RFLD's Climate Justice Programme works at the intersection of feminist movement-building, climate adaptation, and continental policy advocacy — supporting the women whose lives are most affected by climate change to lead the response, not be its passive victims.
The Climate Justice Programme is anchored in two articles of the Maputo Protocol that are too often overlooked. Article 18 guarantees African women's right to live in a healthy and sustainable environment. Article 19 commits states to ensuring women's participation in sustainable development at all levels — including environmental management, land-use planning, and decisions about natural resources.
Together with the African Union Agenda 2063 — which sets the continental development framework through 2063 with explicit gender and climate provisions — and the UNFCCC Gender Action Plan, these instruments give African women a legal and policy framework for climate participation that the work on this page seeks to make real.
This programme operates as the flagship of RFLD's broader Economic Justice & Climate field of intervention — focused specifically on climate adaptation, climate finance, and continental climate policy advocacy. Land rights, financial inclusion, and the wider economic dimensions of women's environmental work are addressed on the parent field-of-intervention page.
The Climate Justice Programme is organised around four mutually-reinforcing pillars. Together they describe what RFLD actually delivers — feminist climate adaptation at community level, rapid-response climate finance through the WAFF Fund, advocacy at COP and AU forums, and the cultivation of the next generation of African women climate leaders.
In most African communities, women are the people already adapting to climate change in real time — adjusting planting calendars when rains shift, walking further when wells dry up, switching cooking fuels when forests recede. RFLD's adaptation work supports the organisations led by these women, helping them access information, peer learning, and resources they would otherwise be excluded from.
Most African food production happens on small farms worked by women. Climate adaptation in agriculture means giving these farmers the information, the seeds, and the peer networks that allow them to keep producing as growing seasons shift. RFLD supports member organisations advancing agroecological approaches anchored in indigenous knowledge.
Women who know what is coming can prepare for it. Women who do not, cannot. Climate information services — weather forecasts, growing-season advisories, flood warnings — too often reach men with phones and bypass the women whose decisions actually shape household resilience. RFLD's information work addresses this gap.
As resources become scarcer, the time required to fetch them grows — and that time falls most heavily on women and girls. RFLD's adaptation work treats water, energy, and household-fuel access as climate justice issues, not just service-delivery issues. Beyond advocacy, RFLD delivers two flagship infrastructure programmes in francophone West Africa — described in the dedicated section below.
Across coastal West Africa, women dominate fish processing, salt harvesting, and coastal agriculture — sectors directly threatened by sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and the collapse of mangrove ecosystems. RFLD supports women-led ecosystem restoration as climate adaptation that delivers livelihoods alongside ecosystem services.
African women are not victims-in-waiting of the climate crisis. They are the most experienced practitioners of adaptation on the continent — and have been for decades. The work is to fund them, not to teach them.
Most of RFLD's climate work is community organising, advocacy, and regranting. But two of our adaptation programmes deliver physical infrastructure directly — community-managed solar boreholes and a clean cookstove and small-scale biogas livelihoods programme. Both operate in francophone West Africa and are designed around the same principle: the women who carry the labour of fetching water and gathering fuel are the people best placed to govern the infrastructure that replaces those burdens.
Across rural francophone West Africa, the daily walk for water remains one of the largest unpaid labour burdens carried by women and girls — a burden made longer and more dangerous by climate change as wells dry up and surface water disappears. RFLD has directly funded the installation of 48 community-managed, solar-powered boreholes, placed within village centres so that water access does not require unsafe travel and so that the resource governance sits with the community that uses it.
Roughly half of Sub-Saharan Africans still cook with biomass — wood, charcoal, dung — on open fires or inefficient stoves. The household air pollution this generates is one of the leading environmental health risks for women and children. RFLD's clean cooking programme equips women's groups to build, maintain, and sell fuel-efficient clean cookstoves and small-scale biogas digesters — turning a household climate-and-health intervention into a women-led livelihood.
A solar borehole in the village centre is not just water infrastructure. It is hours returned to girls who would otherwise be walking, and to women who would otherwise be carrying. Climate adaptation, in practice, looks like this.
Globally, an extremely small share of climate finance ever reaches women-led grassroots organisations on the African continent. The vast majority is absorbed by large international intermediaries or by national bureaucracies. RFLD's response is concrete: a dedicated climate window in the WAFF Fund, designed to move flexible, locally-led finance to grassroots feminist organisations in weeks, not in funding cycles.
The Women's Africa Feminist Fund (WAFF Fund) is RFLD's regranting vehicle — moving institutional resources to grassroots feminist collectives across francophone West Africa with full compliance infrastructure. The Climate Justice Programme operates a dedicated climate window within the WAFF Fund, designed for the specific tempo of climate work: rapid response when shocks hit, multi-year support for adaptation work that needs time, and flexibility for the unpredictable conditions in which our partners operate.
Crucially, RFLD handles the donor compliance, vetting, audit, and reporting overhead — so that grassroots organisations can focus on the work, not the paperwork. Learn more about the WAFF Fund →
The WAFF climate window supports grassroots feminist organisations across francophone West Africa working on the climate dimensions of women's lives. Funding is flexible by design — recognising that grassroots organisations are best placed to decide what their communities need.
The argument for direct grassroots climate finance is not just one of equity — it is one of effectiveness. Adaptation that does not match local conditions does not work. Resilience that is not owned by communities does not last. The WAFF Fund's climate window is built on the premise that the most effective climate adaptation in any African context is the one designed by the women already living through it.
Climate policy is set in rooms African women rarely enter. The UNFCCC Conference of the Parties, the African Union climate frameworks, regional negotiating positions — all shape what climate finance reaches the continent and how. RFLD's advocacy is present in those rooms, in coalition with other African feminist organisations, ensuring the lived experience of African women shapes the negotiating positions that affect their lives.
RFLD engages COP processes through African feminist coalitions — pushing for direct, accessible Loss & Damage finance for grassroots organisations, gender-responsive climate finance reform, and the integration of African women's adaptation experience into national and continental climate policy.
The Gender Action Plan commits parties to integrate gender across climate action. RFLD monitors and advocates for its implementation across African states, including through shadow reporting and parallel civil society engagement.
Engagement with the AU Climate Change Strategy and Agenda 2063 — ensuring gender-responsive climate policy is structural to continental development frameworks, not added at the end.
Regional climate adaptation frameworks shape policy across fifteen West African states. RFLD engages on regional climate adaptation finance, cross-border early-warning systems, and gender mainstreaming in regional climate policy.
Adaptation has limits. RFLD advocates for Loss & Damage finance accessible directly by women's grassroots organisations — not only by national governments — so that communities already past adaptation thresholds receive support.
RFLD coordinates with continental feminist and climate coalitions — turning fragmented national advocacy into coordinated continental positions strong enough to shift global negotiations.
Africa has the youngest population in the world. Young African women will live their entire adult lives inside the climate crisis — and many are already organising in response. RFLD's youth climate leadership work is designed to support that generation: connecting them to seasoned women human rights defenders, to continental advocacy spaces, and to the grassroots networks that make local climate action possible.
Young climate activists across the continent are too often isolated — strong locally, with limited connection to continental movements or to the seasoned women who have built feminist climate work over decades. RFLD's mentorship work creates structured pathways between generations.
Young African women are the most digitally-fluent generation the continent has produced — and digital tools have changed the geography of climate organising. RFLD supports the use of these tools while also addressing the security threats young women activists face online when their work threatens powerful interests.
Three open-access tools maintained by RFLD as public goods — feeding evidence into climate justice work and supporting partners across the continent.
Gender-disaggregated climate data, adaptation case studies, and policy reference materials focused on francophone West Africa.
Explore →Ecojustice in Africa — budget monitoring tools and gender-responsive fiscal policy reference for climate finance advocacy.
Explore →Tracking ratification, domestication, and implementation of Articles 18 and 19 across all 55 African Union member states.
Explore →Climate change is not gender-neutral, and African women experience it not as a future problem but as a present condition. Unpredictable rainfall undermines the agricultural systems women run. Drought lengthens the daily walk for water that women and girls undertake. Heatwaves harm pregnant women and the elderly women who care for households. Coastal erosion displaces fishing communities where women dominate processing and trade. Across every domain — food, water, health, livelihood, displacement — climate change concentrates its hardest consequences on the women who carry the labour that sustains African economies.
This concentration is not accidental. It reflects the structural conditions under which African women already work — without title to the land they farm, without credit to invest in adaptation, without representation in the rooms where climate policy is set, and without recognition in the GDP accounts that determine national priorities. Climate change does not arrive in a neutral economy; it arrives in an economy that has been organised, for centuries, to extract from Africa and from women within it. Treating climate change as a separate technical problem — solvable with engineering and finance — misses the structural dimension entirely.
RFLD's analysis is that climate justice is gender justice, and that the response must operate on both. We support the women already doing the adaptation work — through member organisations, through the WAFF Fund, through technical assistance and peer networks. We push for the laws and finance flows that recognise their work — through Maputo Protocol implementation, through COP advocacy, through engagement with continental institutions. And we build the next generation of African women climate leaders — because the climate crisis will outlast every current programme cycle, and the leaders who will inherit it deserve more than to inherit it; they deserve to shape the response.
The Maputo Protocol gave African women the legal framework. Agenda 2063 gives the continental development framework. The remaining work, in this field of intervention, is implementation — and implementation, on the ground, looks like the women whose adaptation work this programme exists to support.
For partnership opportunities, programme enquiries, member organisation collaboration, or donor due diligence — please reach the appropriate channel below.