Gender Day at COP21

Today was Gender Day at COP21, and given the importance of the day, we attended a fascinating panel on the issue of gender and climate change – Experiences from grassroots: Why we need Gender Responsive Climate Finance – in the Netherlands’ government pavilion.  This panel demonstrated the importance of side events that bring together both officials (be they from governments or multilateral institutions) and non-governmental organizations and grassroots movement leaders.  In this case, the panel included a dialogue between the NGO representatives from the Central American Women’s Fund, the Global Greengrants Fund, The Samdhana Institute, and AKSI! Indonesia, and a Board member from the Green Climate Fund, to which hopes are pinned for climate adaptation and green economy funds in the poor countries.

This was such a rich panel that it is difficult to do it justice in a blog post.  While the discussion presented hopeful prospects for the future of climate finance, some of the panelists and members of the audience were clearly discouraged by the immense amount of work left to do in this area.

On the upside, the Green Climate Fund (GCF), as the Board member stressed, is the first multilateral financing institution to incorporate gender into its mission and policies from the start.  As GCF documentation indicates:  “The Fund will strive to maximize the impact of its funding for adaptation and mitigation, and seek a balance between the two, while promoting environmental, social, economic and development co-benefits and taking a gender sensitive approach.”  The potential for the GCF to support all sorts of organizations working to improve the lives of women across the world is huge.

However, the GCF’s funding mechanism offers some challenges to non-governmental organizations.  To simplify a complex process, institutions must be accredited to receive funds from the GCF.  Non-accredited institutions can apply for funds, but need to work with accredited institutions.  Things get more complicated, however, because the GCF works through Nationally Designated Authorities (NDAs), which it calls the “interface” between the country and the Fund.  The NDAs are meant to align the distributed resources of the GCF with national objectives and priorities.  Even more, applications of accreditation to the GCF need to have evidence of nomination from the NDA for the country in which the project is to take place.  And, projects submitted for funding to the GCF need a “letter of no objection” from the country’s NDA for the country in which the project is to take place.  But, NDAs are political institutions that don’t necessarily have the same priorities around gender as the GCF.  These difficulties can easily pose an unwelcome barrier between the GCF’s funds and their ultimate intended recipients, vulnerable communities that need help.

Moreover, the GCF process poses significant capacity challenges for small grassroots organizations.  Panelists from these groups cited the large amount of time and resources needed to prepare documentation for and file applications, which must be completely in English, a significant barrier in many developing countries. These ‘costs to entry’ make the fund less friendly to small scale grassroots projects, which often are led by women. They suggested additional advising and support from the GCF could support small-scale projects.

The GCF appears dedicated to integrating gender as an integral dimension of its operations, but as always, the devil will be in the implementation.

-Anita Desai, Stephen O’Hanlon, Ayse Kaya

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