Despite the rise of anti-women's rights agendas and the erosion of long-standing gains, Mwanamke Fund remains unfazed and determined in its fight for feminist climate justice, for the health of our planet and the well-being of our communities in the Great Lakes region.
Communication Officer, Mwanamke Fund · Belém, Brazil / Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo
COP30 was held from 10 to 21 November 2025 in Belém, Brazil, with the central objective of accelerating implementation of the Paris Agreement. The conference focused in particular on new national plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, on delivering the new climate finance goal, and on the just transition. Its location in the Amazon also brought questions of biodiversity and forest preservation to the fore.
A crisis built on inequality
The climate crisis is fuelled by entrenched systems of exploitation, extraction and inequality that concentrate power and resources in the hands of a privileged minority. Women, girls and gender-diverse people — particularly those facing multiple, intersecting forms of discrimination in frontline communities — disproportionately bear the brunt of its impacts. Yet they are systematically marginalised from spheres of power, with limited access to resources and to decision-making spaces.
“It is a question of justice, but also a strategic imperative for effective climate action.”
Mwanamke Fund
Because climate change is not gender neutral. Its impacts exacerbate existing inequalities. Women and marginalised groups find themselves on the front lines of climate-related population displacement, food insecurity and loss of livelihoods.
In the Great Lakes region, this is not an abstraction. It is the woman who walks further each year for water. It is the harvest lost to an erratic season in a household she heads alone. It is the Indigenous woman whose knowledge of her own landscape is never recorded in any adaptation plan.
A transformative Gender Action Plan
Mwanamke Fund calls on Parties to adopt a transformative action plan for gender equality that, with adequate resources, promotes the rights of women and girls in all their diversity.
“The adoption of an ambitious Gender Action Plan at COP30 will constitute a watershed moment in the global commitment to gender equality and in the integrity of the UNFCCC as a platform for inclusive and rights-based multilateral climate governance.”
Ms. Véronique Bulaya, Director of Mwanamke Fund
Finance that must be delivered, and must reach the ground
It is also urgent to call on middle-income countries, which are becoming major emitters of greenhouse gases, to take responsibility. The financial commitment made at COP29 has proven insufficient: it is essential that governments effectively assume the annual funding of USD 1.3 trillion until 2035.
The Loss and Damage Fund must be made operational as a matter of urgency, guaranteeing priority access for affected communities. Climate adaptation finance must be transparent, equitable, accessible and effective, and it must target integrated, participatory and community-based climate solutions, with particular attention to valuing initiatives led by women.
This last point is where our own experience is most direct. A financing mechanism that requires certified accounts, English-language proposals and audit histories will never reach a women's agroecology group in a rural territory of South Kivu — however well designed its adaptation strategy may be. Accessibility is not a secondary consideration in climate finance. It determines whether the money arrives at all.
What we do about it
Mwanamke Fund funds women's adaptation to climate change as one of its nine programmes, alongside agroecology and food security and water, hygiene and sanitation. Our grants support reforestation and agroforestry led by women's groups, protection of springs and riverbanks, community early warning systems for floods and landslides, fuel-efficient cookstoves, farmer seed banks managed by women, and the recognition and transmission of Indigenous women's knowledge.
A call to world leaders
Mwanamke Fund calls on world leaders to seize this crucial opportunity and to reaffirm that gender equality is not a marginal concern, but a central pillar of effective, inclusive and just climate action.
