In today’s episode of The Arc, ECSP’s Angus Soderberg and Claire Doyle interview Nisha Singh and Kavin Mirteekhan from Women for Women International. We dive into the organization’s recent report, “Cultivating a more enabling environment: Strengthening women’s resilience in climate-vulnerable and conflict-affected communities,” to hear how women around the world are disproportionately impacted by conflict and climate shocks—and what we can learn from their solutions. 

In today’s episode of “The Arc,” ECSP’s Angus Soderberg and Claire Doyle interview Nisha Singh and Kavin Mirteekhan from Women for Women International. We dive into the organization’s recent report, Cultivating a more enabling environment: Strengthening women’s resilience in climate-vulnerable and conflict-affected communities, to hear how women around the world are disproportionately impacted by conflict and climate shocks—and what we can learn from their solutions. 

A snapshot of Women for Women International’s work: capacity-building, men’s engagement, and a community-driven policy agenda 

Nisha: Since 1993, Women for Women International has supported over 530,000 women survivors of war and conflict in 16 countries through the provision of direct programs or through our support to local partners. Our core program, our Stronger Women Stronger Nations program, offers informational training and skills-building, connects women to networks in their communities, and also provides resources which includes a monthly cash stipend to women survivors of war, who also often face other compounding challenges such as poverty or illiteracy. 

We also have a change agent program to support women in becoming community advocates and leaders who are able to influence formal and informal powers structures in their lives, so that they can tackle the issues that matter that to the most to them…So anything that makes its way into my daily work, or as my daily priority, it comes directly from the communities and from the women that we serve. 

Kavin: We also have another program that is also supporting women, which is called the Men’s Engagement Program. Our main targets are the spouses, in order to create dialogue on issues related to economic and social factors and how to have a healthy family. [In Iraq], so far, there is very positive feedback from the men themselves when they join the program. 

The impetus for Women for Women’s 2023 report on women’s resilience in climate vulnerable in conflict affected communities

Nisha: We already knew that climate change or conflict-driven environmental degradation was affecting the communities where we work, because we were already having to adapt for it in our program delivery. For example, our vocational training tracks in our core programming are often agriculture related. [From what women were telling us], we knew it was a growing challenge that we would have to face programmatically. And even zooming out from what we were hearing from the women in our programs, we already knew that many of the places where we work are not only affected by conflict and poverty, but they’re among some of the most climate vulnerable in the world. 

Findings from the Report: How conflict and climate are disproportionately impacting women around the globe

Nisha: We really wanted to hear from women to understand the unique and disproportionate impact of this climate-conflict intersection on women and their resilience, but also how they might already be adapting what we could learn from them and their solutions.

Women are really connected with these issues, and framed these issues in relation to their daily realities–they were talking about climatic and environmental shocks in relation to their family’s health, their experience of food security…But we don’t really see international actors connecting those dots in their programming…This really helped us to identify climate justice, rather than just mitigation or adaptation, as a better mechanism for approaching solutions. 

The specific case of Syrian refugee camps in Kurdistan

Kavin: While these women experience the same climate stresses as Iraqi citizens—the water scarcity, extreme weather events, and climate access to resources—they lack the same priority in policy responses and access to social safety nets. They are not prioritized by the government because the economic situation in the country is not good, so [the government] neglects to provide basic services for them. 

[Without support from the government for clean water] these women have to buy the water to provide for their daily needs to be able to take care of the household. This has been the situation for years, where hygiene support is no longer provided and water system provision to the camps is no longer provided, which also impacts the health care system. 

Where do we go from here? A look at Women for Women’s policy recommendations

Nisha: The programmatic recommendations we make are the need to break down silos across [funding] categories. Women are not experiencing life in specific funding categories. When implementers or donors are thinking about peacebuilding, or development, or climate change projects, they need to think about them more holistically. 

They also need to prioritize a community-led approach, which applies a gender lens across all programs to include gender analyses and gender-sensitive programming in climate and peacebuilding considerations…[And] women don’t want to just be working on “women related issues.” They should be at the table when talking about natural resource decisions or environmental management, and in post-conflict reconstruction. 

Ensuring that climate financing reaches women on the ground working on adaptation

Kavin: [Donors often] have a specific picture [of the community], and have a specific limitation for their fund. But when you come to the ground, you see the different facts on how these communities are suffering to provide, for example, clean water, to provide fuel for the family, [to provide] basic food items. And then you can understand exactly how you would recommend that your funds [be used]. 

Nisha: In order for financing to really be responsive and to address these challenges, as Kavin said, it has to [reflect] the realities and think about the capacities of these [local] organizations…Financing needs to be flexible, and it needs to be long term. [Donor shouldn’t be] setting an expectation or setting a blueprint, but actually partnering with and taking the lead from local civil society organizations, meeting women where they are in terms of how they see climate change impacting their lives. That’s really where we see the justice in this conversation happening and the relationship between financing and participation and inclusion.