The Gender Equality for Climate Change Opportunities (GECCO) initiative is a 5-year programmatic initiative through USAID’s E3 Bureau to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to leverage advancements in women’s empowerment and gender equality for the benefit of climate change and development outcomes. The initiative provides an array of support options for national, regional, and global activities that advance women’s empowerment and gender equality, and is designed to complement existing or emerging USAID efforts on climate change.
Women have an important role to play in climate change adaptation and mitigation, and new studies have uncovered a positive correlation between the level of women’s representation and a country’s efforts toward sustainability. However, gender inequalities persist, and many climate change initiatives don’t address gender sufficiently. Women’s contributions to addressing climate change are frequently overlooked, primarily due to such challenges as obstructed access to markets, capital, training, and technologies; insecure land and tenure rights; and the double burden of responsibilities inside and outside the household.
In partnership with IUCN, 13 countries and regions have developed climate change gender action plans (ccGAPs) that are anchored in existing national climate change processes. Ministries and regional bodies have chosen to establish ccGAPs when there is limited understanding of gender inequalities in the climate change context and when they need to establish avenues to address these inequalities. Countries with ccGAPs are making greater strides toward equitable climate change responses.
Governments that have prepared ccGAPs state that national strategies create coherence and stimulate cooperation between different government departments, sectors, and other stakeholders dealing with gender and climate change. Existing ccGAPs have already attracted interest from bilateral and multilateral donors and the private sector to invest in specific actions at the intersection of gender and climate change.
The benefits to Missions include engagement in a cutting-edge approach to climate change policy and planning, opportunity to build staff capacity, progress toward USAID gender-related results and milestones, and learning from other country experiences on this topic and sharing best practices. If a country doesn’t have a ccGAP, GECCO may facilitate the development of a new climate change gender action plan where host countries and Missions agree it is a priority. Alternatively, GECCO may support Missions’ efforts to build capacity or implement other activities in gender and climate change that are best suited for the country.
The GECCO program bridges the gap by helping Missions and host countries establish climate change gender action plans that identify specific priorities and actions and implement actions toward women’s empowerment and gender equality for the benefit of climate change and development outcomes.