Why gender-responsive action must anchor Africa’s Climate Summit 2025

Climate change is no longer a distant threat, it is a present crisis. With Africa warming faster than the global average and facing intensifying droughts, floods, and biodiversity loss, Climate impacts threaten decades of development gains.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) estimates that climate change could cost African economies up to 15% of GDP by 2030 if no urgent action is taken. But what often goes unnoticed is the economic toll of failing to integrate gender into climate strategies: a gap that is both costly and counterproductive. For climate action to be truly effective, it must reflect the realities and contributions of all people: across genders, generations, and geographies.

Women, girls, men, boys, and gender-diverse groups experience climate impacts differently. Yet women and marginalised gender groups, especially those from marginalised communities like those in the Arid and Semi-Arid Land (ASAL), often carry the heaviest burdens due to pre-existing inequalities.

At the same time, they remain largely invisible in decision-making spaces and are often viewed as beneficiaries and rarely as agents of change that they are. This has a major impact on the economy of African countries that are already struggling.

According to McKinsey Global Institute, advancing gender equality in Africa could add $316 billion to $550 billion annually by 2026, equivalent to 10–13% of the continent’s collective GDP. Gender-blind climate policies risk leaving this potential untapped. The upcoming summit offers a crucial chance to correct this imbalance and guide states to tap into the potential for effective climate action.

Gender-responsive climate action is not just about inclusion, it is about transforming systems of power. Across Africa, women and youth are frontline defenders of nature, food producers, caregivers, and peacebuilders. Their knowledge and agency are vital to building climate-resilient communities. UNDP research shows that climate interventions that exclude women are 15–20% less effective and less sustainable.

Findings from an IDRC-supported study on the Endorois and Ilchamus communities in Kenya show that women play critical, though often overlooked, roles in peacebuilding amid climate-induced conflict. Their contributions, ranging from faith-based mediation to youth mentorship, demonstrate that women are not mere victims of climate crises: they are solution-makers.

However, they are still struggling with systemic barriers that limit their effective participation. Their exclusion from formal climate security processes not only undermines local stability but also increases the costs of post-conflict humanitarian response and reconstruction.

A truly gender-responsive approach requires intentional strategies, including gender-disaggregated data, dedicated resources, and meaningful representation in climate governance at all levels. This approach will expose the cost of climate inaction and gender inequity through true cost accounting by integrating social, environmental, and economic impacts into decision-making.

This approach indicates that ignoring women’s unpaid care work and community leadership leads to undervalued national accounts; investing in women’s access to agroecology, renewable energy, and peacebuilding yields higher social returns per dollar; and the “externalities” of gender exclusion, like increased GBV, displacement, and poor health, create hidden economic burdens for governments and donors alike. With this, gender-responsive climate investments are not just moral decisions, they are fiscally responsible ones.

Africa’s just transition and climate ambition must therefore mirror equality and not historical injustices. Just transition should prioritise those most affected by climate change, many of whom are women and girls, ensuring access to clean energy, jobs, land, food security, education, and climate finance if the continent is to achieve effective climate action.

At the inaugural ACS that was held in Nairobi in 2023, African First Ladies emphasised women’s roles in this transition. However, their recommendations failed to make it into the final Nairobi Declaration, which only briefly mentioned women. The 2025 summit must do better by moving beyond rhetoric to integrate the disadvantaged gender groups, like women and youth, as leaders, not just beneficiaries.

This requires policy tools like gender-responsive budgeting, project-level gender audits, and participatory frameworks that recognise women's leadership in just transition, climate adaptation, and sustainable agriculture.

Speaking on sustainable agriculture, Africa’s food systems are in crisis, and gender and climate change are at the heart of it. Women produce over 60% of food on the continent, yet they receive less than 10% of agricultural credit, own just 13% of land, and face restricted access to markets and extension services. Climate shocks only deepen these gaps. The World Bank estimates that in agriculture, equal access to land, credit, and inputs could increase women’s yields by 20–30%, potentially lifting up to 150 million people out of hunger globally.

Building food systems that are resilient, inclusive, and equitable means investing in gender-responsive research, agroecology, and support systems that empower women as farmers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. It also means dismantling harmful gender norms that hinder women’s full participation in the food economy. These actions boost productivity, resilience, and community nutrition hence not just good development practice but a smart economic strategy.

Beyond the food and nutrition insecurity crisis, climate-induced conflict is increasing across Africa, especially in resource-scarce regions. Droughts, migration, and competition for land and water fuel tensions that often escalate into violence. Women, girls, boys, persons with disability, and the elderly suffer disproportionately from the resulting insecurity, displacement, and gender-based violence.

Yet, as shown in the peacebuilding processes among Kenya’s Ilchamus and Endorois communities, women are also key to restoring peace and resilience. This is corroborated by a global study on the implementation of the United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 that reveals that women’s participation increases the probability of a peace agreement lasting at least two years by 20 per cent, and by 35 per cent the probability of a peace agreement lasting 15 years. Investing in inclusive conflict-sensitive climate programming, therefore, reduces the need for reactive emergency spending and fosters long-term resilience.

The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) framework must be integrated into climate action plans, recognising women’s agency and supporting their roles in community-led conflict resolution.

Conflict-sensitive climate programming must include women not as passive recipients, but as peacebuilders and negotiators. This means funding and formalising women-led early warning systems, cross-border peace dialogues, and land tenure reforms.

Achieving all these will not be possible without gender responsive climate finance, which has remained severely limited despite global commitments like COPs and regional commitments like the Nairobi ACS declaration. Less than 3% of climate finance globally supports projects with gender equality as a primary objective. Most funding mechanisms still lack clear gender targets, disaggregated reporting, or safeguards against reinforcing inequalities.

The Addis Ababa summit should champion gender-tagged climate investments, establish funding windows for women-led, youth-led, and PWD-led initiatives. The funding windows should require gender integration in all financing frameworks, and support institutions to adopt true cost account frameworks and track social benefits.

The funding should promote transparency and accountability in finance flows that link outcomes to gender equity and climate resilience. Africa can lead by example: showing the world that climate finance without gender responsiveness is both ineffective and unjust.

As we build a Green Africa, the path forward must include everyone. A gender-transformative approach to climate action is not just the right thing to do, it is the most economically sensible path. Africa Climate Summit 2025 must be a turning point.

Building on the gaps of ACS 2023, this year's summit should adopt a gender-transformative agenda that: explicitly integrates gender equality into the summit declaration and outcomes; ensures women’s leadership in negotiations, panels, and policy design; commits to gender-responsive finance, food systems, and just transition frameworks; and promotes conflict sensitive climate action, and peacebuilding strategies rooted in women’s lived experiences and Indigenous knowledge.

Climate action that ignores gender responsiveness is incomplete and ineffective: it's not just a moral failure but an economic miscalculation. Economic justice, climate justice, and gender justice are not separate struggles: they are one and the same. As Africa rises to meet the climate challenge, it must do so with all voices at the table.