Help Women in Kenya Confront Climate Change

MADRE sees social change as the work of generations and views adolescence as a critical time for girls and young women to develop and strengthen the resources and resolve to create the feminist futures they imagine. Our work with VIVA Girls (organizations led by and for young women and girls) focuses across MADRE priority communities—LGBTQIA+ people of all genders, Afro-descendent, Indigenous, and refugee girls and young women, as well as those with disabilities and conscripted by armed groups—to build their leadership and feminist futures. While these groups face a triple-disadvantage—being young, female or gender non-conforming, and born into marginalized communities, which make their voices among the first to be excluded—girls, young women, and their allies are critical sources of solutions, inventing and implementing innovative, locally-rooted responses to challenges that offer a blueprint for effective, global action toward racial, gender, climate, and economic justice and a just recovery from crisis. Yet the priorities, experiences, and knowledge of girls, young women, and their communities are largely overlooked by traditional philanthropy and notably missing from social movements and decision-making spaces at every level.

In Kenya, the LGBTQIA+ community continues to face attacks both online and offline. Religious leaders and politicians are instigating and amplifying anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiments in the coastal region. Simultaneously, Kenya has been impacted by the adverse effects of the climate crisis, including a prolonged drought resulting in four failed rainy seasons and leaving more than 4 million people facing starvation. Additionally, the ongoing economic crisis has exacerbated the situation, making it even more difficult for frontline communities—especially the LGBTQIA+ community—to recover from the devastation of climate breakdown. 

As part of our VIVA Girls work and with your generous support, MADRE partners with Innovations 4 Climate Action (ICA); an organization launched by a young feminist leader from an existing partner, Empowered Ladies Initiative for Equality (ELITE)—which provides free mental health counseling and run a safe house for LBTQI people in Busia, Bungoma, and Kakamega counties, strengthening emotional resilience amid widespread job loss and isolation. ICA was formed in response to the global climate crisis and its impacts in Kenya, and the need for involvement of frontline communities, especially Lesbian Bisexual and Queer (LBQ) women in climate adaptation actions to enhance resilience to the effects of climate change and to ensure that climate resilience strategies are effective, equitable, and sustainable.

MADRE will continue to resource and support women and girl-led initiatives like ELITE and ICA  to uplift human rights and support critical avenues for gender and climate justice. 

Thank you for your commitment to Kenyan women and girls rights defenders and for supporting MADRE in this life-changing work.

In partnership with you, MADRE works with women and girl leaders who create their vision of the future for their communities. We build on this foundation by bringing the voices and expertise of women and girls to the United Nations, International Criminal Court, and other influential forums to create lasting change for human rights and gender justice. We move beyond uplifting one community — or even one country — to winning new laws that will benefit millions of women and girls for generations to come. Far too often, women are left out of essential decision-making conversations in the legal and policy arena. MADRE partners are examining their human rights struggles in the context of international law — and winning significant accomplishments.

MADRE has been supporting spaces that uplift our partners at the United Nations for over 22 years. The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), among other international spaces, allows MADRE partners to gather and share the challenges they face and their solutions for climate and gender justice. In April, for the 10th consecutive year, MADRE co-hosted with Rosa-Luxemburg Stiftung-NYC a delegation of partners from Nepal, Panama, the Philippines, Sudan, and the US-Mexico border participated in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. During the forum, Indigenous women and girls inform and help shape global Indigenous rights agreements. This year’s theme looked at the critical role that Indigenous women and girls play in climate justice advocacy. MADRE’s in-person event, “Reflections on Climate Justice from Indigenous Feminist Peacebuilders Around the World,” co-hosted with Rosa-Luxemburg Stiftung-NYC, was a conversation about what climate justice looks like in action, what challenges we face to achieving climate justice, and how we can leverage and apply international tools for advancing climate justice.

In Kenya, long droughts, the rise of food insecurity, COVID-19, and inflation have increased land disputes as well as threats of ethnic tensions. MADRE partner, the Indigenous Information Network (IIN), positions Indigenous women leaders–who for years have mobilized their communities to mitigate the impact of climate change and advocate for peacebuilding to lower risks of conflict across communities and advance climate justice. Additionally, MADRE has advanced opportunities for women’s and girls’ leadership, autonomy, and economic empowerment that contribute to improved community development and social cohesion. As core to our programming, MADRE provided partners with funding, training, and skills-building opportunities to create and/or strengthen community-based, women-led, and democratically-led climate adaptation and mitigation programming. For example, in Kenya, MADRE supported Indigenous women’s and girls’ Indigenous-knowledge-based solutions for conserving biodiversity, promoting reforestation, harvesting rainwater, protecting local water sources from contamination, and fostering alternative livelihoods, including growing and selling seedlings and surplus vegetables. We also continued to resource seed exchanges between women of different Indigenous communities that have cultivated deep connections and mutual solidarity.

We have built a foundation of trust with partners because we don’t prescribe solutions, instead, we listen to their expertise and serve as a bridge to connect them with resources and forums where they can advocate for their own solutions. By amplifying the voices and solutions of women and girls on the frontlines of crisis and allowing them to be heard in the global policymaking arena, we are using the power of the law and advocacy to improve women’s human rights for generations to come. Thank you for helping us make this important work possible.