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WeCaN members completed the first of a series of training sessions on Friday, designed to boost women’s leadership and advocacy at high-level climate change dialogues. 

The first training session of the series focused on ‘Connecting the dots between Gender Equality, Women's Representation and Advocacy’. It was run by Ilaria Sisto, FAO Gender and Climate Change Expert, and Maurizio Furst, FAO Gender Specialist, who were joined by nearly 20 participants from diverse countries, regions and organisations. 

The training was a chance to learn and discuss some key concepts, including gender-responsive climate justice, climate change negotiations, advocacy and policy dialogue. In his presentation, Maurizio Furst covered the basics of gender and sex, the unique challenges facing women, and the gender-responsive and gender-transformative approaches to tackle them. Ilaria Sisto’s presentation then linked gender equality and climate change. She highlighted the positive benefits that gender equality has on the economy, before showing how climate change disproportionately affects women. She gave some pointers for the achievement of gender equality, including advocating at national policy dialogues, strengthening capacities for the collection of sex-disaggregated data and designing gender-responsive interventions. 

Participants joined the training with a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Angela Nyanchama Nyamongo, from Kenya, took part to “learn more about tools that can be used to advocate for women's rights for gender equality”, whilst Joann Ofori, from Ghana, hoped to “learn more about tools that can be used to advocate for women's rights for gender equality.”

“The global pandemic has taught us that individual and national solutions to global challenges such as climate change does not work. Advocacy, commitment and engagement is the sure way to achieving a better world," Joann said. 

Priority areas

The training concluded with a mapping exercise, allowing WeCaN participants to share the priority areas for action in their region. In smaller groups, members shared challenges that faced women in their own countries, as well as some best practices and solutions currently being implemented to meet them. The main challenges across the regions were women’s access to land, patriarchal inheritance laws for land that disadvantage women, and a lack of representation in decision making processes.  

All members highlighted some solutions being used in their own communities. Elham Abbadi, from Jordan, spoke of her women’s farming cooperative, which brings women together and has planted over 15 000 trees across eight villages in Jordan’s dryland areas. Dunia Baroud El Khoury, from Lebanon, discussed her women’s association that offers training in agro-tourism, improving women’s livelihoods in her region.  

The mapping of the challenges and solutions is a preliminary step to developing a WeCaN advocacy  road map, building on women’s experiences, tracking their contributions, and raising women’s voices at UNCCD COP 15. 

About the WeCaN training

The WeCaN Advocacy Training Journey is designed to increase women's access and contributions to planning and decision-making in dryland forests and agrosilvopastoral management. This includes deepening participants’ understanding of gender issues associated with climate change, drought, and desertification, highlighting specific gender-based inequities, ad strengthening the leadership, speaking and negotiations skills of WeCaN focal points to influence the current policy dialogue.

The training series comprises of several sessions, with two focusing on advocacy at UNCCD COP15 and a further two on opportunities for advocacy at UNFCCC COP27.