Women´s rights and environmental justice – why are they working on this nexus?

Women play a central role in managing and preserving natural resources. As community leaders, they fight to ensure access to clean and safe environmental resources and resist injustices. Yet they are mostly absent from the decision-making bodies and spaces that dictate the use and control of those resources. In addition, the funding streams available for work on environmental sustainability, disaster mitigation, and climate change bypass many grassroots groups and movements fighting for environmental justice from a women’s rights perspective.

The Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action (GAGGA) recognizes that addressing gender inequality is critical to achieve environmental justice. Women are more often affected when they are displaced from their lands as a consequence of large-scale mining or land conversion projects. Women who are indigenous or part of other socially or politically marginalized group are at an increased risk of losing their livelihoods, their homes, and their lives when they are discounted from the environmental decisions that impact them. GAGGA seeks to change this imbalance by catalysing the collective power of the women’s rights and environmental justice movements and amplify the collective voices of women to claim their right to water, food security and a clean, healthy and safe environment at the local, national and international level.

What is the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action (GAGGA)?

The Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action (GAGGA) brings together the Fondo Centroamericano de Mujeres (FCAM – a Nicaragua-based regional women´s fund), Both ENDS (an independent, Dutch environmental justice NGO) and Mama Cash (an international women’s fund headquartered in the Netherlands). Strategic GAGGA partners include Global Greengrants Fund (GGF), Prospera – International Network of Women Funds and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

GAGGA provides funding support to national, regional and global women´s rights and environmental funds and organisations in more than 30 countries across Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe and prioritises support to groups who are working at the local level and have limited access to funding. GAGGA supports these organisations and funds to strengthen their capacity for lobbying, advocacy and research on women´s rights and environmental justice.