Time to Act: Gender-Responsiveness and the Green Climate Fund

The briefing examines the Green Climate Fund's (GCF) potential to address the lack of gender-responsiveness and the bias toward large-scale mitigation in international climate finance. It highlights the specific vulnerabilities of poor rural women in Sub-Saharan Africa and calls for the GCF to implement operational modalities that ensure equitable access to funding and gender-disaggregated data for policy making.

• International climate finance institutions generally suffer from two primary deficiencies: a preference for large-scale mitigation projects and a lack of systematic gender-responsiveness in their policies and implementation.
• Poor rural women in Sub-Saharan Africa are disproportionately affected by climate change due to limited access to credit, land, water, electricity, information, and decision-making processes, despite possessing significant knowledge and innovation in coping with weather variability.
• There is a significant gap between the funding needs for adaptation in Africa and the actual disbursement; in 2011, only US$130 million of the US$350 million in approved adaptation funding for Africa was disbursed, with much of it failing to reach women.
• The GCF is the first international climate fund to incorporate gender considerations from its inception, yet it has failed to achieve gender balance in its decision-making bodies, with only 8 women out of 48 board members.
• Effective and sustainable international climate finance requires more substantial research and the collection of gender-disaggregated data from all global regions to inform the planning, implementation, and evaluation of projects.

APA

Tarpo, C., & Walker, T. (n.d.). Time to Act: Gender-Responsiveness and the Green Climate Fund. Institute for Security Studies. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/time-to-act-gender-responsiveness-and-the-green-climate-fund

Chicago

Tarpo, Catarina, and Timothy Walker. Time to Act: Gender-Responsiveness and the Green Climate Fund. Institute for Security Studies, n.d. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/time-to-act-gender-responsiveness-and-the-green-climate-fund.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Tarpo |first1=Catarina |last2=Walker |first2=Timothy |title=Time to Act: Gender-Responsiveness and the Green Climate Fund |publisher=Institute for Security Studies |url=https://issafrica.org/iss-today/time-to-act-gender-responsiveness-and-the-green-climate-fund |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{tarpondtime, author = {Tarpo, Catarina and Walker, Timothy}, title = {{Time to Act: Gender-Responsiveness and the Green Climate Fund}}, institution = {Institute for Security Studies}, url = {https://issafrica.org/iss-today/time-to-act-gender-responsiveness-and-the-green-climate-fund}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }