Throughout Gender Equality Week, CCIC will highlight the work that some of our members are doing to advance gender equality. This blog post was written by Catherine Boyce, Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED), and presents their Climate-Smart Agriculture Guides which won the UN Global Climate Action Award this past week.

Can you imagine toiling all day in the heat; getting your children to help you in the fields, and still not growing enough to feed your family and earn a living? This is a reality today for millions of women across rural Africa who shoulder the burden of farming to feed their families but who are hit by the double whammy of a female resource deficit and the impact of climate change.

On the female resource deficit – women farmers are typically 20-30% less productive than men. This is not because they work less hard – in fact they work longer hours on average. However, they don’t have access to the same assets – land and water – training, finance, information services and quality inputs such as seeds that male farmers do. Address that inequality and the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation estimates that as many as 150 million people will be lifted out of hunger worldwide.

Meanwhile, however, agricultural productivity is diminishing and under further threat in the face of more extreme weather which manifests as droughts, floods and the recent, devastating Cyclones Idai and Kenneth; destroying lives and livelihoods. For communities in rural Africa, climate change is not a theoretical concept or a risk that lies many  years in the future. It’s happening now. Rural African girls and women contribute negligibly to greenhouse emissions but are the first to feel the effects of climate change as they struggle to cultivate the land to produce enough to feed their families. They are particularly vulnerable to hunger, early marriage and violence in the context of resource scarcity.

We need a global response to this global threat. Like so many others, I’ve been tremendously inspired by young people’s action on climate change. Much of that action is taking place in sub-Saharan Africa, headed by young women living in some of the poorest rural communities. They are leading grassroots community action to safeguard food cultivation in the face of climate change, to manage water resources, and to protect trees and soil quality.

The Campaign for Female Education alumnae network – CAMA – is a movement of 140,000 educated young African women. Together they are spearheading action on climate change. This week they received the UN Global Climate Action Award in recognition of the effectiveness and potential for scale of CAMA’s climate action. Recipients of this UN Award represent some of the most practical, scalable and replicable examples of what people, businesses, governments and industries are doing to tackle climate change.

I first met Annie N’gandu in Zambia in 2008 when she was helping to run a leadership and enterprise initiative for other recent school graduates. Her positivity belies the tragedy of her childhood; she was orphaned at a young age and poverty meant that she missed many years of education. With support from the Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED), however, Annie was trained in entrepreneurship and launched and grew a successful agricultural business. For the last five years, Annie has been championing climate-smart agriculture in rural Zambia:

Annie has reached hundreds of other smallholders, young people and women’s groups with the skills they need to protect their farms from the more extreme weather that climate change has brought, and to improve productivity. She has won the confidence and support of local government agricultural officers, who invite her to train alongside them, and of traditional leaders, such as Chief Nkula who has been inspired to award a land grant of 300 hectares to cultivate a climate-smart demo farm. She’s also increased productivity on her own farm, provided a home for three abandoned children and supported more young people to go to school.

Annie isn’t alone in her climate leadership. From Eva Damasi who is building support for agroforestry in Tanzania to Clarah Zinyama in Zimbabwe who is working with mothers’ groups to boost the productivity of the smallholdings used to cultivate food for school meals; CAMA members are leading action on climate change across rural Africa.

These young women – known as Agricultural Guides – promote both traditional and innovative techniques for climate-smart agriculture. They were supported to develop their skills by the Toronto-based Mastercard Foundation, and EARTH University in Costa Rica, who, together with CAMFED and CAMA, developed a tailored course in sustainable agriculture. Helping to shape the content, the women leaders ensured it would be relevant to the context they live and work in, and in keeping with indigenous traditions.

Clarah, for example, has re-introduced intercropping – growing two crops on the same plot of land – on her farm. It’s a technique formerly practised by her grandmother that reduces soil runoff, preserves soil nutrients and helps with pest management. She re-uses old plastic bottles for affordable drip irrigation, setting them in the soil with tiny holes in the cap to steadily release water. Clarah also trains community groups to construct simple solar dryers to preserve food and reduce waste.

The results are clear to see in increased yields, family nutrition and income. To date Annie, Clarah and Eva and a small team of CAMA Agricultural Guides have reached over 8,500 people across rural Africa with knowledge and techniques to build farming productivity and build resilience in the face of climate change. These include affordable methods of irrigation, crop-rotation, organic composting and mulching which improve soil nutrition and carbon storage, water management and productivity. They are raising awareness in their communities of waste management and how to build cleaner cook stoves from local resources which use less fuel and reduce further carbon emissions. The Agricultural Guides are seeing the results in improved yields and profits on their own farms, have increased standing in their communities and have created an average of four new paid jobs each.

They’re also helping girls to succeed in school and beyond. Last year, for example, CAMA members used their own resources to help over 700,000 children go to school. They help each other to navigate the transition from school and build fulfilling livelihoods, moving up the value chain and seeing agriculture as a business opportunity. When girls stay in school and women generate an income they can avoid early marriage, gain decision-making power and take control over their life choices. These are top priorities in their own right which also have positive climate effects. They result in a later age at marriage and smaller, healthier families and cumulatively reduce both population growth and greenhouse emissions.

As Annie, Clarah and Eve’s experience demonstrates, it’s critical that our global climate strategy builds the strength of vulnerable communities to adjust to the effects of climate change, while urgently reducing further greenhouse emissions. At the Campaign for Female Education we’re working to get more resources into the hands of these young women on the frontline of climate change. Clarah sums up what this week’s UN Global Climate Action Award means to her and her peers:

Let us all endeavour to match her activism on climate change and stand together on this global challenge.

With limited access to clean water in her small village in Kenya, Anne contracted blinding trachoma. She lost all vision in her right eye and some in her left. Through Operation Eyesight’s SAFE program (which stands for Surgery, Antibiotics, Face washing and hygiene education, and Environmental improvement), Anne received surgery to treat the trachoma. Her pain is gone, and her remaining vision in her left eye has been preserved, allowing her to continue to provide for her nine children.

Throughout Gender Equality Week, CCIC will highlight the work that some of our members are doing to advance gender equality. This guest blog post was written by Dr. Mary G. Alton Mackey, Board Director of Operation Eyesight Universal.

Blindness is a gender issue. Blindness discriminates. Fifty-five per cent of the world’s blind are women and girls. More than 20 million women and girls are blind, and 120 million are visually impaired. Four out of five people who are blind don’t need to be.

And this injustice is magnified in developing countries. Women face additional barriers to accessing eye care that men don’t: lack of education, limited decision-making power, restricted access to financial resources and a lower perceived priority.

One reason for the disparity is that women live longer than men so they are more likely to develop age-related, non-communicable eye diseases such as cataract, glaucoma and macular degeneration. But despite the fact that more women than men are affected by the condition, cataract surgery rates are lower for women.

And this is only part of the picture.

Women and girls are at greater risk of contracting trachoma, an infectious eye disease that leads to irreversible blindness. Seventy per cent of those affected by blinding trachoma are women. Very young children are at risk for trachoma, and three times as many girls as boys suffer from it.

Women and girls are at increased risk for infectious eye diseases because of their traditional roles. Women and girls carry the burden of taking care of their relatives who suffer from trachoma or other eye conditions. Not only does this increase their risk of contracting trachoma themselves, but it often limits their opportunities to go to school or find employment.

Women who are blind carry the double burden of discrimination because of their disability and their gender, which can lead to social exclusion. This impacts their ability to do day-to-day activities, increases their risk of injury, and leaves them more vulnerable to violence and depression.

To achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the World Health Organization’s VISION 2020 goals, eye care programs must eliminate all forms of inequity in access to eye care for women and girls. Eye care programs must recognize that women and girls have different needs, preferences and constraints, and women and girls should be at the centre of eye health programming.

Organizations must work with local communities to understand the barriers women face, take affirmative action in training and human resource development to ensure there are more women in the health care system, and remove the barriers to access to services. In addition, programs should integrate eye health services into maternal and reproductive health facilities to give pregnant women access to eye health screening that is not provided routinely, and provide outreach to villages where eye disease remains largely undiagnosed and untreated.

Operation Eyesight works with local hospital and government partners to provide quality eye care services to everyone – regardless of gender, age, ability to pay or other personal circumstances – while working to address the many root causes of avoidable blindness and remove barriers to health care, specifically and deliberately targeting the barriers for women and girls. I’m especially proud of Operation Eyesight’s focus on community outreach and education. We train community health workers – women who live and work in our target communities – to conduct door-to-door eye screenings and educate families about eye health and general health topics such as prenatal care, nutrition and immunization. This approach allows us to reach women and girls who might otherwise go unreached, ensuring those with eye health issues are referred to a partner hospital or vision centre for treatment. Community health workers also refer women and their families to primary health care facilities for pre/postnatal care, vitamin A supplementation, immunizations, etc. These are just a few examples of how Operation Eyesight is embedding SDG 5: Gender Equality into our everyday work.