By Sadiya Ahmed Musa (Nigeria) and Zaynab Sangaré (Senegal)
They sustain agriculture, ensure food security for rural communities, collect water, reforest degraded lands, and feed entire families. Yet African women are the major absentees from international climate finance. In Nigeria, as in Senegal, the systemic exclusion of women from climate governance and financial circuits deepens an injustice shaped by ecological crisis, poverty, and patriarchy.
While Africa needs $2.8 trillion by 2030 to meet its climate commitments under the Paris Agreement, only 19% of climate funding received is gender-sensitive, and barely 2% globally is truly targeted toward women.
This inequality is even more alarming given that women and girls are 14 times more likely than men to die in climate disasters, according to the Centre for Global Development. They also disproportionately bear the economic, social, and security consequences of climate change, which intensifies hunger, gender-based violence, school dropouts, and the collapse of livelihoods.
In the Sahel, a semi-arid region spanning more than ten African countries, including northern Nigeria, Senegal, and Mali, women are at the forefront of the crisis, facing desertification, prolonged droughts, and frequent flooding.
In Nigeria, where the climate crisis compounds long-standing gender inequalities, about 78.7% of households are affected by climate change. In rural areas, 65.3% of girls drop out of school due to the impacts of droughts, conflict, and poverty. Some women, stripped of their livelihoods, are forced into early marriages or survival sex, according to an ActionAid report. And yet, of the 828 climate projects funded in Nigeria between 2015 and 2021, only 16% included gender as a key objective, and barely 1% prioritised it.
A similar picture emerges in Senegal, where 70% of women work in agriculture, yet they own only 13.4% of the land. Groundwater salinisation and the drying of wells make off-season vegetable farming nearly impossible. This double injustice, ecological and land-based, limits their autonomy and economic resilience.
Despite this, women-led solutions are taking root in Nigeria and Senegal, often without meaningful support.
In Nigeria, the Women Farmers Advancement Network (WOFAN) supports women battling the dual pressures of climate change and insecurity. WOFAN Communication Officer Nafisa Murtala Ahmad explains how rural women bear the brunt of climate change.
“Desertification, flooding, drought, and insecurity are making it increasingly hard for women to access farmland,” she says.
“Even men are afraid to go to the farms these days due to insecurity, let alone women, who are even more vulnerable.”
A lack of access to essential farming inputs compounds these environmental changes.
“Because they are women, they are often overlooked when farming resources like seeds, fertilisers, and insecticides are distributed,” Nafisa explains.
“The systems in place rarely consider their specific needs.”
One overlooked aspect is the reliance on firewood for cooking, borne out of poverty and lack of alternatives.
“Due to poverty, many women rely on firewood, which contributes to deforestation. The same crisis comes back to harm them,” she says.
This vicious cycle of environmental degradation and poverty further entrenches women’s vulnerability.
WOFAN, however, offers a different model, based on empowerment through practical and tangible support.
“What makes WOFAN different is that we don’t just talk; we provide real tools: tractors, seeds, fertilisers, and training,” Nafisa emphasises.
The organisation groups women into clusters, trains them, and equips them with full farm kits. Beyond farming, WOFAN also provides post-harvest support, helping them access markets and even purchase their produce.
“We even buy their produce at prices higher than the market,” she explains.
“If rice sells for ₦100, we might buy it at ₦130 or ₦150. That’s empowerment.”
To support climate adaptation, WOFAN offers training in climate-smart techniques, early warning systems, on-field extension services, and sustainable agriculture practices.
“Women are already taking climate action in their communities,” Nafisa adds.
“But they remain invisible in climate finance. That has to change.”
Similarly, in Senegal, Mariama Sonko, president of AJAC and the pan-African network We Are the Solution, leads vital grassroots work. This movement, which brings together approximately 175,000 rural women across eight West African countries and promotes environmentally friendly agriculture rooted in women’s traditional knowledge.
“We work with communities to identify the areas they can preserve, allow trees to grow without cutting them down, and encourage reforestation,” she explains. Their work also includes producing biofertilisers, alternatives to chemical fertilisers, and leading reforestation campaigns.
Yet these local initiatives receive no structured climate support.
“To date, we have not received any funding to fight the effects of climate change, even though we’ve been working on the ground for years,” Mariama Sonko laments.
She stresses the urgency of placing rural women at the centre of policies: “They are already taking initiative. So we must help them access funding, support them, strengthen them, and empower them.”
In Méckhé, in Senegal’s Thiès region, another local initiative is also tackling these challenges. The Union of Farmers’ Groups of Méckhé (UGPM), founded in 1985, brings together approximately 5,000 members across 77 village-based groups, with the majority of its members being women. Its president, Fatou Binetou Diop, explains that their organisation promotes agroecology, local processing (peanut oil), vegetable farming, and solar-powered irrigation projects to strengthen women’s autonomy.
“But in terms of funding, it’s almost nothing,” she says. “For an organisation with 5,000 members, we were allocated just 500,000 CFA francs (about ₦1.36 million), and that was only for a single activity related to bio-climate fertilisation.”
Still, UGPM actively offers training on resilient seeds, reforestation, and the importance of consuming local products. They emphasise the need for adaptation in the face of irregular rains and unpredictable farming seasons.
“We’ve trained women to process what they produce themselves. It’s both a mitigation strategy and a tool for autonomy.”
Women farmers in Kano State, Nigeria, describe a similar reality. Hafsa Usaini, 45, who has farmed millet, maize, and sorghum for decades, explains how skyrocketing input prices and water scarcity have devastated their planting capacity.
“The biggest problem now is the cost of fertiliser,” she says. “If we don’t apply it early enough, we lose everything. And most of our wells have dried up.”
Like many rural families, Hafsa’s children have dropped out of school, and their priority now is basic survival.
In the same state, Amina Ashiru, 50, echoes the impact of erratic weather. Once able to cultivate tomatoes, onions, rice, and maize, she now grows only tomatoes due to financial constraints.
“Some years, we don’t get enough rain. Other times, the sun burns everything,” she explains. “Our wells are drying up. We don’t even have clean water to drink, let alone water for our farms.”
Despite repeated visits by NGOs and officials, Amina says no lasting help has reached her. “They come, they ask questions, but nothing changes. No training, no fertiliser, no school fees.”
The consequences of this climate and financial exclusion are severe for urban women farmers, too. Kubra Usaini, 55, who used to grow vegetables in Tokarawa and sell them in Kano’s Yankaba Market, had to abandon farming altogether after repeated crop failures.
“The heat kills our crops. Wells have dried up,” she says. “I used to invest everything. Now I borrow vegetables just to sell and survive.”
Girls and young women are also disproportionately affected. In Kumbotso, Kano, Zainab Abdullahi, 20, had to leave school when her father, a farmer and food vendor, could no longer afford her fees due to failed harvests.
“We used to farm plenty of food, but now even eating twice a day is hard,” she says. Zainab dreams of becoming a doctor, especially to support women during childbirth, but the climate crisis has put that goal out of reach.
Similarly, Fatima Abdullahi, 21, from the same community, dropped out of school after her brother lost his job and the family could no longer afford education.
“We never used to worry about food, but now my younger siblings cry from hunger,” she says.
Fatima still dreams of becoming a lawyer to defend women in harmful marriages. But with no support, she fears being forced into early marriage to survive.
This exclusion of women is also reflected in financing mechanisms. Globally, only 2% of public adaptation funds are gender-responsive, according to the UNDP. In Africa, 32% of funds are labelled as gender-sensitive but often lack specific indicators or meaningful monitoring. Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) mention gender in 82% of cases, but few integrate it across all sectors.
In Nigeria, even with a gender-climate action plan and a climate budget tagging system, rural women continue to be excluded from decisions and resources. In Senegal, despite having a national strategy for gender equity and equality since 2005, the green industry remains poorly gendered and under-documented.
Yet there is growing evidence that targeted funding has positive impacts. In Senegal, the Baobab Group increased loans to women farmers by 54% between 2021 and 2023. Training programmes have helped improve sustainable farming practices, and insurance policies have been adapted to local climate realities. The Natur’ELLES project, active in 123 Senegalese villages, reaches over 85,000 people, including 5,600 women. In Nigeria, partnerships like the one between ADUST University and the GCAN programme are working to integrate climate, nutrition, and gender into local agricultural policies.
The Seeds of Change
In Nigeria, a quiet revolution is taking shape. In Kano State, where Hafsa Usaini’s children dropped out of school when the wells failed, women now whisper about the Baobab Group’s mobile loans—how a sister in Sokoto received ₦50,000 straight to her phone, bought drought-tolerant sorghum seeds, and kept her daughters in class.
Across the border, the solution reveals itself each dawn in Senegal’s Thiès region, where Fatou Binetou Diop walks past her half-built solar irrigation system to join women sorting heirloom seeds. Their hands move in practised rhythm—the same rhythm that taught them to predict rains by the flowering of desert roses and to restore degraded soil with compost their grandmothers perfected.
“What we build survives,” Fatou says, running a calloused finger along a seedling’s fragile stem. “The wells NGOs dug last year already ran dry. But these drought-resistant millet varieties? They’ll feed families when the rains fail again.”
The models exist where policy meets ancestral wisdom: In Senegal’s Casamance region, Mariama Sonko’s women’s collective increased crop yields by half after securing direct funding to expand their biofertiliser production. Near Lake Chad, when a climate programme finally put resources in women’s hands, they restored 200 hectares of degraded land in one planting season – using techniques their mothers taught them.
“They fly in consultants who tell us to farm differently,” Mariama says, watching a girl climb a mango tree to gather leaves for natural pest control.
“We don’t need lectures. We need what any farmer needs: tools, land rights, and money that doesn’t get stolen on the way down.”
A Future Already Growing
Rural African women aren’t waiting for salvation. They’re building it seed by seed, hectare by hectare, with knowledge as deep as the roots of a baobab tree. When given direct access to climate funds, they don’t just file reports; they plant trees that outlive donor cycles, train their daughters to become smarter farmers, and turn subsistence plots into thriving cooperatives.
The math is simple: the women feeding Africa today can cool the continent tomorrow if the world finally pays its tab. To exclude them from climate finance is to shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to a just transition. It’s sabotaging solutions that already exist in the hands of the women who feed Africa.
“We don’t need more reports—we need money in our hands,” says Mariama Sonko. “The women feeding Africa are ready. Is the world ready to listen?”
This collaborative report was written by Sadiya Ahmed Musa (Nigeria) and Zaynab Sangaré (Senegal) with the support of the Africa Women Journalism Project.