As we celebrate International Women’s Day, the Adaptation Fund continues to strive to advance gender equality and gender mainstreaming while enhancing adaptation actions on the ground for the most vulnerable.

The Fund’s Gender Policy and Action Plan adopted in 2016 and updated in March 2021 aims at mainstreaming equal access to all Fund projects and programmes, while building resilience and adaptation capabilities and enhancing gender equality and empowerment of women and girls. The policy ensures that equal rights, responsibilities, opportunities and respective interests, vulnerabilities, needs and priorities for women and men are considered throughout the project cycle. It also promotes women’s leadership roles in decision-making and adaptation planning.

The Gender Policy complements and mainstreams gender principles contained in the Fund’s Environmental and Social Policy, which has been in place since 2013 and was updated in 2016. It is further aligned with the Paris Agreement and is a cross-cutting element of the Fund’s Medium-Term Strategy, which advances gender equality and empowerment of women and girls across the Fund’s strategic pillars of Action, Innovation, and Learning and Sharing. The policies continue to be adapted and updated to meet the needs of the most vulnerable countries to climate change.

Fund projects are implementing strong gender components that are advancing these principles and adaptation outcomes in the process — across diverse areas such as livelihood diversification, ecosystem-based adaptation, sustainable farming and women’s entrepreneurship.