Episode 6: Financing at the Nexus of Gender and the Environment
Dr Jeannette Gurung is the founder and Executive Director of WOCAN — Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management, a global network with over 1,300 members in 113 countries to support capacity building for women’s leadership and empowerment. She is the innovator of the W+standard ™ to measure, quantify and monetize impacts of projects on women, through the use of a results-based financing approach, providing ways for companies, governments, organizations and individuals to confidently drive and measure social and economic empowerment for women. She has managed projects for the Asian Development Bank (Harnessing Climate Change Mitigation to Benefit Women) and other UN and bilateral development agencies and led and served on numerous committees such as The Forest Dialogue Steering Committee, Gender Expert of the CGIAR Participatory Research and Gender Analysis Program, Advisor to the Forest Stewardship Council, FAO’s Policy Committee on Incentives for Ecosystem Services, and UNFCCC’s Expert Group on Gender and Climate and more. She joins us from Hawaii, USA.
She speaks to us about:
being a female forester
pursuing gender mainstreaming in male dominated organizations
her Phd thesis on the same topic above
the devaluation of women’s labour in natural resource management
being motivated by frustration
innovating new standards
the struggle for financing gender and climate projects
working across sectors and silos
inclusive feminine leadership
climate reliance
nature based solutions
the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic - and much more.
Editors Note: This transcript has been slightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Transcript
Intro: What I learned there is that there is an understanding that bureaucracies are neutral. That is not at all true. It was interesting, it’s a very dynamic process to see how power is used to maintain and recreate the processes of gender discrimination. And so what was happening was these powerful men were allowing gender and women’s agencies on terms that they themselves dictated.
Safa: Welcome back to the Rethinking Development Podcast. My name is Safa and I will be your host as we speak with and learn from practitioners of all backgrounds and affiliations around the world. In our conversations, we aim to rethink ethical behaviour and best practices, through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different practitioners. Our guest today is Dr Jeannette Gurung. Jeannette’s career has focused on gender equality within climate change related organizations. She is the founder and executive director of Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (WOCAN), a global network with over 1,300 members in 113 countries that supports capacity building for women’s leadership and empowerment and gender integration. Jeannette is also the innovator of the W+ standard that measures, quantifies and monetizes impacts of projects on women through the use of a results based financing approach, providing ways for companies, governments, organizations and individuals to confidently drive and measure social change and economic empowerment for women. The W+ was awarded the Momentum for Change Women for Results award by the UNFCC in 2016 for application to Nepal’s biogas program that sold W+ impact units and shared revenues with women. Jeannette has also co-founded the Women and Climate Impact Fund with a financial expert to mobilize blended financial investments in climate mitigation and adaptation projects that incorporate high levels of gender equality and women’s empowerment. The fund also uses the W+ standard to assure quality impacts across its portfolio. Jeannette has expertise and certification in standards monitoring and evaluation, training, research, gender and organizational analysis, policy advocacy and network building. She has managed projects for the Asian Development Bank and other UN and bilateral development agencies, and led and served on numerous committees, including the Forest Dialogue Steering Committee, as Gender Expert of the CGIAR Participatory Research and Gender Analysis Program, as Adviser to the Forest Stewardship Council, FAO’s Policy Committee on Incentives for Ecosystem Services and more. Jeannette, thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Jeannette: Thank you so much Safa, thanks for the opportunity.
Safa: Thank you. Could you please tell us how your interest in this type of work, in this field first began and what were some of the earlier experiences in the beginning of your career that kind of shaped the future route that you took?
Jeannette: That’s a great question and of course I have to look way back. But as a young woman, I was always an environmentalist. And as an American, for me, that meant interest in forestry and various natural resources. But the life changing event for me was my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. And this was a time in the late 70’s, when I was living in a village, and there I came to understand the role of communities in forest management. I think up until that time, I thought of environment as purely something related to animals and plants, and I was not aware of the incredible importance of communities, of people in management of these resources. This was the late 1970’s, so it was kind of the dawn of social forestry, which actually did begin in Nepal at that time. But I was living in a remote village up in the hills of Nepal and watched as members of my village started to set fire to the forest to convert them into agriculture land so they could have more ownership over this. So this interest in environment, when I was finished with my Peace Corps time — by the way, I highly recommend people think of an experience like the Peace Corps, it is a life changing event, you’ll never see the world in the same way, but that interest took me to study forestry. That’s really where I think I had this realization of a sector that is dominated by men, and not only dominated by men, but by a very masculine understandings of the profession. So I understood this at the time, and I think I believed that I needed to become what I call a card carrying member of that old boys network of foresters in order to gain recognition as a woman. I understood that that was even more precious and valuable and necessary for me than it would be for a man. I have to say that forestry is an exclusive profession. And when two foresters meet, they’ll often ask each other where they studied. And that’s because there’s not so many forestry institutions. And I have to say that all of the forestry institutions, including those that are the top ones in the US and around the world, are difficult places for women. And I know this right up into the present from discussions with young foresters. I’ll tell you how it’s masculine. For example, when I talk to young women studying forestry in Latin America, they would tell me how distressing it was that they’re not allowed to, for example, where makeup or wear high heels into classrooms, which sounds like a petty thing, but for women, it was really part of their identity. At the time that I studied forestry, there were a few women studying, and I’ll tell you one thing, we never wore dresses or anything that looked feminine. And I often think that in this country, the ideal forester is someone who looks like Paul Bunyan and Paul Bunyan was a mythical character in North America that was a big guy with big muscles and a big beard. And so I think, forestry students tried to look like Paul Bunyan, just a strange thing, and even as women, we tried to look like Paul Bunyan, except we couldn’t grow the beard. So that was, I think for me, how I got started in this. My focus on gender grew very much out of my own lived experience of living and working in a rural community in Nepal and then again working across the entire Himalayan region. And here is where I watched women in villages and fields toil to plant, to weed, to harvest rice for example, bent over all the time, in infested waters. And I watched them walk long distances to get to fuel wood supplies and where they had to cut and then haul this fuel wood on their backs and and I watched women working 16 hours a day, and that’s not an exaggeration. That’s up at 4 AM to do water collection and get the fires going in the kitchen and then closing down the kitchen at only about 8 PM. That’s a long day. And while they are doing all this, in many cases, their menfolk were sitting in tea shops, drinking tea and alcoholic beverages and usually talking politics. And it was just extraordinary to see this huge difference between what a women’s day looks like and what a man’s day looks like. And I think this really sort of annoyed me, just the injustice of this situation and then to further augment that, working in international development and in organizations that were formulating policies and projects for agriculture, for forestry, natural resource management and finding that most of these ignore women’s roles in those very sectors, even though they were the primary actors and managers. And I think to this day there’s this very strong, normative idea of who are primary actors in these fields. I’ll give you an example, I worked in an office in Katmandu for many years. My boss was the head of the agriculture division of this organization, and I’ll never forget this, but he had a photo on his wall of a woman plowing a field in India and the narrative, the title of the photo that he had put there, said ‘women helping men in agriculture’. And there’s not a man in the picture. This is just classic I think, everywhere around the world we think that the farmer is a man and maybe his wife is his helper, when nothing could be further from the truth. But that simple change in normative ways of thinking is the key to unlocking changes in development sector programs.
Safa: Very interesting. As you say, these gender dynamics are evident not just in the way labour is divided or valued, but also in images, in metaphors, in the ways we speak about issues. Early on in your career, when you were working as a gender and development specialists for the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, what where the practices or projects that you were working on in terms of trying to challenge these normative ideas or these stereotypes and what were some of the challenges you faced in trying to create these changes?
Jeannette: I think, you know, initially working as a forester in that field and then at some point after I’d been there a few years, my boss said, Okay, Jeannette, you’re interested in gender, so I’m going to task you with now leading the process of gender mainstreaming or the integration of gender into this institution — and the institution is really close to my heart. This is an institution that works across eight countries, the Himalayas, I had amazing autonomy to pursue the projects that I was interested in, it was wonderful. However, when it came to this task of integrating it across everybody else’s programs and projects, it was a very challenging job. And I think the reason they asked me to do this was because of donor pressure. I mean, we had European donors who were insisting that the institution become more gender sensitive. And so I took it on with great glee. Well, five years later, I felt the need to write a PhD thesis on it as a sense making exercise. Because it was not a straightforward process. And to give you a clue as to how that went, the title of my PhD thesis was ‘Narratives of Resistance: Enacting Gender in an International Development Organization.’ And that’s because I think through this process of leading the process of gender mainstreaming, I became aware of — I looked at seven years of data and of course, what was unique about this was I was an insider into this institution, so my PhD was a rare opportunity to see the guts of the institution from inside. An outsider would not have been able to see what I could see. But I was able to analyze the actions of male and female staff, and I saw how it was both constructing, maintaining and challenging the gender culture of the workplace. So I looked at not only the structural aspects, but also the cultural features of the organization, which is where it gets very interesting and where you can see how power operating in various dimensions was able to maintain the gender inequalities within the context. So that’s where the resistance lay, and that’s where it became so difficult. I was seeing how powerful men inside this organization and again, this is South Asia, so very bureaucratic, maybe more so than other parts of the world, but I have to think this is common everywhere. I think that development institutions are gendered. All institutions are gendered. But development institutions are gendered through their policies, procedures and cultures that are really designed and adapted to meet the needs of men as well as men within the communities. It’s easier — I think, if women had had the power, we might have done the same thing, but we didn’t. So men have defined the way this works. And it’s certainly easier for men to work with other men. You don’t have to, you know, sort of balance your programs around the complex, varied responsibilities of women who are up at four in the morning, work till eight for example. What I learned there as well is that there is an understanding that bureaucracies are neutral and that is not at all true. It was interesting. It’s a very dynamic process to see how power is used to maintain and recreate the processes of gender discrimination. And so what was happening was these powerful men were allowing gender and women’s agencies on terms that they themselves dictated. And so power was being enacted behind the scenes so that, for example, myself, who was supposed to be in charge of this, I didn’t always see what was happening, and then I would have rare glimpses of the reality. For example, we would have a staff party, there would be alcohol consumption and men’s tongues would start to loosen up, and they would say things like, well, you know, we all understand that women can never be fully equal to us in terms of doing their professional responsibilities and things like this that would have been jaw dropping if they had said this in a public meeting, for example. But they never did. So that was how I got to see this insider’s glimpse into how things are maintained and as women of the organization, we were also super inclusive. There were not very many women across the organization, so certainly we, by necessity, we also had to include all the secretaries, cleaners and everybody. And so when we did that, that was also very challenging to them because now we crossed over not only the gender line but a class line, and that was also extremely upsetting to the men of this bureaucracy. So their reaction was to sort of lash back against that, when it started to become something serious, and then they were doing things like altering the language of our memos. That was phenomenal to me, they actually changed language and then put it out there and said this was the narrative by the women in the organization, things like that. Another thing that was key, was the boss who was very keen, he himself was European and very keen to show that the institution was gender sensitive, had a meeting with all of us women on the first women’s day event and when we placed our demands to him, he was absolutely shocked because his expectation would be that our demand was for toilets. And I kid you not, all of us were asking for representation at the highest levels of the decision making bodies within the institution. He was not expecting that, and actually thought we would ask for toilets, which none of us did.
Safa: Wow, there’s so many fascinating points in everything you just said, but to follow up at least on one thing — so you mentioned that the push to do the gender mainstreaming work was actually on the part of the donor, but then it’s interesting that there was a backlash by the male dominated management as well. In that work, you know, you mentioned the title of your thesis was ‘A Narrative of Resistance’, so when you experienced that pushback or that backlash, what were the strategies, if any, that were helpful or that you thought could be used to continue to resist, to continue to call for change?
Jeannette: You know, I look back on my PhD, actually by the way, the PhD reads like a novel because it really is the story of this process that happened over a period of five years. And in my conclusion at the time, I felt as if not much progress has been made as a result of this, that our strategy was, as I said, to bring together all women across the organization. We did things like we started day care centers and we just kept pushing to be — and it was never granted during my time there, but we kept pushing for the gender person or the gender team to be represented at senior management meetings, which were held every week and we could not get that to get approved and that was the most strategic thing. However, I have to say, even in the PhD, my conclusion is that if we’ve had any impact at all, it’s been at the individual level. We have opened women’s eyes in this organization about these hidden processes, we’ve kind of exposed this normative aspect of gender discrimination here and how they’re enacted. We called the play, I mean, we basically called out to men what they were doing, so we brought awareness to women. And my hope was even after I left the organization, that the women who remained would be able to pick up on this and continue. And in fact, that happened. And I couldn’t be prouder than to say that today that organization has a very strong gender division that is well represented at the senior level, and that itself has a staff of five or six others, including some men on that group, that’s really been effective, and they’re well recognized by donors. And so I think it’s a powerful story about, if you do this right, it really works out well for everybody. But I have to say, I often say to people that I have great empathy for anybody who is trying to mainstream gender into one of these male dominated organizations. I did it for five years. I think that’s about the life cycle of a gender mainstreamer, it is five years, and then I always say, after that you quit to do something easy, like have another child or write a PhD thesis! It is just extremely tough and it’s not appreciated by anybody because you have to be very diplomatic and it requires certain kind of skills. And I liked the men in that organization, I got along with them, and I wasn’t seen as some horrible woman who was trying to cause trouble all the time. I loved the organization, loved working there, it was like a big family. It was hard for me to see what was actually going on behind the scenes.
Safa: Absolutely, as you say, the impact on the individual level as compared to a systemic change level — that is often a tension that we speak about with different guests. Can we speak a bit about you deciding to found, in 2004, WOCAN — Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management and what the work of that organization is, especially thinking about individual level versus systemic level?
Jeannette: And in one of your later questions you are probably going to ask me what motivates me, so -
Safa: (laughs) Yes, feel free to answer that as well —
Jeannette: Why am I innovating all the time? Well, I’m motivated by frustration with the status quo. I think frustration is the mother of innovation. So I’ve been obviously very frustrated in many different ways and I think what I understood through my global networks was I was in touch with so many other women who were working in international development agencies, whether they be the UN or otherwise or NGOs, that were also working to bring gender into sectors that were male dominated. And I understood that my struggle was common to all of these other women. And that is of course very powerful when women understand that their struggle is shared. So we started understanding that we felt we were being prevented from working on gender issues within our organizations and by the very organizations we worked for that were out there claiming that they are doing gender to their donors and to the world at large and yet inside we were being prevented and having our hands tied in various ways. So once we realized that this was common between us — I remember there was a woman in Zambia who worked in the forestry department or my friends in high level positions in the FAO, we understood that we needed to have a space for our voice. So much like as in order to get women’s voices heard at the community level, you often have to break them away from men and give them a separate safe space to talk, we understood, even though we were kind of high professionals in these organizations, we did not have our own space, and we needed to have our own space to have our own voices, but also so that we could go out and speak around the world as a group of women working in these sectors. So that’s why we formed WOCAN. The first thing I did was to go around world and hold meetings, one or two day events with women who were already working in these sectors of agriculture, forestry, water and just hear, just listen, just listen to them and oh my goodness, I mean, it was tearful. Women were coming and just talking about their experiences and they started to cry. It was the sense of I studied to be a professional, and yet the way I am treated in my organization is as a cleaner or tea maker or secretary or I’m interrupted all the time, cannot fully enact my duties as a professional. So there was a sense that Okay, this is worldwide. I did this in West, Central Africa, I did this in Eastern, Southern Africa and South Asia, Southeast Asia. And the story is the same. And in some ways I’m going to tell you that the story is still the same. I know only recently from a group of my colleagues back in Nepal, that still — again, tears from women foresters as they described their great frustration in the work place on these issues. So we needed WOCAN, we formed WOCAN. I think in the early days what we did was a lot of advocacy around agriculture development, forestry development. Looking at this now, and this is what, 15 years later, I think it’s been a long slog. But I think things have really changed and I want to talk about this a little bit as well, now as the world turns so strongly towards climate change, thinking about responses in this sector, so many of the climate change related sectors are again these male dominated sectors, agriculture, energy, forestry, water management and so the climate related institutions, the financing mechanisms, still do not fully understand the role of women in climate mitigation, climate adaptation and they don’t understand yet the value in including women into this, nor even more importantly, the risk to your investments if you do not include women, understanding that the world’s farmers are primarily women, the world’s forest managers are to a large degree women, water managers are women. If you exclude them from your processes, from your benefits, from your financing, what’s to say that they’re not going to do something that will have negative impacts on your project. And I think it’s particularly important because in many places, the narrative in these sectors is still understanding women as victims of climate change, and I will not use what I call it the ‘V word’, although I just did, because that implies that they don’t have agency, it negates women roles in the management of these resources and from an investment side of things, who wants to invest in a victim? Nobody, right? Let’s instead recognize the agency of women, the roles and responsibilities, the tremendous things they do to nurture the planet with no compensation I would say, in almost all cases. And I think within this COVID world, this is one thing that’s now become increasingly a part of the narrative, it is understanding the high value of people working in service industries, that are caring in hospitals and families and etc. Those are very female dominated sectors. And we can extend that idea to taking care of the climate as well and stop seeing women as victims in this climate world.
Safa: Absolutely, so in that light, could you also tell us about establishing the W+ standard and the process of quantifying or verifying benefits for women and inclusion of women?
Jeannette: So I like to say the W+ standard was really motivated out of three things. One is a sense of the frustration again, to use that beautiful F word, that came because those of us who have been working to mainstream gender for so many years, I mean, if we step back and think about what’s been the impact of that, it’s not great. Gender mainstreaming as a strategy is very much debated, but it’s kind of a necessary but not sufficient approach to gender equality. So there was a frustration with the fact that a lot of the work was being measured only by outputs, maybe inputs and outputs, and not by results. So there’s a question of accountability that needed to be raised here, and there’s a lot of checking the box when it comes to gender, so even very large projects that can mention gender in one paragraph or a sentence or two within a project document, the donor may just say, OK, yes, check, so that’s not good enough. We want to recognize that. Two, we wanted to get at the fact that this gender integration — I like to say there’s neither a carrot nor a stick that’s been big enough to make a difference, particularly with environment and agriculture related organizations. I mean, they don’t do gender unless they have to or there’s a good reason to. And I don’t think that reason has really existed. Even the donors have not — I mean, there’s a prevailing view that all the donors require gender. Well, like I said, maybe they do. But often it’s very easily attainable by checking the box. So that’s not what we are talking about. So, we said, can we develop an incentive system, can we incentivize those environment organizations to do something that brings benefits to women and has an inclusion of gender equality within their projects. Now, what we found at the time was we started to learn about the carbon market. We started to learn about the way you can measure environmental impacts through the tracing of carbon, the measurement of carbon. And then the World Bank and others who developed the carbon market found that that could be a way to bring new funding into environmental management and also incentivize people, including individuals, to do things that could get them this added revenue. So we had this very crazy idea and said could we do the same for women’s empowerment and gender equality? Could we incentivize a process through which organizations that do something for women’s empowerment, can have that measured, can be certified and can even monetize those impacts through the creation of a unit, a W+ unit that could be sold? Can we create a market around us? And in some ways, that’s the key question. Who purchases these units? And it’s a challenge. We don’t have a ready made market out there for social good. But one of the strategies we’ve also been able to do is, is it possible to stack a W+unit onto a carbon unit? So, for example, in a project that’s a climate change related mitigation project that’s producing GHD or carbon units, and simultaneously doing good things for women, we have a way to stack the women’s empowerment as a co-benefit on to the carbon and put that out into the market. But otherwise, there are also companies and organizations that just want to be supporting women’s empowerment, maybe to contribute to reaching their SDG goal number five for women’s empowerment and gender equality and doing so in a very real way, transparent way, that’s trusted and that attacks what we call ‘pink washing’.
Safa: So is it that organizations who think they qualify or are interested in being part of the W+ standard, they reach out to you or you reach out to them?
Jeannette: Both, if we hear about good ones, but we certainly have many projects that reach out to us as well, and I think when projects start to understand that the process of , I mean, at first they maybe — especially if they are environment related organizations — not working on gender, it sounds maybe complicated, but that’s the whole point of the standard. The standard is also a design framework that you can use to adapt your project, and in some cases it takes very little adaptation. And here’s where this project that we won the Women for Results Award from the UNFCC, it was a perfect example. So this is a biogas project in Nepal being implemented by the government across the country that is getting biogas digesters into the households of Nepali’s across the country. It is a beautiful design because it’s linked to a toilet. So they also got the objective of having toilets added to homesteads and that the toilet is actually linked directly to a biogas digester. So the government of Nepal is doing this and they’re producing the carbon units which have been sold to Nordic countries etc. What they didn’t think about that was also going on at the same time was women’s lives were being transformed by this. We used the W+ to measure time saving, and in this case, women using a biogas digester saved two and a half hours every day of their life. And that doesn’t even account for the hardship of walking, of cutting the wood, saving the forest. It simply measured time saving for women. Two and a half hours a day, you know, that’s a perfect case to see that, in fact, this was a project that already was creating those benefits for women, but they didn’t measure. And when you don’t measure it, you don’t see it. So I think my suspicion is there are many other projects out there, be they for water adaptation, or forestry, energy or whatever , that are similarly doing fantastic things for women, but only measuring and monetizing on the carbon aspect of it. I think that can change.
Safa: Absolutely. As you say, if you don’t measure it, you don’t see it or value it. When it comes to measuring or evaluation, what are some of the changes that you’ve witnessed over the years, or have there been any changes when it comes to programs or projects related to measuring and evaluating women’s empowerment or participation?
Jeannette: So I think when we first started, we took a look at all the other existing standards and certifications and there were one or two, and we understood that people were not using them because they were too difficult. They took too much time. You know, this is the problem in measurement. You want to develop a system that’s rigorous but not onerous, and so it’s workable for organizations. Otherwise they won’t use it. So we found that the existing ones were a bit like that. So we tried to create something and give as much guidance as possible. So the standard has methods for six domains that were determined by women’s groups in Kenya and Nepal, when we went to them in the early days. And we said, what is women’s empowerment, what does it mean to you? What should we measure? And they identified the same in both cases. Time saving — and at that time the world was not really thinking about time saving or time as an asset, but of course it is — time, income and assets, knowledge and education, health, leadership and food security. So our team developed methods and indicators for each of those six what we call domains. So we’re trying to make it as easy as possible for a project to incorporate this. And as I said, you can use it as a design mechanism, you shouldn’t be afraid that oh, we’re not good, we’re going to try, we are gonna fail, we won’t get certified. That’s not the point, because the whole point is to measure where you are now and what progress you will achieve within, I don’t know, a year, two years, you tell us. What period of time you want to measure. And it is possible, like in the case Nepal, where in fact, the project had already had these benefits for women, so we just instantly were able to measure those benefits and generate units out of that. So I think the point here is to make it as easy as possible for people, but still hold onto the rigour and since we came out with the W+, we were the first standard certification system that looked at women at the community level, not at the work place, so there are other standards that would look a how many women are on boards, how many women are senior staff, and we argue that that’s wonderful, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into benefits for women at the community level, grassroots level. We are still waiting, we want to see some company, some supply chain, use the W + to certify its supply chain in way’s that it is benefiting women. Here’s a place, Safa, that I think there’s enormous opportunity, which is to have a product with a label on it that signifies, if you purchased this item, you’re in fact helping women in the supply chain. Currently nothing exists like that except there’s a couple of small coffee labels that will do that. But you can imagine knowing that consumers, women are something like 70, 80 % of the consumers around the world. Why don’t we have some sort of a label on a good or service that indicates this? The third part that motivated the W+, it was really key to us, we at WOCAN are firm believers in the tremendous potential of women’s collectives and women’s organizations in the community levels across the world. We see that these groups have amazing opportunities to effect food security, climate change and poverty. However, they’re not receiving funds or capacity building efforts, they are looked over, they are missed. And so when we developed the W+ standard, we said we get to determine the rules of this standard, this is our standard. So we’re going to say that at least 20% of the value — like if you create a W+ unit and you sell it on the market, 20% at least of that revenue from the sale of that unit has to go directly into the hands of those women’s groups at the community level and they get to determine what to do with it. We don’t tell them you have to buy more cook stones with it, no, they know what they need to do with this. And in the case of Nepal, they used it for things like — it was amazing what they did — they started a new water supply system, a lot of them put it back into their savings and loan groups, one amazing group of women decided they wanted to use the funds to subsidize poorer women to have biogas projects that they couldn’t otherwise afford to have. We need to do a lot more studies of these kind of revenue sharing, benefit sharing mechanisms, we haven’t yet done that impact study but we would love to.
Safa: In terms of funding and working with donors, what have been some of the changes you’ve witnessed over the last few years in terms of the conditions or the availability of funds? Or sometimes there’s competition amongst organizations that work in the same fields for funding. Could you speak to us a bit about navigating that area of this type of work?
Jeannette: This is the topic dearest and closest to my heart. I want to say from the start, women’s organizations, at all levels, are starving. And you would be shocked if I told you that some of the women led organizations you’ve probably heard of barely have enough funds to keep the lights on and keep running for the next month. And it’s not because of the coronavirus. This is the dilemma that all of us are facing. We used to have core funding, and I have to put in a pitch for core funding because core funding is what enables innovation. When you’re just managing projects and B for service types of operations, you just can’t have the money you need and the time you need to do innovative thinking. All of these organizations, like I said, women’s organizations in general, are not funded, are not appreciated and I see an enormous need for women’s organizations at regional levels, at national levels, not just the grassroots level. You always hear about women at the grassroots. That’s fine. But there are so many opportunities and needs for other women’s organizations to act as intermediaries and to assure that those grassroots level organizations develop the capacities they need to move forward. There’s also been, I think, a really interesting upsurge in a gendered lens in investing, which is fantastic. And that is, of course, where investors right down to personal individuals, want their funds to be used to support women. However, much of that is for women enterprises or women entrepreneurs. Again, it’s great, but I would say that a lot of the women we work with will never self identify as an enterprise or entrepreneur. Most women’s farmers, even though they may be trading their products on market, would not fall into that category of being a women owned business. Therefore, they’re not investable. When everybody is looking for a financial return back on investment, even impact investors, this is a problem. So sure, women owned businesses is one area that we can have investments in, there could be more investments into climate related green businesses, that’s great. But there will never be enough. There are not enough women owned companies in the world that can make, I think, a significant dent in, for example, finding ways to support gender equality, women’s empowerment, in relation to climate change, for example. On the other side, those of us who are women organizations and women NGOs, we need to learn also a little bit to become social enterprises. We need to show how we have services that are valued and have a financial value in themselves. We are underpaid and undervalued. And I think often the case we find with donors is sometimes I think they think we work for free. I don’t know how to otherwise explain the fact that some of the policies of foundations and donors is to allow, for example, only like an 8% increase that we could put onto a project budget that’s supposed to pay for our overhead administration costs. So let us behave like businesses in some way, and let the donors and funders recognize our value as businesses. But we also need as NGOs I think, to also become a little bit more up to date and start thinking of what value do we bring to the larger group of what we could call funders and not just the traditional grant donors. With bilateral agencies and countries, we have not been lucky, maybe it’s luck. I don’t know what it is. I mean, sometimes what we hear is that we are too small and we know this. We know that over the years, bilateral donors are shifting very much into sending their funds for the World Bank, for example. And what they say is the transaction costs are too high for them to funnel money to smaller NGOs. We have to learn to adapt to that. Maybe we need to form more consortiums or be more collaborative ourselves. But you know, we have to spend so much time on fundraising that it’s not the best use of our time.
Safa: It is such a significant challenge. Could you also speak to us a bit about founding the Women and Climate Impact fund and what are some of the projects that that fund has supported?
Jeannette: I can’t say that we’re yet supporting projects. We’re still in the early stages of fundraising for that and getting it going. But again, the idea was until about a year ago, we were not seeing much understanding or interest in financing at the nexus of gender and climate. And that’s still a struggle. But I think in the last year we’ve seen many more of the climate finance groups understand gender leads and the gender lens investors understand the opportunities to invest in climate. That’s another thing that I get incentivized by. One is the frustration. But the other thing is seeing these ways to cross over these different sectors, to cross over silos, that excites me tremendously. So, you know, seeing that there needed to be this space at the nexus and not seeing that, and so determining that maybe what we needed, besides the W+ standard, could be developing a fund structure that could start to accept money from various kind of donors and funders who were interested in this nexus but couldn’t imagine what does that look like? What is a project look like that’s a good project for gender and climate? And we’re still developing those. I think there is still an interest and I think there’s an interest now more than ever by individuals who want to invest their private money into both of those areas. So it’s been a chance to try to attract donors. It’s not easy building a fund, oh my goodness. You know, we’re still looking for anchor investors in this and grant related funds that can be used as catalytic funding, what we do see is a way to make returns to investors. And that is again because the W+ standard, which is used across all of these projects, has this opportunity of generating returns in the form of W+ units. So not to get too much into this, but for impact investors who say that they’re interested in impact first, this is a chance to walk away with a unit of impact. Now whether you want to monetize that impact or not, that’s up to you. But if you’re the investor and you invest in a project and it generates W+ units, you now have units that you can stand behind that ascertain that your project has produced this and that for women’s empowerment. There’s not many investors who are there yet. There are many who are talking about it. That’s one way. But the other way to generate the return within this fund is just to recognize that there are existing climate projects and climate mitigation projects that are already generating profits. So this is really where we see what the fund can do. We don’t try to fund everything or be the fund, but we try to have partners and arrangements with other projects and funders in the climate sector who are already developing and managing projects that are producing carbon benefits, for example. But that could, with a little bit of extra input and technical assistance, be able to add gender and women’s empowerment as well. So that’s where the funds headed, into sort of being a partner, co-funded with others. So we’re in the process now of identifying those other funds and those other projects that are interested to work with us in that.
Safa: Fantastic. It sounds like such an important idea and plan that you have and I wish you all the best with developing it further. I also wanted to speak to you about your role as a leader or as a manager, as a founder. What have been some of the lessons you’ve learned or experiences you’ve had when it comes to leading people or being the head or the lead behind an idea, pushing it along, advocating for it, working with others? Do you have some thoughts that you could share with us about taking up that role and being in that seat of the leader?
Jeannette: That is an interesting question, I think I have done too little reflection on my own leadership. WOCAN teaches a wonderful leadership course for women and for men to better support women leaders and we think a lot about feminine forms of leadership in opposition to the dominant sort of hegemonic, masculine forms of leadership. And maybe I’m hedging away from talking about myself, I’ll get there. But you know what we’ve seen other women do that absolutely inspires me, is women leaders who practice a kind of inclusive, feminine forms of leadership. And we have some amazing examples of women who we know well who have done this. And the first thing is to understand that leadership comes not from only an official title. And that’s one of the things women had trouble understanding and women would say, Oh, I’m not a leader because I don’t have a title. And then what they learned is that actually what they’re practicing is already leadership, which is coordinating, building communities around them, it is very much focused on relationship building. I like to think that that’s what I’ve done over my career. I think I don’t have enough feedback from people around me who tell me what I do best and what I don’t do best in that way, but I think it is very much about relationship building. It’s interesting during COVID when we watch so many organizations become desk oriented places where people are no longer going to their offices. I mean, WOCAN has worked like this since the beginning, and that’s what enables us to be nimble. And we work with people across the world who are our members but also our friends and the one’s we’ve been working with in face to face ways. Once you develop face to face relationships, then it’s really easy to then become a group that works across Skype and ZOOM and whatever. I mean with my staff in Europe and Asia, we do weekly meetings on Skype, and it’s just almost as if we are in the same room together. We know each other well, we work together well. Is that a form of leadership or is that just managing the organization, I don’t know. But here is one thing I believe more strongly than anything else, it is that individuals need to have their agency within their workplace. They need to have what we call space to manoeuvre. Every single person in an organization of any kind needs to have their own space of deciding how they work, what they work on and the process they do this in and the manner in which they do it. And I’m a huge believer in thinking that everybody needs to have their independence and their space to develop, design, create. I think the need to create is a human requirement. I know it is for me and I assume it is for everybody else. And so I think for me, leadership management means allowing your staff and your partners those opportunities to innovate, to create and it doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but it allows people to innovate and to take initiative.
Safa: Those are wonderful ideas to reflect on for all of us. We touched briefly on your interest in working across sectors, bridging silos, the intersection of different areas of work. How do you see this pandemic impacting the work that women will do in the future in terms of agriculture and natural resource management? In some cases, we’ve heard stories of in different countries farmers, for example, having to burn their crops or destroy their cops because there’s no longer a market for it or different challenges in different contexts. What are some of the — maybe not necessary worries, but observations or thought you have around how this coronavirus pandemic is impacting women in the sector?
Jeannette: So I’m worried. Of course, I’m also worried for us who work in the development industry. I’m not sure what we can do. I mean, for us, we have a number of activities we were supposed to implement, but we can’t travel. So what do we do about that? We’ve been thinking at WOCAN in the last couple of days of about — for us, we’re connecting the pandemic with the climate, right? What have we learned in this pandemic that we’re going to apply to climate? And we’ve been listening and attending webinars and reading and thinking about this. Here’s what I want to say. I think many things have emerged that we see as critical for climate resilience. So it’s kind of a post COVID recovery and climate resilience where we see things focusing. I’ve mentioned a couple, but here’s what I think. One, nature based solutions. More than ever, we’re seeing a focus on biodiversity, conservation, forest restoration. There are huge spaces for women, as I’ve already mentioned , around that. The second thing we see is the focus on social safety nets. We, as I mentioned, believed that women’s organizations are absolutely key to everything. Women’s organizations have special relationships and networks with the community members. We’ve seen women’s organizations in times of disasters reach out and just take charge of things and manage things very effectively. Again, I think they are key, but they need recognition. They need support to assure their sustainability and their adaptation to these changing environments. We’ve seen in this country, in the US, now more and more a focus on networks of social safety nets. So that’s been highlighted. We’ve seen that women leaders around the world have been the most effective ones at managing this pandemic. There’s a recognition now that feminine principles, compassion, inclusion with men as well as women at all levels, from communities to global institutions. I think we’ve seen a focus on that. We’ve seen how families are the most important thing , and we have seen how income for families is critical. We have seen how benefit sharing, ideally in the form of cash, is better than micro loans — I heard that on one webinar. Cash is better than micro loans for disasters. Cash transfers are better at providing assets to women than employment schemes and the whole household benefits. So that fits into our understanding through the W+ of how we share dividends with women, cash revenues for example. We have seen how we’re all starting to value the care roles of women. And we’ve seen it for the family and the household, but we’re gonna now enlarge this to think of the planet and we are going to now look at how women are nurturing the planet. We’re going to figure out how we have to be compensated for that work and I think this follows from what we’ve seen of these women’s care giving roles through the pandemic. We’ve also seen everybody staying at home so suddenly the idea of child care and the value of childcare facilities becomes huge. We’ve seen how men need to share the burdens of women in the household, and men who are staying home may now suddenly understand those burdens in ways they didn’t see before. We’ve seen again a focus on health and wellbeing, mental wellbeing and how to extend that into climate resilience and understanding human health being related to planetary health. I mentioned investment. So now increasingly, I’m hearing talk about this idea of intact investments with multiple returns that includes social returns, environmental returns as well as financial returns and how this is required to build resilience to the pandemic as well as resilience to climate. Gosh, I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’m watching television and seeing advertisements on the TV that are now all about — they’re not pushing the brand, they’re not pushing the profit, they’re not saying go out and buy our product. They’re pushing the fact that we’re all in this together, focus on the family, we’re going to focus on taking care of each other. That’s amazing. That’s really something new. There’s questions now into the capitalist system and that its just not what’s needed for a pandemic but extended into the climate as well. Two more things I will mention. The fact that institutions need to change. Institutions need to become more nimble, more learning, more inclusive and they have to bring the abilities of all of their staff, men and women both, to bear on these crisis’ and to learn from others. It’s the only way they’re going to survive. And I’ll say the last thing, that I think is a focus on sustainable food chains with a focus on local food production that increases food security in these uncertain times. Again, recognizing that women are the primary farmers of the world, even in this country of the US, and how do we help those farmers now learn climate smart agriculture practices so they can do this. I mean, I live in Hawaii, I live on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. When we talk about sustainability it has a very different, real sense to us than when you talk about sustainability in a conference in New York, Washington, Geneva, right. This is real here and we’re worried about how we continue to feed ourselves. Our islands can only produce or are so far only producing 10 to 15% of what’s consumed here. So for us, it becomes very real. And I think it’s on the global scale as well. We have to think about food production and markets and how those now relate to a climate perspective. So that is just a few of my thoughts.
Safa: Yes, absolutely. Everyone of those can be a conversation in itself, and they’re all very important to think about and also connect all the different issues together and look at the intersection amongst them. Is there any final thoughts or anything you’d like to share before we wrap up?
Jeannette: What I’ve learned is that everything needs to have a gender lens and a gender approach. So even all these 10 ideas I just mentioned. Men cannot be excluded. Women’s empowerment is critical, and it’s not just at the grassroots level. It’s all the way up into development institutions and that all of these things can be transformational once we understand the power of individuals and we create the enabling environment for them to thrive.
Safa: Wonderful, absolutely, that’s beautifully said, and I just want to thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, your experiences. There is so much to learn from all the different points that you made. So we really appreciate it and thank you so much.
Jeannette: Thank you Safa, it was a great opportunity.
Safa: I also want to thank our listeners. To keep up with our latest episodes, you can listen to us on your preferred podcast provider and follow us on Instagram, where our handle is @rethinkingdevelopment. If you have any listener questions that you would like me to ask our future guests, please feel free to email them to us. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all next time. Until then, take care.
