This grant is available to grassroots women and girls’ organizations in Indonesia and the Philippines, who plan to implement initiatives tackling the climate crisis while promoting gender equality.
In many IPLCs, grassroots women are best positioned and in the forefront of action to protect the environment, yet their efforts are less recognized and are underfunded. Through NTFP-EP’s small grants facility, we are bridging the gap and creating opportunities for women to participate and take up space in community-building, proposing solutions and alternatives to the problems they face. Earmarking funds for women’s actions has evidently increased their agency and leadership determining their own pathways for development. We acknowledge as well the significant role of women as knowledge bearers offering local and climate resilient solutions.
Through PRSGF, our previous work with grassroots women and girls in Southeast Asia has contributed to strengthening local women’s leadership, mobilisation, implementation, and advocacy skills in the areas of community conservation, sustainable livelihoods, natural resources management, food security and health. Local women-led CBOs improved their sustainable forest and watershed management and protection of natural resources within their respective territories. Training on L&A strategies bolstered the advocacy skills of women’s groups. They advocated on local environmental issues in which women were disproportionately impacted, such as destructive mega-developments in mining, hydropower dam development and palm oil, rubber, and other plantations. Working on NTFPs practices and L&A enhances the contribution and fair share of benefits for women in the sustainable management of forested landscapes and ecosystems, catalysing rural and Indigenous women’s collective power and voice to secure community forest rights, resources and sustainable livelihoods.
Indeed, allocating resources for them is our way of recognizing, scaling-up and facilitating spaces for women’s contributions to mitigate, adapt and reduce carbon emissions through their time-tested local and indigenous knowledge and practices on sustainable resource use, management and conservation.
