International Day of Rural Women 15 October

Achieving gender equality and empowering women is not only the right thing to do but is a critical ingredient in the fight against extreme poverty, hunger and climate change.

Women are responsible for half of the world’s food production while working as environmental and biodiversity stewards. As farmers, women have learned how to cope with and adapt to climate change, for example, by practicing sustainable agriculture in harmony with nature, switching to drought-resistant seeds, employing low-impact or organic soil management techniques, or leading community-based reforestation and restoration efforts

Indigenous women have been at the forefront of environmental conservation by bringing invaluable ancestral knowledge and practices, and rural women have been leading global and national climate movements that have spotlighted the need for action for the sake of this and future generations..

Given their position on the frontlines of the climate crisis, women are uniquely situated to be agents of change — to help find ways to mitigate the causes of global warming and adapt to its impacts on the ground.

However, reports prove that climate change has a more pronounced impact on women, primarily indigenous and peasant women, whose agricultural dependence, living conditions, and marginalization expose them to a greater degree of changes due to climate, loss of diversity, and pollution.

This International Day of Rural Women's theme is “Rural Women Sustaining Nature for Our Collective Future: Building climate resilience, conserving biodiversity, and caring for land towards gender equality and empowerment of women and girls.” 

Let’s promote their work as food providers and protectors of the environment. Let’s demand their participation in decision-making within their communities. Let’s promote rural areas where women can have the same opportunities as men.

Did you know?

Rural women have less access to a range of resources, from land rights and credit to education and technology. If women had the same access to productive resources as men, farm yields could increase by 20–30 per cent, feeding an additional 100 to 150 million people.

Every year, female-headed households experience income losses of 8 percent due to heat stress, and 3 percent due to floods, relative to male-headed households.

A 1° C increase in long-term average temperatures is associated with a 34 percent reduction in the total incomes of female-headed households, relative to those of male-headed households.

Rural communities around the world are grappling with increasing challenges brought on by the climate crisis. However, it is rural women who suffer the brunt of these impacts, including significant financial losses. If you want to know real numbers, consult the FAO report The unjust climate.

Women are driving climate solutions at all levels – as farmers, workers, consumers, household managers, activists, leaders, and entrepreneurs. Get to know three reasons why women are essential in the climate crisis' fight.

From UN Women >>

The International Day of Rural Women recognizes the critical roles and contributions of rural women, including Indigenous women, in enhancing agricultural and rural development, improving food security and nutrition, and eradicating rural poverty. These are vital for protecting and securing our common future. The 2024 International Day of Rural Women invites all stakeholders to celebrate rural women’s essential role in building climate resilience, conserving biodiversity, and caring for the land.

There is much to protect against and to restore. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation have had significant impacts on the rights, resilience, and resources of rural women and girls. UN Women’s latest research estimates that globally, under a worst-case scenario, climate change may push up to 158 million more women and girls into poverty and 236 million more women and girls into food insecurity by 2050. Ecosystems, natural resources, and livelihoods are being depleted, and rural women’s ability to safely secure resources, such as healthy food, clean energy, and water, has diminished. Clean cooking fuels and technologies remained out of reach for nearly half of the world’s rural population (45.6 per cent) in 2022 and 1.8 billion people worldwide still rely on supplies off-premises for their drinking water. It is primarily women and girls who remain responsible for collecting biomass like wood for heating and cooking, and for collecting water in seven out of ten households.

It is time to promote rural women’s livelihoods, leadership, rights, and resilience as set out in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action ahead of its 30th anniversary next year. In doing this, we need to scale up investments, especially in rural areas, including in access to electricity and piped water systems. These are critical to alleviate women’s and girls’ unpaid care and domestic workloads and to support their daily work of building communities and restoring ecosystems.

It is equally urgent that we eliminate the discriminatory laws and practices that impede rural women’s rights to land and natural resources as has been called for in the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women. Despite the fact that rural women nurture life on the planet, their control over the land they cultivate is restricted or denied, while they earn just 82 cents for every dollar earned by men in agricultural production. These inequalities are compounded by women’s limited access to infrastructure, services, and social protection, which restricts their ability to bounce back from environmental shocks.

Let us replicate high-level commitments such as the Inter-American Decade for the Rights of All Women, Adolescents and Girls in Rural Settings of the Americas and the African rural women’s mobilization of the Kilimanjaro Initiative across all regions of the world to ensure that no rural woman is left behind.

And as we speed towards the three Rio Convention Conferences of the Parties this year, let us unite in promoting rural women’s rights, amplifying rural women’s voices, and taking concrete action to support their indispensable role in forging a more equitable, just, and sustainable world for all people and the planet.

With UN Reports & UN Women ..…