Forest landscape restoration needs women
Women play a key role in natural resource use and management, particularly in agriculture and forested landscape systems and along value chains. On International Women’s Day, IUCN delves into why women should be at the forefront of the global restoration movement and initiatives such as the Bonn Challenge and UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
Women make up about 43% of the agricultural workforce in the developing world. It's estimated that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could raise total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5% to 4%, in turn reducing the number of hungry people in the world by 12% to 17%. Moreover, women in forest communities may generate more than half of their income from forests. Women are deeply involved in land use across the world. They shape landscapes at scale, and need to be at the forefront of planning and implementation of forest landscape restoration.
IUCN convened a panel of four exceptional women to discuss how the forest landscape restoration approach can help to reduce inequalities.
Cécile Bibiane Ndjebet, African Women's Network for Community Management of Forests. A social forester and gender specialist from Cameroon with extensive experience in the field, in the civil service and internationally, shares examples on how restoration projects have failed when women were not adequately engaged in planning and implementation.
Samantha Figueroa, Member of Congress of Guatemala. Deputy for the Department of Chimaltenango and an expert in using the political system and courts to advocate for justice for people and communities, she speaks about how indigenous women have unique knowledge to contribute to restoration programmes.
Lorena Aguilar, Regional Coordinator, International Cooperation and Research for the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences former Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs (Costa Rica), and former Director of the IUCN Governance and Rights Programme speaks about the differentiated impacts of forest loss on women and which avenues should be taken to engage them.
Tangu Tumeo, formerly Principal Forestry Adviser, Ministry of Natural Resources, Energy and Mining, Department of Forestry (Malawi) speaks about her role in getting the government of Malawi to adopt a gender-responsive lens to its national forest landscape restoration assessment process.
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