This chapter intends to inform current discussions about what constitutes, and most importantly, how to realize gender-transformative green transition paths in sub-Saharan countries. The transition to a green economy will create many new jobs around the world, including in sub-Saharan Africa, but there is a risk that women and girls will not share its benefits. This chapter concludes that women can benefit from the green transition in the region if countries adopt strong policies and programs to make it happen. Strategies should aim at facilitating a transition in which women and girls leapfrog to high-productivity green jobs. This chapter offers a menu of policy interventions to make that happen, with a focus on getting women ready for the transition, leveling the playing field to remove structural obstacles that women face to access green jobs, and accelerating their participation in the green economy while leveraging green finance and green economic instruments. Action on both short- and long-term strategies needs to start now to prevent the green transition from leaving women and girls behind.
Introduction
The transition to a green economy will create many new jobs around the world, including in sub-Saharan Africa. But will women share in these new jobs, and will the economic transformation help them move into higher-paid, more stable jobs that require more education and skills? The short answer is “yes”—provided that countries adopt strong policies and programs to make it happen.
The transition to the green economy will be a major trend shaping socio-economic outcomes worldwide over the next 50 years. This transition will create new economic opportunities, spawn new jobs, and spur the adaptation of existing jobs. One projection is that 24 million new jobs will be created worldwide just to accommodate the changes that are necessary to contain global warming to 2° C (International Labour Organization 2018a).
Like in any transition, there will be winners and losers. Some economic sectors will expand, others will shrink, and there will be associated employment redistribution. The gender impact of this transition could take different forms depending on whether women are over- or underrepresented in sectors that will grow or reduce their weight in the economy.
A focus of feminist analysis of climate change over the years has been on identifying how climate change affects men and women differently and the consequences of climate change with regard to gender inequalities. Much less attention has been paid to how the transition to the green economy, mitigation, and low-carbon paths could create opportunities for women’s empowerment. This chapter strives to shed some light on this topic for sub-Saharan Africa.
This chapter examines what needs to happen so that women and girls do not miss out on the opportunities to be created by the transition to the green economy in Africa. It will look at what policies and programs need to be put in place now so that women and girls can access the green jobs that will be generated in the region in the coming decades and for the accessed jobs to be high quality, high productivity, and decent. The answers to those questions intend to inform current discussions about what constitutes and, more importantly, how to realize gender-transformative green transition paths in sub-Saharan countries.
Opportunities for Women in the Green Economy in Sub-Saharan Africa
The International Labour Organization (2018b) projected that the greening of the world economy (to hold global warming to 2° C) would create 24 million new jobs and that job growth would take place across nearly all sectors of the economy. Globally, the shift to a green economy to combat global warming would create 4 percent more jobs in agriculture than if business continued as usual, 20 percent more jobs in forestry, and 10 percent more jobs in transport. A range of sectors will create green jobs in sub-Saharan Africa, with energy, construction, and agriculture accounting for the largest numbers.
Across sub-Saharan Africa, employment data show that women are well positioned in some of the sectors where green jobs will be created but are underrep-resented in others that will create the higher-quality jobs. The agricultural sector in sub-Saharan Africa employed 53 percent of working women in 2023. Most women’s work in agriculture is via self-employment.
Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s highest rate of women involved in entrepreneurial activity at 26 percent; women entrepreneurs contribute as much as 13 percent of the continent’s GDP (Dushime 2022). Forestry and tourism, where the growth of green jobs is also expected in the region, are also important areas of female employment. However, women are underrepresented in key sectors of the green economy that will offer the best jobs. Those sectors most likely to create higher-end green jobs include energy (especially wind and solar), transportation, construction, and some niche areas of services (for instance, green advisory). Women are overrepresented in agriculture, waste management, and certain areas of renewable energy (biomass), which are likely to create mostly lower-end jobs. The energy mix will depend to a certain degree on country policies. A positive development, however, is that even in sectors where women are not well represented, they are finding niches, often as small women-led businesses in indirect jobs in green construction, renovation, or energy efficiency (see examples in Box 20.1).
Women Greenpreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa
Across sub-Saharan Africa, women entrepreneurs and women-led businesses are entering the green economy. These are some examples of leading women “greenpreneurs” in the region.
Solar Sister is a nonprofit organization that recruits, trains, and supports women entrepreneurs and supplies them with durable, affordable solar-powered products and clean stoves, thus leading to the development of clean energy businesses and markets in last-mile rural African communities. Through this model, implemented in Tanzania, Uganda, and Nigeria, the Solar Sister women entrepreneurs earn income by selling the clean energy products directly to people without access to power in their communities, which helps eradicate energy poverty. The business model of Solar Sister is to eradicate extreme energy poverty while empowering African women. Solar Sister invests in local women entrepreneurs to start, grow, and sustain successful clean energy businesses by providing them with a comprehensive training package and ongoing mentoring in the business, technology, and leadership skills necessary to kickstart a sustainable clean energy business. As of 2023, more than 8,500 Solar Sister Entrepreneurs have reached 3.9 million people in Africa with clean energy.
Solar Mamas is a women-led business that has installed solar panels in rural coastal communities in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including Tanzania, where less than 4 percent of the population has access to the electricity grid. As of 2016, the group of 13 women with low literacy trained in a six-month course to become solar engineers at India’s Barefoot College (including building, installing, and maintaining solar panels and batteries) and had installed more than 800 solar units. Recipients pay a monthly fee set to be less than the average monthly cost of kerosene, the most common source of light. The panel installer receives half of the fee, and the other half goes to community projects. With support from UN Women, the Solar Mamas model has also been developed in Liberia where, as of 2017, the Solar Mamas have electrified over 425 homes and structures in their hometowns. According to the India-based nongovernmental organization, every woman trained by the program electrifies an average of 50 homes in her village.
In Senegal, E-Cover is a woman-led business that recycles used tires into rubber aggregates, tiles, shoe soles, and flooring for businesses, households, sports complexes, schools, and town halls. In 2020, the company collected more than 834 tons of tires and employed 25 people. They have recently secured funding to expand through WIC Capital, an investment fund for women-led micro, small, and medium enterprises in West Africa.
In Kenya, Pine Kazi, a women-led fashion design business, uses pineapple waste produced after harvest to craft ecofriendly shoes. Their model encourages pineapple farming communities to move from a linear model of plant-harvest-dispose to a circular model of plant-harvest-reuse. They connect waste managers with product designers to use pineapple-leaf waste as clothing material and create green jobs for unemployed youth. Pine Kazi was a winner in the African Development Bank’s Fashionomics Africa Initiative (https://fashionomicsafrica.org), which supports producers of sustainable fashion.
Focus on Agriculture
In the short term, given the high share of women in the sector’s workforce in sub-Saharan Africa, most green job opportunities for women in the region will be in agriculture. The agriculture, forestry, and fisheries sector, as well as the entire system of food production, is both the highest greenhouse gas–emitting sector in sub-Saharan Africa and the most vulnerable to climate change.
The agriculture sector will need to shift fundamentally to more sustainable practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to enhance resilience to climate change. Whether this is done by promoting a more efficient use of resources in conventional agriculture or via a shift toward conservation and organic farming, such changes will require financial investments, research, and capacity building, and will demand new skills and create new jobs. In the short term, the shift to conservation agriculture may even cost jobs because it requires less labor. In the medium term, on the other hand, it may produce better-paying jobs for more skilled workers. Evidence shows that green practices in agriculture help increase workers’ incomes by lowering input needs, increasing yields, and fetching higher prices or a combination of these factors. Returns on economic activities in green agriculture can be high where jobs are linked to green certification and labeling, which can help ensure sustained access to profitable global markets.
The combination of a transition toward green agriculture and the process of digitalization currently underway in the region, which has accelerated during and in the post–COVID-19 period, can also bring new opportunities for high-end green jobs in the sector. Recent research in East Africa shows that developing innovations and digital technologies that support agroecological practices, such as blockchain technologies for quality assurance and supply management and digitized certification of standards in organic farming, can create new jobs. However, the same study shows that most of the job opportunities in high-value products and services are taken by educated youth and youth who reside near towns (UN Women 2021a).
Climate-resilient agriculture, conservation agriculture, and organic farming may offer quick-win opportunities for female smallholder farmers to move into green jobs because the transition to green jobs can be realized in a short time with relatively small investments for training and other skills-enhancement strategies. Access to higher-end jobs linked to digitalization and innovation trends in agriculture will require longer-term strategies that emphasize investment in education among other things.
However, even to realize short-term opportunities for women in green jobs in agriculture, several structural obstacles to their participation in rural value chains need to be addressed. Despite women’s prominent role in agriculture, they tend to be employed mostly in informal, vulnerable jobs at the early, low-productivity stages of agricultural value chains: 89.7 percent of employed women in Africa are in informal employment when agriculture is excluded, and 92.3 percent of employed women in Africa are in informal employment when agriculture is included (International Labour Organization 2018b). Research shows that the gender gap in agricultural productivity does not arise because women are less efficient farmers but because they experience inequitable access to agricultural inputs, including family labor, high-yield crops, pesticides, fertilizer, and land (UN Women 2019). Unequal access to male family labor is one of the most important factors in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Tanzania. In Tanzania, lack of male family labor explains virtually the entire gap in agricultural productivity, whereas in Ethiopia and Malawi, it accounts for about 45 percent of the agricultural productivity gap (UN Women 2019). One of the primary explanations for these gaps is women’s household care responsibilities, along with lower access to cash income related to heavy demands on their time performing unpaid farm labor for their husbands. Women may also be unable to scale up to the level required for high-value crops if they are constrained by plot size. UN Women’s research in East Africa shows that women, as well as youth with disabilities and youth who reside in rural and remote areas, are excluded from opportunities in agriculture because of problems with accessing land, lack of access to finance, lack of capacity development efforts near their area, lack of access to digital technologies, and low digital literacy (UN Women 2021a).
Social norms are an important constraint to women’s access to high-productivity jobs in agriculture. In Malawi, Uganda, and Tanzania, women’s high burdens of unpaid care and domestic work leave them less able than men to invest their time in agricultural work. UN Women’s research (2023) shows that, in northern Senegal, as many as 45 percent of rural women are responsible for caring for a family member with a disability or chronic illness; female farmers spend up to 12 hours per day on direct and indirect care work, which substantially limits the time that they can spend farming. Women are also less able to work on their own self-managed plots of land because of social norms that create the expectation that they will work on plots that are controlled by or jointly with their husbands before working on their own, particularly in polygamous households. These norms reduce the amount of time that women have available for their own plots and their likelihood of investing in higher-value, higher-maintenance crops (UN Women 2019).
Overall, user- and women-centric, multifaceted interventions that address these constraints and facilitate women-led business development in agribusiness and entrepreneurship can enable them to realize the gains associated with the green transition in the agriculture sector in the region.
Focus on Entrepreneurship and Green Finance
In the short and medium term, most opportunities for women’s participation in the green economy in the region will arise via self-employment and entrepreneur-ship. Women make up 58 percent of Africa’s self-employed population and are more likely to become entrepreneurs than men. Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s highest rate of women involved in entrepreneurial activity at 26 percent (Mastercard 2022). In the short term, most opportunities for green jobs will arise through entrepreneurship and women-led businesses in agriculture, forestry, waste management, circular economy, or renewable energy. Although women are already claiming green jobs in these areas as entrepreneurs and owners of small and medium enterprises (see Box 20.1 for examples), lack of adapted finance remains an important constraint to take their economic activities to scale.
The gender gap in access to finance in the continent is estimated at $42 billion (African Development Bank Group 2023). This gap has widened in recent years. Despite high rates of women entrepreneurs, women find it particularly difficult to secure financing for their businesses. Today, in the region, only 37 percent of women have a bank account, compared with 48 percent of men. This gap is strongly linked with social and cultural norms as well as access to land, which is especially important as collateral for loans to small businesses owned by women (Chapter 15).
Despite the tremendous growth of green finance in the past decade, women entrepreneurs and women-led businesses continue to be excluded from this source of financing. In 2021, green finance exceeded $720 billion, including green bonds, green loans, venture capital and private equity funding for green tech, green initial public offerings, and green acquisitions, which use funds to buy companies that bring environmental benefits (Barry 2022). Lack of sex-disaggregated data makes it difficult to fully assess the extent of the gender gap in access to green finance or the actual share of green finance that trickles down to women-led businesses, but the use of standard financial products and conventional mechanisms to deliver green finance points to the same barriers that women-led businesses face to access commercial finance. Most of the of green finance is channeled via commercial banks and investment vehicles that are not well adapted to small businesses, where a large proportion of women-led entrepreneurial activity lies. A recent report by the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Financial Inclusive Finance for Development (2023) claims that green finance has focused primarily on opportunities for traditional players (for instance, banks and institutional investors), with less attention on tools and pathways for microsegments, including households and micro, small, and medium enterprises.
Only a fraction of green finance is gender-responsive, and just a small percentage reaches organizations for women in the Global South. Taking public finance as an example, and using the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (2016) methodology to assess gender-responsiveness of official development assistance,2 about 31 percent of total climate aid was gender-responsive; just 3 percent had gender equality as a principal objective, whereas 28 percent integrated gender equality as a secondary objective. Across regions, the gender focus of climate aid in Africa seems to be higher than in other regions with six African countries among the top 10 recipients of gender-responsive climate aid (Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda). Overall, however, the proportion of gender-responsive aid that went to southern civil society organizations amounted to just 2 percent (OECD DAC Network on Gender Equality 2016). The role that women’s organizations can play in climate change adaptation and mitigation is restricted because of limited green finance flows to women’s organizations. Women’s access to green finance has been a priority in the advocacy of the global women’s movement over recent years. The Women’s Environment and Development Organization (2019) identifies women’s access to green finance as an essential element of gender-just climate action to achieve systemic change in addressing climate issues.
Gender-responsive finance concentrates on adaptation rather than mitigation and focuses on the primary and secondary sectors. According to the OECD, adaptation and projects with cobenefits appear to offer the most potential for integrating gender considerations, currently reporting 27 percent and 43 percent of finances as gender-responsive, respectively. On the other hand, only 7 percent of tracked mitigation finance was gender-responsive. This is consistent with the emphasis of feminist analysis and climate action on the impact of climate change on women and gender equality and less so on how transition to the green economy and mitigation paths could generate opportunities for women. By sectors, agriculture, forestry, and other land use and industry had the highest gender-responsiveness rates: 35 percent and 28 percent, respectively. Almost none of the aid to energy and transport, critical sectors in the generation of green jobs in the future, was reported as targeting gender equality as a principal objective (Women’s Environment and Development Organization 2019).
Women’s Obstacles to Participate in the Green Economy in Sub-Saharan Africa
Women face several barriers that may limit their full access to green jobs in the coming years. Many of the obstacles mentioned regarding agriculture or entrepre-neurship also apply to green jobs in other sectors. These include barriers to women’s and women-led businesses’ access to land, finance, and technology. In addition, skills deficits are barriers for women to access green jobs in the short term. Addressing this, via access to key assets and investments in skills, will be important in the short term and will realize some quick wins. However, addressing skills deficits will not be enough to ensure that men and women enjoy equal access to green jobs. Skills-oriented interventions might be sufficient to facilitate access to green jobs for men and boys. However, for women and girls, structural barriers from social norms will need to be addressed in parallel.
Discriminatory social norms underlie many of the obstacles that women face in accessing green jobs—and jobs generally—including barriers to land access, finance, and skills-building opportunities. They also constrain women’s participation in certain sectors by dictating which ones are considered male-oriented areas of employment and which are perceived as offering acceptable jobs for women. More critically, the unequal distribution of unpaid care work between men and women is a significant barrier to labor market access for women. In sub-Saharan Africa, women living alone have a higher labor force participation rate (92 percent) than women who are married (77 percent) and women with children (80 percent). Women are still responsible for the vast majority of sub-Saharan Africa’s unpaid domestic and care work and spend more than twice the time on household chores and care responsibilities as men. Indicatively, in Tanzania and South Africa, women’s share of unpaid care work is 79 and 70 percent, respectively (Charmes 2019). In Senegal, women spend an average of four hours per day on housework and childcare compared to less than 30 minutes for men (Agence Nationale de la Statistique et de la Démographie, Agence Francaise de Developement, and UN Women 2022). In Benin, women spend, on average, three hours and 41 minutes per day on unpaid care work compared to 42 minutes for men (Charmes 2019). In Mali, women spend an average of 21.6 hours per week on unpaid work compared to 5.7 hours for men (Observatoire National du Dividende démographique Mali and UN Women 2022).
In rural areas particularly, water and wood collection are time-consuming tasks done largely by women and girls, which limit their opportunities to earn money. Women’s disproportionate care work burden limits their ability to participate in the labor market overall, and it has been shown to affect women’s ability to enter green areas of employment. For example, a study on skills required for green sectors across 32 countries concluded that without policy interventions, the energy transition is expected to promote more employment opportunities for men than for women (International Labour Organization 2019). According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (2019), lack of adequate work-life balance, care solutions, and flexible working measures is a critical impediment to retaining women in the wind energy industry.
Gender in Green Transition Policies in Sub-Saharan Africa
Integrating gender equality into mitigation and adaptation policies helps accelerate sustainable, inclusive, and equitable country-driven climate action. Nationally Determined Contributions, which are at the heart of the Paris Agreement, are policy documents that state efforts by each country to reduce national emissions and to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Integrating gender considerations in Nationally Determined Contributions is an iterative process to meet gender equality goals through climate action, including by allocating budget for gender activities. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (2021), countries have altogether increased their attention to gender, but still a quarter of Nationally Determined Contributions is gender blind at the global level. About 94 percent of sub-Saharan Africa Nationally Determined Contributions mentioned gender or women—they consider the impact of climate events on women’s livelihoods, acknowledge women’s contributions to climate adaptation, and commit to women’s participation in decision-making roles.
Similarly, the National Adaptation Plans, from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2021), identify medium- and long-term adaptation needs and develop and implement strategies to address those needs. This is an iterative process implemented in a country-driven, gender-sensitive, participatory approach. As of April 2022, of 44 countries that had submitted National Adaptation Plans, 17 are from sub-Saharan Africa (UNFCCC 2023). All National Adaptation Plans integrate gender considerations to varying degrees. This helps ensure that adaptation planning processes address persistent gender inequalities by recognizing gender differences in adaptation needs and capacities, promoting gender-equitable participation and influence in adaptation decision-making, and ensuring gender-equitable access to financial resources and other benefits because of climate adaptation investments. The greatest increase has happened since 2020, which coincides with the establishment of the enhanced Gender Action Plan. Most National Adaptation Plans recognize women as a vulnerable group, whereas fewer identify women as a key stakeholder group in the adaptation planning processes.
Finally, Long-Term, Low-Emissions Development Strategies are policy instruments, in line with the Paris Agreement, that identify long-term, low-emissions paths of economic development and propose changes to the economic development model of a country. Because of their long-term outlook, these policies are ideal for identifying opportunities for women to participate in the green economy (in the new low-emissions scenarios identified by the strategy) while there is still time to address some of the structural barriers that women face to access those jobs. In Africa, Ethiopia and Burkina Faso have implemented Long-Term, Low-Emissions Development Strategies that have integrated gender analysis (see Box 20.2 for more on the strategy in Burkina Faso).
Beyond the Paris Agreement–related instruments, countries are developing policies to inform their transition to a green economy, both sectoral and nonsec-toral, which offer opportunities to integrate gender considerations. At the sectoral level, sustainable energy and energy reform, together with agriculture, forestry, waste, or sustainable transport policies, are important instruments. Other policies with a nonsectoral focus include national green jobs strategies, such as the ones in Senegal or Ghana, and green finance strategies. Most policies lack analysis of gender co-benefits associated with those economic reforms, and gender considerations are lacking from the policy formulation process. Data constraints are an important limitation in this process because limited sex-disaggregated employment data at the subsector and position level in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa make it difficult to quantify specific gender-differentiated employment impacts associated with the transition. A narrow approach to gender analysis, focused on skills and access to finance without understanding the role that social norms play in influencing women’s access to assets and the labor market, also limits the reach and effectiveness of recommendations in some of these policies. Although integrating gender in green transition policies is important, the impact of such policies will also depend on the extent to which they are aligned with and integrated into governments’ medium- and long-term priorities and expenditure frameworks. Gender-responsive budgeting, which is applied to different degrees in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, can help establish the link between gender policy priorities in relation to the green economy and public expenditure (Chapters 11 and 12); gender-responsive budgeting can also help prioritize public resource allocations for operationalizing and implementing many of the gender commitments in sectoral and non-sectoral green economy national policies. However, effectiveness will largely depend on the countries’ capacity to fully implement gender-responsive budgeting. UN Women (2021b) researched government compliance with the 10 percent allocation of agriculture budget as part of the Maputo declaration3 in seven countries in eastern and southern Africa; the study showed that, although all of the countries except Burundi had produced guidelines on gender-responsive budgeting, the governments’ nonadop-tion of those guidelines was a barrier that prevented women from fully benefiting from the 10 percent budget allocation.
Gender in the Burkina Faso Long-Term, Low-Emissions Development Strategy
The Government of Burkina Faso led the process of forming a Long-Term, Low-Emissions Development Strategy. With technical support from the Global Green Growth Institute and UN Women for the gender analysis, two workshops were held in 2022 to identify gender co-benefits, negative impacts, and mitigating actions associated with the strategy and to assess employment effects arising from the low-emissions scenarios. The workshops included participants from all sectoral and nonsectoral ministries concerned with the strategy as well as representatives from civil society and women’s groups. Despite a lack of data to identify quantitative distributional employment impacts among men and women, workshop participants discussed in depth the challenges and opportunities for women’s participation in green jobs associated with the low-emissions scenarios—particularly in agriculture, forestry, waste management and energy. As a result, the workshop participants adopted a recommendation to establish a national Program on Green Jobs for Women and Youth, and gender targets were included in the Long-Term, Low-Emissions Development Strategy performance indicators.
Source: UN Women and Global Green Growth Institute. Forthcoming. “Guidance Note to Integrate Gender in LT-LEDS: The Case of Burkina Faso.”Policy Recommendations
Recommendations for policies to leverage women’s green job opportunities fall into three categories. First, policies need to get women and girls ready for the green economy through education, skills development, capacity building, and institutional support of women-led businesses. However, a major conclusion is that policies on skills development, which are the focus of most policy interventions to promote green jobs, will not be enough for women and girls to benefit from green economy opportunities and to access a fair share of the jobs to be created. Thus, policies need to level the playing field by addressing structural barriers that women face in accessing green jobs. Finally, policies should accelerate action to promote a gender-responsive green economy so that change can happen within a reasonable time frame.
Recommendations to Get Women Ready for the Green Economy
Reducing horizontal segregation in the labor market to allow women access to all green jobs on equal terms with men will require a combination of education policies, strong female role models, and support mechanisms for women in male-dominated sectors. Initiatives should focus on:
Addressing gender segregation in education and promoting women’s participation in science, technology, engineering, and math. If women are to reap the benefits of the green transition in sub-Saharan Africa, strong leadership and investment are needed to improve their access to education in science, technology, engineering, and math and to careers at all levels of the education system, from primary to tertiary, including vocational education and training.
Reskilling and upskilling. Retooling the labor force for the future of work is, according to the African Development Bank, a priority for Africa in the strategy for recovery from economic shocks associated with COVID-19. The report recommends that governments scale up efforts to retrain and reskill the labor force as quickly and as broadly as possible to facilitate workers’ transition from low-productivity, obsolete sectors and jobs to new and emerging ones. This recommendation is particularly important in the context of women’s access to green jobs in the region. Reskilling and upskilling strategies will be needed to ensure that women can access new green job opportunities in sectors where they are already well positioned, but the greening of jobs will require new skills—for example, in agriculture and services. Training offers should reflect the current and future needs of the labor market, economy, and environment.
Developing women’s networks in male-dominated sectors. Establishing professional women’s networks and business associations in key sectors of the green economy with higher barriers to entry by women (for instance, construction, energy, and transportation) are a mechanism to support existing female professionals and to encourage others to join. Such networks can nurture female role models and enhance women’s ability to participate in those sectors. These networks can also be instrumental in advocating for corporate policies adapted to women’s needs, facilitate investments in women-owned businesses and start-ups in these sectors, and be a source for mentoring and coaching of women.
Supporting the transition toward the formal economy, which can facilitate women’s movement into better-paying green jobs with better working conditions. This will be particularly critical in sectors such as agriculture, forestry, or waste and, to a lesser extent, tourism.
Recommendations to Level the Playing Field for a Gender-Responsive Green Economy
Addressing social norms and improving the social environment to enable women’s participation in the green economy is crucial. This change requires both overcoming biases and expectations around the distribution of unpaid care work and overturning laws that limit women’s access to the resources and means to undertake economic activities. To this end, specific recommendations include:
Removing legal barriers and addressing gender discrimination in legislation. Key areas for reform include (1) amending legislation to ensure women and men have equal rights to ownership of immovable property (land) and equalizing the inheritance rights of sons and daughters; (2) introducing legislation (and enforcement mechanisms) to address sexual harassment in the workplace, particularly in male-dominated areas of the green economy (energy, construction, transport, and others); (3) amending legal provisions that do not allow women to open bank accounts or to move freely in the same way as men, which is required for doing business and for holding jobs on an equal basis with men; and (4) removing legal restrictions on women’s access to specific jobs and tasks. Additional policy and legal provisions to incentivize the development of corporate policies for female employees can also play a critical role in certain sectors.
Balancing men’s and women’s responsibilities for care. Addressing inequalities in the distribution of unpaid care can have an important impact on enabling women to take paid jobs, including in the green economy. Governments should invest in expanding care services, investing in infrastructure, and implementing policies to recognize, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care. Recognizing women’s unpaid care work is particularly important in sub-Saharan Africa, where a large part of care work is informal. Changing social norms through education and communication and involving men and boys are important means to effect change in this area in the medium term.
Investing in role modeling and focusing on youth to change stereotypes about acceptable jobs for men and women. Many of the jobs in the green economy will be in new occupations, not yet socially assigned to men or women. Thus, opportunities exist for women to claim new jobs as engineers, architects, energy-efficiency advisers, drivers of green buses, or green innovators across many different fields. The many women-led small and medium enterprises installing solar panels across the region illustrate how to pierce the “glass walls” and enter male-dominated sectors such as construction. Perceptions evolve slowly, but governments, civil society, and community leaders can take the lead through education, social communication, and advocacy by leveraging positive role models of women working in male-dominated sectors and by addressing young men and women from an early age. In the past, involving men and boys, including traditional leaders, in efforts to change social norms has proven effective in other domains such as gender-based violence prevention.
Recommendations to Accelerate Action for a Gender-Responsive Green Economy
Affirmative action to integrate gender targets and objectives into existing and new economic policy instruments can accelerate women’s access to green jobs. Through regulation, governments can expand opportunities for women in areas of the green economy that have the potential to generate many green jobs but have high entry barriers for women; these regulations can thus increase the speed with which change takes place. New economic instruments can also open new ways to assign economic value to women’s unpaid work on behalf of the environment—thus contributing to a truly transformative green transition from a gender point of view. Specific recommendations include:
Leveraging green economy instruments for women’s employment. As countries explore and identify the appropriate combination of taxes, subsidies, incentives, and other economic instruments to encourage a transition to the green economy, these measures can be designed in a way that supports women’s employment objectives. Specific provisions can be incorporated into the design of these instruments to carve out employment targets for women-led businesses, or for women directly, particularly in sectors of the economy with high employment generation potential and in which women’s share is low (energy and transport).
Prioritizing women’s access to green finance and redressing gender biases in the green finance architecture. The growth of green finance offers a unique opportunity to accelerate climate action. But women’s limited access to green finance restricts not only their contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation but also their access to jobs in the green economy. For example, although carbon credits are designed to compensate for mitigation activity, across Africa, grassroots women, who are at the forefront of climate change mitigation through their (unpaid) work preserving ecosystems with important carbon sequestration functions, do not access carbon credit markets (see Box 20.3 for examples). There is a need to address the gender gap in green finance and to rethink the green finance architecture to make it more inclusive and gender-responsive. Steps in the right direction include improving women’s participation in decision-making spaces; developing specific facilities to support grassroots women’s access to carbon credit markets and other green finance mechanisms; improving women’s information, knowledge, and capacity to access complex processes around green finance; and collecting sex-disaggregated data to track green finance flows along gender lines. In the meantime, leveraging current momentum around impact investments and gender lens investment to stipulate gender and women employment targets in green bonds and other private finance instruments represents more immediate opportunities.
Women’s Contribution to Climate Change Mitigation and Climate Finance: The Missing Link
Across sub-Saharan Africa, women-led initiatives in forestry and other ecosystems play a key role in carbon sequestration. This box provides a few examples. Despite promising experiences such as the Mikoko Pamoja project described here, only a small fraction of women are accessing the economic rewards derived from carbon credit markets.
In Casamance, Senegal, the association Poumoulindiana, a women’s economic interest group, seeks to reforest more than 50 hectares of mangrove trees per year. Mangrove forests are powerful tools for reducing greenhouse gas emissions; they store 50 times more carbon in their soils than tropical forests and 10 times more carbon than temperate forests.
In Mali, UN Women’s Climat et Energie Mali (Mali Climate and Energy) project project supports women’s participation in the biomass value chain through training in the production of improved stoves and sustainable fuels (500 women trained; 150,000 improved stoves and 119 tons of sustainable charcoal briquettes manufactured). Other initiatives include reforestation; management of tree nurseries; improved and efficient carbonization techniques; and establishment of women-led forest management mechanisms. The project has led to the generation of carbon credits linked to the activities to reduce biomass consumption (estimated to be 23,689 tons of reduced emissions of CO2 equivalent per year or 165,822 tons of CO2 equivalent over seven years).
The Mikoko Pamoja project in Kenya is an example of a mechanism to reward communities financially for sustainable forestry activities. As the world’s first project to fund mangrove conservation through the sale of carbon credits, it uses certification to compensate the community for reducing greenhouse gas emissions through the conservation and expansion of mangrove forests. Since 2017, the project has protected 117 hectares of natural mangrove forest and has planted 10 hectares of mangroves. The plan is to plant 2,000 trees annually over 20 years. The carbon benefits of the Mikoko Pamoja project are conservatively estimated at 2,500 tons of CO2 per year. In return, in a two-year period, the community received a total of $24,000 in income that has been reinvested in local projects determined through community consultation.
Conclusion
The transition to the green economy in sub-Saharan Africa can be harnessed by countries to promote gender-transformative development paths. Strategies should aim at facilitating a transition in which women and girls leapfrog to high-productivity green jobs and skip the slow climb from one low-productive job to one that is slightly better. The extent to which these promising paths will be realized will depend on the combination of policies and the level of ambition. But whatever the policy combination, action needs to start now—on both short- and long-term strategies—while there is still time to prevent the green transition from being severely biased against women and girls.
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This chapter is based on the findings of the 2021 joint report “Green Jobs for Women in Africa” by UN Women and the African Development Bank Group. The chapter incorporates findings from other research by UN Women in sub-Saharan Africa on different aspects of women’s participation in agriculture, as well as recent research and policy work supporting countries in integrating gender considerations in green transition policies.
The Development Assistance Committee gender equality policy marker is based on a three-point scoring system to qualitatively track the financial flows that target gender equality. Not targeted (score: 0) means that the project or program has been screened against the marker but has not been found to target gender equality. Significant (score: 1) means that gender equality is an important and deliberate objective but not the principal reason for undertaking the project or program. Principal (score: 2) means that gender equality is the main objective of the project or program and is fundamental in its design and expected results; that is, the project or program would not have been undertaken without this gender equality objective. This allows the OECD to identify gaps between the Development Assistance Committee’s donor policy commitments and financial commitments. For more information, see the Development Assistance Committee gender equality policy marker (OECD 2019).
The Maputo Declaration is a declaration on Agriculture and Food Security in Africa that was signed by African Heads of State and Government in Maputo, Mozambique in July 2003. The declaration called for a pan-African flagship program to enhance agriculture production and bring about food security on the continent. The declaration also called for a re-investment of at least 10 percent of national budgets to improve food security, reduce poverty, and spur rural development.