African women are fighting climate change from the bottom up, but the billions go elsewhere

Women across Africa continue to build grassroots responses to climate change with little institutional support, even as international climate financing continues to flow largely toward formal programs that often collapse once the money runs out.

This comes as Africa is still routinely described in global climate discourse as a future “vulnerability zone”, a framing that overlooks the daily adjustments already underway across the continent.

At a recent webinar, women from five countries described how they are managing climate stress through practical routines that have become central to household survival.

The three day Green Skills Exchange Programme for Women in Africa, convened by the Lady Dynamique Network in partnership with One Planet Agency, brought together participants from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi and Nigeria.

The organisers said the event was part of a growing effort to promote cross pollination of ideas among women working in the climate action space.

The women who gathered described an informal, decentralised system of climate adaptation already operating across the continent and held together by everyday decisions made at the household level.

Africa contributes less than 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions yet absorbs some of the world’s worst climate consequences, including erratic rainfall, prolonged droughts, and flooding that directly threatens food supplies and incomes.

Women are managing most of that fallout, making up nearly half of the continent’s agricultural workforce, with roughly three quarters of employed women in Africa depend on farming or food-related work to survive, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation.

“Climate action doesn’t always require big, complex solutions,” said Esther Moses Sangasa of Tanzania. “It can start with small, everyday actions. Meaningful change begins with conversations.”

Those conversations, repeated across households and communities, are doing work that formal policy has struggled to reach.

Susan Chisi of Malawi identified a structural problem at the heart of climate programming. International climate funding arrives in short cycles while the stress communities are absorbing compounds over decades.

Grassroots groups, the ones most embedded in communities and most likely to endure, rarely see that money. “Women have to take the initiative to sit at the table where decisions are discussed and made,” she said, adding that real sustainability means ensuring community groups “can continue their work long after funding ends.”

Participants from Uganda, Nigeria, and Tanzania described remarkably similar patterns, with recycling, resource conservation, and energy saving operating as survival strategies woven into the rhythms of daily household life.

Seth Onyango of One Planet Agency said the distance between global climate governance and local climate reality is also a language problem. Emissions targets and temperature thresholds mean little to a woman deciding whether there will be enough rain to plant this season. Climate communication, he argued, gains traction when it speaks directly to food, health, and income.

By Nympha Ozougwu | One Planet Agency | OPA New Agency