RFLD's economic and climate work begins from a single observation: women carry most of the labour that sustains African economies and most of the burden when the climate breaks down — and own the smallest share of the resources that would protect them in either case. This field of intervention exists to change that equation.
Africa contributes roughly 3 to 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and bears a disproportionate share of climate change's consequences — drought, flooding, food insecurity, displacement, and the loss of agricultural livelihoods. The continent is also the region where women most consistently work the land they do not own, draw the water they cannot govern, and carry the household economies that no national-accounts statistic counts.
These are not two separate problems requiring two separate strategies. They are the same crisis. You cannot protect the forest if the woman living next to it has no other fuel source. You cannot build climate resilience if women are denied the credit to adapt their farms. You cannot end rural poverty if the laws of inheritance still treat women as dependents rather than rights-holders.
RFLD's work in this field is anchored in the Maputo Protocol (Articles 19 and 21 on sustainable development and inheritance), the African Union Agenda 2063, and the framework on women's economic and climate rights advanced by African feminist movements over the past two decades.
The page below is organised into four mutually-reinforcing pillars. Each addresses a structural failure: women's exclusion from land ownership, women's invisibility in climate policy, the unrecognised economic value of care work, and the gendered injustice of extractive economies and unjust energy transitions.
Across many African countries, the majority of small-scale farmers are women, yet only a small fraction of titled land is held in women's names. This gap is not just an injustice — it makes women unable to access agricultural credit, unable to invest in soil health beyond a single growing season, and exposed to dispossession when a husband dies or a marriage ends. RFLD's land rights work addresses the law, the registry, and the daily practice of who can claim land in their own name.
Many African legal systems retain customary inheritance rules that dispossess widows and daughters in favour of male relatives. RFLD works with national parliaments, ministries of justice, and traditional leadership to reform these frameworks while respecting cultural authority.
A right that women cannot access in practice is not a right. RFLD's legal literacy work translates land law from court documents into community knowledge — helping women navigate land registries, document customary holdings, and contest dispossession.
Most African food production happens on small farms worked by women. Industrial monoculture expansion — often promoted as "modernisation" — degrades African soils and pushes women smallholders out of viable agriculture. RFLD supports an alternative model rooted in agroecology and food sovereignty.
Competition is not the only economic model. Cooperative structures, mutual aid networks, and communal land trusts allow women to pool labour, share risk, access markets collectively, and survive shocks together. RFLD supports cooperative formation and the legal frameworks that allow them to function as economic actors.
Climate change is no longer a future concern in the countries where RFLD works. It is present — in shortened growing seasons, in collapsing fisheries, in coastal erosion that displaces whole communities, in heat waves that kill the elderly. African women are doing the daily adaptation work already; the question is whether climate finance, policy, and law will support them or continue to ignore them.
SMS-based weather alerts and locally-translated climate forecasts that reach rural women with the information they need to protect crops, livestock, and households.
Distribution of drought-resilient sorghum, millet, and indigenous crop varieties — combined with farmer-led seed networks that preserve genetic diversity.
Women-led planting and restoration projects that protect coastlines from sea-level rise and storm surge while supporting fisheries and biodiversity.
Low-tech water capture and storage systems for rural households and small farms — reducing women's water-collection labour and building dry-season resilience.
African women have adapted to climate variability for centuries. RFLD documents and amplifies indigenous adaptation knowledge — integrating it with scientific approaches rather than replacing it.
Adaptation has limits. RFLD advocates for direct, accessible Loss & Damage finance for the communities — including women's grassroots organisations — that have already crossed those limits.
Climate justice is not a theory waiting to be applied. It is a daily reality — negotiated each morning by the woman walking further than yesterday for water that was once at the edge of the village.
Across Africa, women perform the overwhelming share of unpaid care work — fetching water, collecting fuel, caring for children and the sick and the elderly, maintaining households. This work makes every other economy possible, yet none of it appears in GDP. Climate change is making it worse: as resources become scarcer, the time required to provide them grows. RFLD's care-economy work demands that this labour be recognised, reduced, and redistributed.
Make unpaid care work visible. Time-use surveys, gender-disaggregated economic data, and inclusion of care work in national accounts. What gets measured gets resourced.
Reduce the time burden through public services and infrastructure. Water access, electrification, paved roads, school feeding, and accessible health care — all of which directly cut women's care hours.
Redistribute care work — between women and men within households, and from individual women to public services. Paid parental leave for both parents, public childcare, and dignified employment in the care sector.
Formal financial institutions across Africa systematically misjudge rural women — applying credit-scoring models built for wage-earners with formal collateral to women whose economic lives run on agricultural cycles, kinship networks, and movable assets. RFLD's financial inclusion work addresses both the supply side (banks, mobile money providers, microfinance institutions) and the demand side (women's financial literacy and collective bargaining power).
The majority of African women earn their livelihoods in the informal economy — as market traders, domestic workers, agricultural labourers, home-based producers. They generate substantial economic value, yet are excluded from labour protections, social security, and collective bargaining. RFLD advocates for decent work standards that meet women where they actually work.
The world is moving — slowly and unevenly — away from fossil fuels. Whether that transition reaches African women, or repeats the extractive patterns of the past century, depends on policy decisions being made now. RFLD's just transition work pushes for energy systems that serve African communities, mining and oil accountability that protects affected populations, and water rights that resist privatisation.
Roughly half of Sub-Saharan Africans still cook with biomass — wood, charcoal, dung — on open fires or inefficient stoves. The resulting household air pollution is one of the leading environmental health risks for women and children, and the time spent gathering fuel is one of the largest unpaid labour burdens women carry. RFLD's energy work treats clean cooking and decentralised renewable energy as women's rights issues, not just climate issues.
Mining and oil projects across Africa have repeatedly promised development and delivered displacement. Women bear specific costs: contaminated water that affects pregnancy and child development, sexual violence in mining camps and around extractive sites, loss of farmland that supported household food security. RFLD supports affected communities to negotiate binding agreements and to hold companies accountable.
In many African communities, women are the primary managers and providers of household water. Privatisation of water utilities, pollution from extractive projects, and climate-driven scarcity all hit women first. RFLD's position is that access to clean water is a human right under continental and international law — and not a commodity to be traded.
Across coastal West Africa, women dominate fish processing, smoking, and trading — yet are routinely excluded from policy decisions about fishing rights, marine protection, and the "blue economy" frameworks now reshaping coastal livelihoods. Industrial trawling and foreign fleet agreements have collapsed several fisheries that sustained local women's livelihoods for generations.
RFLD does not stop at the national level. The decisions that shape African women's economic and climate futures are made in international forums where African feminist voices remain underrepresented. Our advocacy is present where those decisions happen.
RFLD engages COP processes through African feminist coalitions — pushing for direct, accessible Loss & Damage finance for grassroots women's organisations, gender-responsive climate finance reform, and the integration of African women's lived adaptation experience into national and continental climate policy.
The African Union's Agenda 2063 sets the continental development framework for the next forty years. RFLD's role is to ensure that gender-responsive economic and climate policy is not an afterthought to its implementation — through engagement with the AU, the African Commission, and the African Peer Review Mechanism.
ECOWAS economic and climate frameworks shape policy across fifteen West African states. RFLD engages regional bodies on women's land rights, cross-border trade, regional climate adaptation finance, and the gender-responsive implementation of regional treaties.
The Maputo Protocol's Article 19 commits member states to sustainable development that addresses women's economic situation, and Article 21 protects widows' inheritance rights. RFLD's Maputo Protocol Hub tracks implementation across all 55 AU member states.
Three open-access tools maintained by RFLD as public goods — feeding evidence into this field of intervention and supporting partners and researchers across the continent.
Ecojustice in Africa — budget monitoring tools and gender-responsive fiscal policy reference for civil society and parliamentary advocates.
Explore →Gender-disaggregated climate data, adaptation case studies, and policy reference materials focused on francophone West Africa.
Explore →Tracking ratification, domestication, and implementation of Articles 19 and 21 across all 55 African Union member states.
Explore →Africa contributes a small share of global greenhouse gas emissions and bears a disproportionate share of climate change's consequences. This injustice is compounded by the historical legacy of colonialism, which structured African economies as extraction sites rather than centres of value creation. The pattern persists today: in mineral concessions signed for decades at terms favourable to foreign capital, in fishing agreements that empty African seas, in trade rules that prevent African countries from adding value to their own commodities. Climate change does not arrive in a neutral economy. It arrives in an economy that has been organised to extract from Africa for five hundred years.
Within that economy, the gendered burden is unmistakable. African women perform the labour that sustains household economies, agricultural production, and the care of children and the elderly — most of it unpaid, none of it counted in GDP. They hold the smallest share of titled land, formal credit, and inheritance rights. They are most exposed to the climate disruptions already underway and least represented in the rooms where climate policy is set. In the words of the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty: as climate change accelerates, those least responsible for it will pay the highest price.
RFLD's analysis is that environmental degradation and women's economic marginalisation are two sides of the same structure. You cannot protect the forest if the woman living next to it has no other fuel source. You cannot build climate resilience if women are denied the credit needed to adapt their farms. You cannot end rural poverty if the laws of inheritance still treat women as dependents rather than rights-holders. The intervention must therefore work on both sides simultaneously — on the economic conditions that constrain women's choices, and on the climate conditions that are making those choices harder every year.
Our intervention moves beyond charity. We are advocating for a feminist economy that values life over profit, regeneration over extraction, and equity over growth — built on a continental legal framework, the Maputo Protocol, that already gives African women the rights this work seeks to make real.
For partnership opportunities, programme enquiries, member organisation collaboration, or donor due diligence — please reach the appropriate channel below.