How funders are addressing climate-driven violence for women workers

Climate change is a threat multiplier, amplifying existing risks and vulnerabilities, including structural inequality and workplace exploitation, which has been found to drive more extreme gender-based violence and harassment — or GBVH — including physical, mental, sexual, verbal, and economic violence for women workers across the informal, industrial, and agricultural sectors. Despite the urgent need for intersectional approaches to climate, labor, and gender justice, funders have long separated grant funding for climate and gender justice, with less than 0.1% of all philanthropic funding focusing on gender and the environment.

However, as women workers take urgent action to defend their rights in a changing climate, funders are creating innovative solutions to support their cutting-edge work. Devex spoke with Monica Aleman, international program director for gender, racial, and ethnic justice at the Ford Foundation; Jessica Brown, senior director of adaptation and resilience at ClimateWorks Foundation; Laura García, president and CEO of Global Greengrants Fund; Nivedita Jayaram, thematic lead for movement and labor at Women's Fund Asia; and Nicolette Naylor, founder and CEO of Ubuntu Global Philanthropy & Gender Justice Consulting, about how funders can support women worker-led initiatives at the intersection of climate change and GBVH.

The following answers have been edited for length and clarity.

How is the global climate crisis exacerbating existing inequalities and GBVH in the world of work?

Naylor: Women and girls face disproportionate impacts from climate change because they make up the majority of the world’s poor and are already marginalized because of their gender. Low-wage, seasonal, farm, and factory workers are more vulnerable to economic exploitation and GBVH as climate impacts their working conditions, including in the aftermath of climate disasters. Extreme weather disrupts work and essential services, including sexual and reproductive health care. Globally, GBVH is increasingly used to silence women environmental and human rights defenders.  

Brown: The climate crisis is here — and it’s already exacerbating gender inequalities. Women often lack social protections, especially in the global south, and the climate crisis will only amplify current injustices. In the informal labor market, women work as market vendors, waste pickers, and construction workers, or provide unpaid care for their families. These women lack social protections, especially in low- and middle-income countries. They lose wages and livelihoods from climate shocks, leading to poverty and diminished social power in families and communities, thus putting them at a higher risk of exposure to multiple forms of violence.

García: Climate change and environmental crises disproportionately affect women and girls, particularly those who have been historically marginalized. A large percentage of the world’s food is produced by small-scale farmers — most of which are women. The increasing severity of droughts and floods makes it harder for them to secure livelihoods, reinforcing discriminatory gender norms around land ownership and power dynamics, ultimately deepening entrenched GBVH.                                                              

How can climate, labor, and gender funders jointly respond to these new challenges?

Aleman: Funding women’s leadership is crucial, at both the workplace and community levels. Unionized women workers have channels for addressing GBVH in the workplace and beyond. Research by our grantee partners shows that unionized workers experience half as much heat stress as non-unionized workers. The right to organize and bargain collectively is critical for redressing inequalities in the world of work and for centering women worker-led solutions to the climate crisis and a “just transition.”

García: We have seen that funding in thematic siloes doesn’t work: Holistic thinking is critical. Flexible, multiyear, long-term support to women environmental defenders and women’s strategies can support a sustainable future and just transition. Climate-specific funds may find it vital to connect with women’s funds, environmental funds, and others more engaged with local communities including women workers. A great opportunity to learn and fund at the intersection of these issues is the Funder Learning and Action Co-Laboratory, including environmental, human, and women’s rights funders.

Naylor: Climate, labor, and gender funders must work together and make the connections between the climate crisis, economic justice, and gender inequality in very deliberate and meaningful ways. We have to invest in solutions-oriented work that not only unpacks the problem but also sets out pathways for change at the local, national, regional, and global levels. We have to connect the dots at a transnational level.

What are some of the challenges you’ve faced when funding integrated climate, labor, and gender justice solutions focused on women workers?

García: One of the biggest challenges is the lack of unrestricted, multiyear funding. A great example of how funders are working to fill this gap is the Roots Rising: Growing Grassroots Gender-Just Climate Action, a campaign developed by Global Greengrants Fund, the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action, and Women’s Environment and Development Organization to mobilize at least $100 million for gender-just climate action by 2026, and significantly more by 2030.

Jayaram: Women workers slip between the cracks of climate, labor, and gender funding and are marginalized in labor, gender, and climate justice movements. They face increasing repression, union busting, and backlash. Only a minuscule portion of global funding reaches them, exacerbated by regulatory restrictions on accessing funds — with efforts to unionize workers, and set up or strengthen women worker-led organizations being the most under-funded. In 2024, we were only able to support 23% of applications focused on women workers under our core grantmaking program and women worker-led organizations we support often report WFA as their only funder.

Aleman: From a climate justice perspective, a big challenge is that the voices of women workers are largely missing. While we recognize that women are disproportionately impacted by climate change, including violence against women on the front lines of natural resource extraction, there is a knowledge gap around how this affects women's ability to assert their rights. As we move towards more integration at the nexus of climate, labor, and gender, we need to invest in research that amplifies the stories of women workers and the connections to GBVH.

How are you currently working to link climate, labor, and gender justice in your philanthropic work?

Aleman: At the Ford Foundation, we have learned that integrating a gender justice lens into climate and labor funding is essential. Recognizing that women face systemic barriers to leadership in the climate movement, our Natural Resources and Climate Justice program established women’s leadership as a grantmaking metric, witnessing profound shifts as a result. Our Future of Work(ers) program takes a gender lens to our work on labor rights, which helped us identify the intersection of climate change and GBVH in the world of work as a pressing issue.

Jayaram: WFA focuses on listening and responding to the needs of women-led movements through participatory grantmaking, and ceding decision-making power to movement representatives. We are committed to core, flexible, and long-term support that strengthens women worker power and do not have an exit strategy. We prioritize support to address precarious work, GBVH, and climate impacts through cross-movement solidarity; and to women from rural, Indigenous, caste-oppressed, and minority communities, women with disabilities, as well as migrant and refugee women.

García: To deepen our own organization’s feminist and intersectional approach to grantmaking and foster learning, we launched the Gender and Environmental Justice Working Group in 2024. The working group comprises ten gender “champions” from our global network of grantmaking advisers and coordinators. They have committed to collective exploration, reflection, and documentation of our intersectional, feminist approach to integrate a gender justice lens and analysis into all our environmental justice grantmaking.

Throughout history, women-led organizing has been essential to advance the rights of women workers. How are you supporting women worker-led organizations and what role do they play in addressing these issues?

Brown: Our current work focuses on the health and livelihood impacts of extreme heat. On extremely hot days, it’s simply too hot to work. Women fall into debt, pushing many into forced labor or migration. In India, we work with Climate Resilience for All and SEWA, a trade union of self-employed women, to protect livelihoods using an innovative tool called heat-based micro-insurance, which triggers a payout when outside temperatures reach a certain threshold. The insurance payout is a safety net on dangerous heat days for thousands of women in the informal economy.

Jayaram: WFA has invested in dismantling barriers in access to funds for women worker-led organizations — including for trade unions, cooperatives, and collectives of garment, gig, migrant, domestic, agricultural, and sex workers. We support women worker priorities and fund cross-cutting strategies with intersectional impact, such as addressing unsafe workplaces, barriers to sexual and reproductive health and rights, bargaining, and advocacy for living wages and social protection.

García: Since we began funding at the intersection of gender and the environment in 2015, we have given more than $25 million in grants to grassroots groups working on gender-just climate action, making us a leading funder of grassroots gender-just environmental and climate action. Only 0.05% of the billions of dollars of environmental funding each year goes directly to support the women facing violence due to their environmental activism. Global Greengrants Fund works to bridge that funding gap.

What lessons can you share with other funders as we learn to address the interlocking impacts of climate, labor, and gender injustice on women workers?

Aleman: We need to bridge silos across funding for labor, climate, and feminist movements. Ford has found that a collaborative approach, both internally across portfolios and with external peers, helps move intersectional funding at scale. For example, we will launch a collaborative fund for a gender-just economy that prioritizes women’s rights and recognizes the barriers they face in the world of work, including climate change and GBVH. Joint grantmaking allows us to pool resources, share knowledge, and support bold initiatives that address root causes of inequality.

Jayaram: Women workers are often viewed as mere beneficiaries of livelihood initiatives by funders. Instead, we need to recognize their right to freedom of association and collective bargaining as central strategies for advancing climate, labor, and gender justice. While grassroots organizations are expected to demonstrate intersectionality, funders often lack this practice in their own institutions. It is critical for funders to apply an intersectionality lens on how they fund and not only who they fund.

Brown: A growing number of funders are looking at intersectional impacts of climate, labor, and gender injustice — and we need to work together. We released a call to action for philanthropy at COP28 and established the Adaptation and Resilience Collaborative for Funders (ARC), a coalition to increase funder knowledge, facilitate information sharing and coordination, develop joint global adaptation strategies for philanthropy, and ultimately scale our collective investment.

Visit Women Rising — a new narrative series spotlighting the intersection of gender-based violence and harassment and climate change in the world of work.

This content is sponsored by FORGE. To learn more, visit the series website.