The purpose of the study is threefold:
(1) to shed more light on the gender dimension of green growth, especially in the context of private sector development and thereby fill an important knowledge gap in the green growth discourse;
(2) to validate women’s contributions to green growth and sustainable private sector development; and
(3) ultimately to promote women’s empowerment and gender equality.
The overall approach of the study combines three intersecting perspectives, which are dealt with independently as well as in tandem: a gender perspective with a focus on the (potential) participation of women, a greening perspective and a private sector development perspective.
The study contains case studies from Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Philippines, South Africa, Uganda and Vietnam.
Green jobs represent a new kind of employment which is not yet caught in the history and inertia of social inequity. This could represent an opportunity for a more equitable sharing of revenue between capital and labour. This opportunity may also help women into career path’s that will allow them to become more financially secure and support themselves and their families.
The recent study undertaken falls into this type of combined exercise, demanding a change towards a sustainable production model, and at the same time shedding light on what kind of jobs should be defended and which should not, and which policies to promote or reject. The paper sets the challenge of analysing and putting forward proposals for discussion from working women, advancing towards a gender perspective, as other studies on green jobs have included little or no reference to women workers.
Climate change is one of the greatest global challenges of the twenty-first century for developed and developing countries alike. Though developing countries have contributed the least to the causes of climate change, they stand to suffer more due to their vulnerability to extreme environmental events. Women and men working in sectors most dependent on the weather, such as agriculture and tourism, are likely to be most affected. Climate change, moreover, is not gender neutral. Women are increasingly being seen as more vulnerable than men to the effects of climate change because they represent the majority of the world’s poor and are proportionally more dependent on threatened natural resources. What is more, women tend to play a greater role than men in natural resource management – farming, planting, protecting and caring for seedlings and small trees – and in ensuring nutrition and as care providers for their families. Yet, in the long run, no one – women or men, rich or poor – can remain immune from the challenges and dangers brought on by climate change.

The discourse on climate change does not pay adequate attention to women, either at the local project level or in international negotiations. Women are unable to voice their specific requirements even though the impact of climate change affects women and men differently. In several rural areas of the South, although women are responsible for feeding their families and are therefore more dependent on natural resources such as land, wood and water, their access to these resources is limited. They are also denied full access to loans, education and information.
Second, the potential of women as agents of change for climate mitigation and adaptation remains untapped: Their extensive theoretical and practical knowledge of the environment and resource conservation is not given due consideration. In terms of economic participation, they are not paid for the environmental services that they already provide (e.g., reforestation). Their potential contribution to climate mitigation by being part of the economic cycle is not sufficiently exploited.
This collection of contributions by gender and sustainable development experts explores the interconnections between gender equality and sustainable development across a range of sectors and issues such as energy, health, education, food security, climate change, human rights, consumption and production patterns, and urbanisation. The articles provide evidence on how women’s equal access and control over resources not only improves livelihoods, but also helps ensure the sustainability of the environment. Recommendations for policy makers and practitioners include: develop a participatory and gender-responsive consultation process to inform and ensure equitable decision-making; commit to building a green economy based on gender equality, poverty eradication, and technological and social systems that reduce the environmental impact of production and consumption; decrease women’s growing burden of unpaid labour by increasing their access to appropriate technologies and natural resources.
The publication contains several case studies, including from Ghana.
This summary was prepared by Eldis.


Early in 2012 Mexico, as G20 President, invited international organisations to examine practical actions that could be undertaken to sustainably improve agricultural productivity growth, in particular on small family farms. The preparation of this report, co-ordinated by the FAO and the OECD, is a collaborative undertaking by Bioversity, CGIAR Consortium, FAO, IFAD, IFPRI, IICA, OECD, UNCTAD, Coordination team of UN High Level Task Force on the Food Security Crisis, WFP, World Bank, and WTO. The recommendations provided are broadly of two types: specific actions that can contribute in some way to improving productivity growth or sustainable resource use (whether building on existing initiatives or suggesting new activities) and more general proposals that may not be actionable as presented but that serve to highlight areas for priority attention.
This report examines how green growth and sustainable development policies can be incorporated into structural reform agendas. Indeed, as demonstrated in the report, many of these policies are closely linked and synergistic with the framework policies applied by G20 governments in their efforts to pursue strong and sustainable growth.
Climate change is one of the most pressing threats to development today. Addressing climate change requires that countries take an integrated approach to climate and development planning so that policies and actions across multiple sectors and scales facilitate the adaption to climate change and deliver poverty reduction gains. An important tool for countries to manage climate finance is the National Climate Fund (NCF). NCFs are nationally-driven and nationally-owned funds that help countries to collect climate finance from a variety of sources, coordinate them, blend them together and account for them. This guidebook is part of a series of practical guidance documents and toolkits to support national and sub-national governments to achieve low-emission, climate-resilient development. It is based on UNDP’s decades of experience in delivering climate change programming in order to help countries design and establish an NCF.
The guide presents the following as key goals of NCFs:
•collect sources of funds and direct them toward climate change activities that promote national priorities