Introduction
In 2021, 283 million people were acutely food insecure, 811 million were chronically hungry and 45 million were on the edge of famine.1 These dire numbers are a result of a confluence of crises, from the now two-year-old COVID-19 pandemic that led to disruptions in food supply chains and limited access to adequate food for vulnerable people across the globe to the escalating impacts of the climate crisis that is intensifying disasters such as storms, floods, and droughts, wiping out crops and livestock and furthering disrupting global supply chains. Helping people build their resilience to survive and thrive after these shocks is vital to ensuring this alarming trend is reversed.
The Paris Agreement, an international treaty signed to tackle climate change, acknowledges that climate change is a common concern for all humankind. And yet, many women are disproportionately and negatively impacted by climate change as existing inequalities and gender roles are intensified. However, women are known to play a vital role in climate change adaptation and mitigation, and so the Paris Agreement also states that climate action should promote gender equality and the empowerment of women.
WFP pursues gender equality and women’s empowerment in all its projects as hunger cannot be eradicated without equality. Women’s empowerment is the process whereby women obtain and exercise agency in their lives and have equal access to resources, opportunities and power as men. To be empowered, women must have not only capabilities and equal access to resources and opportunities that equal those of men, but also the ability to use them to make choices and decisions as full and equal members of society. For WFP, this means that food assistance policies and programmes must create conditions that facilitate, and not undermine, the possibilities for women’s empowerment.
An important element of women’s empowerment is women’s economic empowerment. Economic empowerment is a cornerstone of gender equality that refers to both women’s ability to succeed, advance economically, and their power to make and act on economic decisions.4 A significative number of institutions, researchers and practitioners have started developing approaches and methodologies to measure women’s economic empowerment in financial inclusion initiatives, as economic empowerment remains one of the most powerful routes for women to achieve their potential, while advancing their rights. Women’s economic empowerment is not the result of a chronological chain of events, such as savings, followed by access to credit, then insurance, trainings and technical assistance that would eventually lead to income generation, better decision making and finally economic empowerment. It is, rather, non-linear and multidimensional, depending on structural circumstances at the community, household and individual level.
For a decade, WFP has been utilizing climate risk insurance to advance the protection and resilience of communities affected by extreme climate events. More recently, it has become a priority to integrate insurance into a broader bundle of risk financing instruments that are accessible for governments and smallholders in climate risk hot spots across Africa, Asia and in the Latin American and Caribbean region. Evidence gathered over the years shows that insurance for food insecure households can be effectively used to manage climate risks and ensure sustainability of livelihoods. As climatic events occur, for women, and the families they take care of, this insurance acts as a safety net that they can count on to help them through the difficult times. Furthermore, insurance is the most effective when integrated with other risk management tools that improve productivity and the household asset base while reducing their underlying risk to disasters and increasing saving opportunities that help people absorb idiosyncratic and less extreme shocks. This gives women the possibility to think ahead, invest in improving their situation and not live in fear of the next extreme event or shock.
We now present four women in different situations in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa: Khadija takes care of her family and land in Malawi, Herlinda lives with her family in Alta Verapaz, in the dry corridor of Guatemala, Denise is a single mother of two children in Southern Madagascar, and Maria lives in Nueva Segovia, Nicaragua with her family, where they survive on subsistence agriculture.
Despite their differences, these four women have proved unstoppable against the extreme weather events that hit their countries and climate risk insurance not only helped them survive but grow stronger, especially when linked to other economic empowerment and financial inclusion activities. The tangible aspects of economic empowerment such as asset ownership and income diversification can be easier to measure, yet, the intangible, subjective and context-specific aspects, like decision making, can be challenging to assess. By listening to our beneficiaries, we learn more and more on how we can improve and adapt programmes to save lives and change lives, everywhere
Source: ReliefWeb