental and climate change decision-making: Women are often overlooked in decision-making processes, leaving their needs unnoticed and excluding them from district and local planning related to environmental and climate change issues. For example, responses to flooding and prolonged drought often lack a gender perspective when women and other marginalised groups are not consulted in analyses of climate crisis impacts.

Representatives of women’s rights organisations echoed the impacts of climate and environmental crises mentioned above during a focus group discussion. The conversation highlighted the need for inclusive climate action, as underrepresentation in decision-making extends to women’s rights organisations, which face significant barriers in accessing climate finance, thus impeding their ability to contribute effectively to climate action.

This section was informed by women founders and executive directors of several Rwandan women’s rights organisations. While a number of these organisations do not work directly on environmental and climate change, they all identified this as impacting the women and communities they work with. These organisations support women, girls and other historically marginalised people such as children, persons with disabilities and migrants. They do so through a wide range of interventions, including economic empowerment, education, sexual and reproductive health and rights, preventing sexual and gender-based violence, environmental protection and climate change resilience. While women’s rights organisations are essential actors in climate action that is truly gender transformative, multiple barriers hinder their access to funding:

Barrier #1: Being aware of climate finance opportunities

Women’s rights organisations whose focus is not the environment or climate change have limited awareness of funding available to respond to environmental and climate issues. Women’s rights organisations cannot apply for proposals and funding if they do not know when the calls for proposals come out or where they come from.

Barrier #2: Having the capacity to apply

The complexity of climate finance mechanisms and application processes can pose a significant barrier. Applying for climate finance is not straightforward for organisations without prior experience. They may lack the necessary resources, technical expertise or staffing and infrastructure. Time and capacity are needed to put together a strong application that showcases an organisation’s value-add, and experience and technical knowledge are needed to establish clear and convincing methodologies. Grants can often take a long time to be agreed − up to seven years – and smaller organisations may not have the capacity to engage with such a long timeframe.

Barrier #3: Meeting the criteria

The criteria for accessing funding sometimes exclude women’s organisations that do not focus on the environment or climate change. Moreover, unsuccessful applicants do not usually benefit from feedback, making it difficult for organisations to know how to improve for future applications.

Barrier #4: Accessing sustainable funding

The lack of access to stable funding hinders women’s rights organisations’ ability to function effectively and achieve lasting impact. One-off funding opportunities restrict programmes and projects to short-term outcomes and disrupt efforts to provide services and advocate effectively for systemic change.

Barrier #5: Meaningful participation

Women are underrepresented in decision-making and negotiations about climate finance mechanisms and priorities. This is an underlying barrier exacerbating the other obstacles.

While women’s rights organisations face significant barriers in accessing climate finance, understanding the broader landscape of gender-relevant climate funding is crucial to addressing these challenges. By examining the flow of climate finance to Rwanda, we can better assess how current funding mechanisms align with the needs of women and other marginalised communities.

This section looks at the specifics of how gender-relevant climate finance is being allocated in Rwanda. It provides a critical lens through which to evaluate the effectiveness of these financial flows in fostering gender equality and resilience to climate change. A comprehensive assessment of whether a programme is gender-responsive or gender-transformative requires delving into impact evaluation and is beyond the scope of this briefing. Therefore, the term ‘gender-relevant’ will be used by default.

Gender-relevant climate finance

Currently, gender or climate finance is measured by "marking" the finance with either the Development Assistance Committee's (DAC) gender marker, its climate marker (Rio markers), or both. However, these markers cannot be relied on to accurately assess whether funding is directed towards gender-transformative climate projects. This is because, despite improvements in the general uptake of gender and climate markers, several donors still lag in applying these markers to some or all their flows. For example, multilateral development banks (MDBs), including the World Bank, which is the largest climate finance funder, do not use the same markers as the DAC. This is because MDBs have their own methodology for calculating and tracking their climate finance. ^[9] The World Bank, for example, only marks the sectors singularly, making it difficult to quantify where they overlap across gender and climate. Breaking down these silos is essential to ensuring integrated programming that delivers a truly holistic approach to meet the needs of women and girls.

Additionally, some donors adopt a more liberal approach in applying the markers, often categorising projects as 'significant' rather than 'principal'. This categorisation indicates that the projects could only be tangentially related to gender equality or climate issues, diminishing the value of analyses that aggregate data without deeper scrutiny of project details. Gender measurement is often a projection of intent rather than a rigorous tracking of accountability and results.

While public multilateral climate funds have continued to increase gender mainstreaming through policy implementation and/or practice, they are not necessarily ensuring that it is possible to track all climate finance that is gender relevant. ^[10] We looked at a number of these funds − the Adaptation Fund, the Climate Investment Funds, Green Climate Fund and Global Environment Facility. For example, we found that disbursements from the Climate Investment Funds were not gender-tagged, making it difficult to assess the extent to which the funding integrated gender equality objectives. The Green Climate Fund also does not use the gender equality marker consistently to tag all its projects/activities. Of the 23 activities that were targeted by the Green Climate Fund, 14 were not gender tagged.

Climate finance disbursements to Rwanda

In the DAC Creditor Reporting System (CRS), ODA flows (which includes what we refer to as ‘climate finance’) to Rwanda amounted to US$12.7 billion between 2013 and 2022. This consisted of US$6.9 billion from multilateral donors and US$5.8 billion from bilateral donors.

Multilateral donors provided over half (54%) of total aid to Rwanda over 2013-2022. Given the differences in how the World Bank uses its own markers, and the fact that some other multilateral development banks do not mark climate finance at all, this makes it even more difficult to measure how much is gender-relevant. The IDA21 replenishment, a series of negotiations throughout 2024, will determine the World Bank's financing and policy package for the next three years. The IDA21 replenishment currently has no information showing how targets and progress will be measured. Given this, there is a risk that if gender equality is deprioritised in the replenishment it is not clear how climate progress would be measured, let alone what metric would be used to measure the gender impact of climate finance. ^[11]

If we only count ODA, 64.1% of climate-related ODA to Rwanda integrated gender equality as a significant objective. However, just a further 3.6% was marked as having gender equality as a principal focus. This is consistent with a previous piece of research undertaken by Development Initiatives in which we found the global climate ODA figure with a principal gender focus stood at 3.0% in 2021. ^[12]

Between 2013 and 2022, the World Bank disbursed US$2.1 billion in ODA to Rwanda to support the achievement of various development objectives. Of this, US$307.4 million (14.8%) (see Figure 1) was earmarked for climate change adaptation and mitigation, while US$157.8 million (7.6%) went to interventions that promote/support gender equality objectives. Although we cannot know the exact overlap between gender and climate finance due to the way it is reported, out of a total of 32 World Bank projects in Rwanda during the period 2013−2022, 13 had a climate component, 9 had a gender component, and 6 had both gender and climate components.

Gender-relevant climate finance by sector

While gender equality is sometimes considered in climate-related ODA disbursements to agriculture and energy, other sectors identified by women as critical for women’s and girls’ resilience rarely incorporate a gender lens. These include health, water and sanitation, disaster risk management, population policies/programmes and reproductive health (see Figure 2).

Breaking down GRCF by purpose codes relevant to women and girls reveals an even starker picture of how their specific needs are being addressed. As highlighted in the Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation’s report, the climate emergency increases the risk of GBV. ^[13] Despite this, the amount of climate finance that includes the GBV purpose code is minuscule – just 0.01% (see Table 1). This means that interventions funded by climate finance streams are not recognising or mitigating against the increased risks to women and girls.

This is compounded by the paucity of funding to key areas such as family planning and reproductive health − each accounted for just 0.2% of total GRCF. This is despite the now widely recognised threats that climate change poses to maternal and newborn health, ^[14] as well as issues identified by the women consulted for the Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation’s paper.

Gender-relevant climate finance by disbursement channel

More than half of all GRCF is received by the Government of Rwanda (see Figure 3). The Government therefore has an important role to play in ensuring that all national budgets incorporate a gender perspective and that climate finance reaches the local level. The remainder of GRCF is received by a variety of different entities from UN agencies to country-based donor governments and international NGOs. It is imperative that these institutions pass this finance onto grassroots women’s rights organisations, given we know that much climate change adaptation is delivered at the local level. They need to be engaged as key stakeholders in climate finance-related decision-making at all levels.

Women's rights organisations face manifold challenges in accessing climate finance, yet gender-transformative climate action cannot happen without them. Additionally, there is simply not enough climate finance or gender-relevant ODA in the first place to adequately address the impacts of climate change, gender equality or both.

An indebted, climate-vulnerable, low-income country such as Rwanda that relies heavily on agriculture will need vast sums to ensure a just green transition, to adapt to climate change properly, and to pay for the loss and damage of climate impacts. The available climate finance is difficult for small women’s rights organisations to access due to the system’s complexity, the long timelines for grants to be agreed and high transaction costs. Climate finance is usually dispersed in large sums aimed at big projects rather than in smaller grants – this also stops smaller organisations from accessing this finance as they cannot absorb such large grants.

As long as women and other marginalised communities are not involved there is little likelihood that decision-making around financing will change. Much can be learned from other sectors, particularly the humanitarian sector which has been championing and promoting localised responses. Ensuring that agencies and funders embrace feminist ideals of localisation, flexible modalities and greater support for women’s organisations and movements would not only enable more access to funding for women’s rights organisations but would move responses to climate change closer to the ground where they can have more impact.

Finally, truly gender-transformative climate investments have the potential to tackle the root causes of gender inequality while addressing the impacts of climate change. Not only do they enable communities to adapt, but they also shift historic power imbalances by placing women in leadership positions and changing gender norms, transforming society as a whole. In addition, breaking down silos between the sectors paves the way for a holistic approach which appreciates the many intersecting needs of women and other marginalised communities.

Quantity

Donors should:

• Increase the quantity of gender-relevant climate finance to ensure that women and girls on the frontline of the climate crisis are able to fund important programmes which address both climate and gender considerations

Quality

Donors should:

• Fund more programmes with a principal gender objective to have a better balance between interventions that mainstream gender considerations and interventions that are primarily dedicated to tackling gender inequality.
• Appropriately fund sectors that have been identified as key areas of the gender-climate nexus, such as health, water and sanitation, disaster risk management and preventing gender-based violence.
• Break down funding silos to foster integrated and holistic programming, allowing for more efficient use of resources and better collaboration across sectors. This approach enables donors and their partners to address the intersecting challenges faced by women, girls and other marginalised communities.
• Provide direct funding to national and local women’s rights organisations, favouring long-term and flexible funding approaches. This includes overhead funding (covering indirect costs) to support their growth and sustainability, rather than limiting support to project-based initiatives. Lessons can be learnt from the localisation agenda of the humanitarian sector.
• Prioritise grants over loans to avoid additional climate financing worsening Rwandan’s existing debt challenges and allow the Rwandan Government to invest in preserving and advancing the rights of women and other marginalised communities. This will also increase these communities’ resilience in the face of climate change.

Accessibility

Donors should:

• Facilitate access to climate finance for women’s rights organisations by removing barriers in the funding process. This includes actively reaching out to organisations to inform them about climate finance opportunities, offering training to help them understand the climate finance ecosystem, providing technical assistance for developing project proposals and supporting them to become accredited entities.

Tracking

Donors should:

• Make consistent use of the gender and Rio markers to ensure accurate reporting of gender-relevant climate finance. These markers provide a standardised way to track and measure the impact of funding on gender equality and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Consistent use enhances transparency and accountability. This holds for all institutions and funds that disperse bilateral and multilateral funding.
• Routinely collect data that can be disaggregated by gender and other drivers of exclusion. This enables donors to identify the needs of women and other marginalised communities in the context of climate change, and to monitor the impact of climate finance on different community members. Doing so helps ensure that climate finance is effectively targeting the populations who need it the most.

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This briefing was produced together with the Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation. It was authored by Charlotte dos Santos Pruth, Annika Flensburg and Bridget Rhinehart at the Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation and Fionna Smyth, Hayley Lelourec and Boniface Owino at Development Initiatives (DI). We are very grateful to the women's rights activists in Rwanda who gave their time to share insights and recommendations, and to Kvinna till Kvinna staff members Annette Natukunda Mukiga and Justine Mbabazi at the Kigali office for the coordination. We are grateful to Alex Farley at Bond, Eloise Jenkins at MSI Reproductive Choices and Katherine Tobin and Tara Daniel at Women’s Environment & Development Organization for their invaluable feedback. At DI, analysis was carried out by Boniface Owino and Alex Miller. Thanks are due to Duncan Knox and Matthew O’Brien for their support with data analysis. Euan Ritchie and Martha Bekele acted as data and policy advisors. Mohammed Ali-Hassan project managed, and editorial support was provided by Georgina Carver and Simon Murphy.