A group of women under the aegis of Center for 21st Century Issues have said that it is necessary to allocate more finance to women to enable respond to climate change challenges.
This formed one of the conclusions at a side event held on November 14, 2022, during the 27th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
Speaking during the event, Aisha Titilola Kazeem of C21st, stated that women ought to have access to climate finance and loss and damage finance and enumerated how women’s inclusion is important in climate change policies and decision-making processes.
The event also featured gender monitors from Uganda, Cameroon, and Kenya, who were part of the panel discussion session, and also shared their countries’ experiences as it affects women and the way forward.
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The panellists bemoaned the fact that women don’t have access to finance because their rights are not respected and also observed that women are coming from a point of contribution on a daily basis to respond to a spectrum of problems that are caused by climate change, adding that lack of access to good road infrastructure as a result of loss and damage affects women.
“Women lack sources of economic empowerment and are forced to depend on their cattle. The resilience of women is basically in times of climate change. We urge leaders to take action to change the world and be gender-responsive to climate change. Therefore, we want to finance for loss and damage to come in, over that of adaptation and mitigation and call upon responsible duty bearers to ensure infrastructure is accessible for women,” they said.
Speaking further, they said, “We need to inculcate expertise in this field to solve the problem,” the panellists stressed, adding that the transparency process is key and that there’s a need to understand the different levels of climate change from international to national, cutting across all levels.
Story was adapted from EnvironnewsNigeria.
