Climate change and natural disasters

Climate events and natural disasters often lead to resource shortages, the destruction of infrastructure, destabilisation of livelihoods, high health impacts and increased financial exclusion.

Women tend to save and carry out more cash transactions than men (often keeping savings at home or in their local community). Women have lower financial resilience (less savings, limited access to credit/insurance), and are often responsible for caring for the sick and injured, as well as bearing the responsibility of accessing clean water and food for their families and themselves.

In disaster situations, this not only increases the risk to women’s health and livelihoods, it also results in increased time poverty, preventing them from attending school or work. As a result, climate change often disproportionately impacts women.

Opportunity
medium

Opportunity to invest in innovative models that build resilience and strengthening women’s’ ability to be the key agents for change in minimising weather-related disasters.

Risk
high

Significant risk to women’s health, assets, and livelihoods.

Opportunity
medium
Risk
high

Compared to men, women have lower access to credit, emergency funds or savings. This means they have a lower resilience and ability to rebuild post-disaster.

Lower risk tolerance from financial institutions, because of increasingly frequent adverse weather events, is likely to disproportionately affect women, given their already low access to credit (due to lack of collateral and credit/spending histories).

Gender-smart investors can support investees to develop an integrated approach to build greater resilience, among ‘at-risk’ communities (particularly women) by:

  • Offering value-added services that encourage women (and men) to diversify their livelihoods and/or invest in increasing efficiency and improving reliability of their current resources (e.g. agri-insurance products).
  • Improving the level of consumer awareness and trust in financial institutions (e.g. community-based interventions).
  • Seeking ways to lower barriers to access to longer-term savings, credit (including emergency loans) and insurance.
  • Supporting innovations that strengthen and lower the cost of infrastructure (for example, Off-Grid Solar, mobile phones and network coverage for emergency services and digital financial services).

More info

Opportunity
medium
Risk
medium

Natural disasters often destroy the livelihoods of women in sectors dominated by female employment (e.g. textile and garment industries).

Gender-smart investors can support investees to develop an integrated approach that builds greater resilience among ‘at-risk’ communities, particularly those employing large numbers of women, by:

  • Offering value-added services to help diversify companies’ offerings and/or invest in increasing efficiency and improving the reliability of their current resources.
  • Seeking ways to increase access to emergency loans and insurance.
  • Supporting providers of innovations that improve the resilience of infrastructure relevant to the manufacturing sector (for example, road assistance networks and roads made of materials resilient to the increased range of temperatures associated with climate change).

More info

Opportunity
medium
Risk
medium

Climate events disproportionately affect women due to the social construction of gender norms in which women and girls often have limited access to – and control over – resources. For example, damage to schools and infrastructure interrupts the education of girls and boys. However, the responsibility of rebuilding a home, caring for the sick and injured, or accessing clean water after a weather-related disaster, tends to fall on women and girls. These efforts are often longer-term. As a result, girls are at higher risk of being pulled out of school permanently, to support their families.

Gender-smart investors can support investees to invest in mobile education technologies. With their high levels of accessibility, these technologies can meet the needs of those in disaster or resource-shortage situations in the short and medium term. Support can be provided by:

  • Presenting the high-level business case for entering the mobile health (m-health) and education markets.
  • Identifying local partners with the capacity and capability to manage and distribute digital content to large numbers of people in a targeted manner.
  • Supporting providers of innovation that strengthen and lower the cost of mobile infrastructure (for example, mobile phones, data, coverage, payments etc).

Sources: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2018/01/23/how-natural-disasters-undermine-schooling/ More info

Opportunity
medium
Risk
high

Natural disasters disproportionately affect women, “exacerbating previously existing patterns of discrimination that render females more vulnerable”. In other words, natural disasters often lead to higher rates of direct deaths and infections amongst women. Moreover, in times of shortage, women’s health is “more likely to suffer than their male counterparts’, according to U.N. WomenWatch… [because they] are often the first to reduce how much they eat, sacrificing their diets for other family members”.

Gender-smart investors can support their investees to enhance women’s health outcomes by:

  • Helping them to develop m-health technologies that offer women information about short and medium term self-treatment during disaster or resource-shortage situations.
  • Working with governments and health sector distributors and producers to create supply-side solutions that can be rapidly rolled-out in emergency situations (e.g. paramedic networks, drug stockpiles, etc).

Sources: https://thinkprogress.org/5-reasons-natural-disasters-are-worse-for-women-60fcf429b111/ https://psmag.com/news/climate-change-impacts-women More info

Opportunity
medium
Risk
medium

Gender diversity has been linked to improved financial and organisation performance. Several cross-regional studies observe a positive correlation between greater levels of gender diversity at the executive level and higher likelihood of financial and organisational outperformance.

For example, a 2014 McKinsey study of 210 African companies showed that, for organisations with 30 per cent of board positions occupied by women, earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) margins tended to be 20 per cent higher than the industry average. Comparatively, companies with no female representation on their board had an average EBIT margin of -17 per cent relative to the industry average. Although the number of female executives within financial institutions has improved over the past decade, overall figures remain low. For instance, within the banking sector, women typically hold fewer than 20 per cent of board seats globally.

There is also a clear case to serve more women clients with relevant and accessible financial products and services. Women are often their households’ ‘money managers’ and women-owned enterprises account for 30-37 per cent of all small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging markets.

Women customers are also creditworthy (tending to have lower non-performing loans), save at a higher rate than men and have a higher net promoter score and rate of product cross-selling.

However, 73 percent of women in sub-Saharan Africa, and 36 per cent in South Asia, do not have access to an account at a financial institution, compared to 62 per cent and 27 per cent of men, respectively. This gender gap is driven by a combination of demand- and supply side factors. Demand-side barriers include sociocultural norms (e.g. mobility constraints) restricting women’s access and usage. Supply-side barriers include high collateral requirements, traditional Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements and limited innovation to develop relevant products and services for women (for example, low-cost structured savings solutions support women to save effectively and manage their daily and often competing needs).

Gender-smart investors can support investees to increase access to OGS in cases of disaster or resource shortages by:

  • Improving the level of consumer awareness of OGS (e.g. through partnerships with local companies, collaboration with local agent networks, etc).
  • Seeking ways to lower barriers to access to OGS (including loans, pay as you go models).
  • Supporting regulators, financial institutions and other stakeholders to innovate in ways that lower the cost to serve and scale OGS.
  • Collaborating with major donors to ensure OGS is an integrated part of relief programmes.

More info

Opportunity
medium
Risk
high

Low income households are often forced to sell their productive assets, reduce their meals or leave their livelihoods in search of work. This disproportionately impacts women as the primary caregivers of their families and who make up 45-80 percent of the food-producing workforce in developing countries.

Gender-smart investors can support investees to develop an integrated approach to build greater resilience among ‘at-risk’ communities, particularly women, by:

  • Offering value-added services to help customers diversify their livelihoods, or invest in increasing the efficiency and improving the reliability of their current resources (e.g. agri-insurance products targeting women, savings and access to credit).
  • Building disaster-resilient agricultural value chains (for example, rainwater harvesting to reduce pressure on ground water).
  • Promoting disaster-resilient agricultural practices at scale.

Sources: https://psmag.com/news/climate-change-impacts-women More info

Opportunity
medium
Risk
high

Abnormal and extreme weather can damage or destroy infrastructure (roads, water supply) which women, as the primary care-giver, rely on for their basic needs. Women also tend to have lower levels of access to mobile phones, meaning they are less likely to be able to access help in disaster situations.

Gender-smart investors can support investees to increase resilience to climate change and resource shortages by:

  • Raising awareness of the risks to infrastructure posed by climate change and resource shortages (e.g. the need to create infrastructure, such as road networks, capable of dealing with a wider variety of temperature or higher rainfall).
  • Proactively working with regulators and governments to make infrastructure (e.g. mobile money) more resilient or efficient.
  • Proactively consulting with women and girls to effectively integrate gender perspectives in climate resilience projects, as well as disaster risk reduction and resilience agendas.

Sources: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~sjv340/roots_of_gender_inequality.pdf More info

Opportunity
low
Risk
low

Opportunity for women to work in the construction sector to drive post-disaster rebuilding efforts.

Disasters are likely to lead to an increase in migration – please see trend for potential impact on women. More info

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