Climate adaptation is going digital. Are women being left behind?

Climate change is reshaping how communities prepare, respond, and adapt. Many of the tools that now support adaptation – from early warning systems and climate-smart agricultural services such as weather forecasts, pest surveillance, and soil guidance to crop insurance and emergency payments – increasingly depend on digital connectivity.

Yet the spread of digital connectivity is not gender-neutral.

To understand the digital gender gap, defined as the disparity between women and men in access to and use of mobile devices and internet services, it is useful to examine the data presented in The Mobile Gender Gap Report 2025 by the GSMA. The report examines three key indicators of digital inclusion: mobile ownership, smartphone ownership, and mobile internet adoption.

According to the report, when it comes to mobile internet usage, across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), women remain significantly less connected than men. They are about 14 percent less likely to access mobile internet, which translates to roughly 235 million fewer women than men online. At a regional level, mobile internet gender gaps are widest in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where around 60 percent of the 885 million women still not using mobile internet live. 

The disparity in smartphone ownership mirrors the internet access gap. Women in LMICs are about 14 percent less likely than men to own a smartphone, representing approximately 230 million fewer female smartphone owners. Current ownership rates stand at about 61 percent for women and 71 percent for men. 

The numbers illustrate how hundreds of millions of women remain digitally excluded. The digital gender gap is not just a technology issue. It is a climate resilience issue. The gap is widest in regions that are also among the most climate-exposed, including South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Global data from the International Telecommunication Union confirms that women in the least developed countries remain significantly less likely than men to use the internet.

These regions are already facing intensifying droughts, floods, heat stress, and food insecurity. Climate change interacts with existing social and economic inequalities, and unequal digital access is increasingly one of the mechanisms through which vulnerability is amplified.

One area of particular concern is food security and agriculture. Women are central to food systems in many climate-vulnerable regions. Globally, women account for roughly 40 percent of the agricultural workforce. According to a 2023 FAO report, although the proportion of both men and women working in agrifood systems has declined over the past two decades, the sector remains a cornerstone of women’s employment globally. In 2019, more than one-third of working women worldwide were employed in agrifood systems, and in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, the sector continues to be the primary source of livelihood for women. In sub-Saharan Africa, roughly two-thirds of employed women work within agrifood systems, while in Southern Asia the figure exceeds 70 percent, substantially higher than the share for men. 

Even where overall participation in agriculture is falling, alternative employment opportunities appear to be expanding faster for men than for women. As a result, women remain disproportionately dependent on agrifood systems for income and survival. 

Agriculture is one of the sectors most directly exposed to climate variability. Shifts in rainfall, rising temperatures, droughts, and floods can quickly reduce yields and disrupt planting cycles. For smallholder farmers operating with limited savings or insurance, even modest weather deviations can translate into income loss and food insecurity. In these climate-exposed agrifood systems, climate risk affects entire communities.

FAO and World Bank research consistently show that women have less secure access to land, credit, extension services, and other productive resources. In climate-exposed agrifood systems, these constraints and unequal access to digital tools can limit their ability to diversify income sources and invest in adaptation measures.

The implications for women extend beyond agrifood systems. In many contexts, women are primary managers of household water, energy, health, and caregiving responsibilities, areas that are increasingly affected by heatwaves, water scarcity, and climate-related disease risks. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s 2025 Global Assessment Report underscores the growing importance of early warning systems, risk communication, and digital data infrastructure in disaster preparedness and response. As these systems increasingly rely on digital and mobile channels, access to timely advisories and recovery mechanisms becomes closely linked to connectivity.

Climate finance also increasingly flows through digital infrastructure. Mobile money platforms enable microinsurance, savings, and access to climate adaptation funds. Yet digital exclusion reinforces financial exclusion. Women who are less connected are less able to access insurance products, less able to receive digital payments, and less able to build financial buffers against climate shocks.

This creates a feedback loop. Limited digital access reduces adaptive capacity. Constrained adaptation increases economic vulnerability, which in turn reinforces affordability barriers to digital tools. The gap sustains itself.

International Women’s Day often celebrates resilience. Women’s capacity to endure, adapt, and sustain families and communities is rightly acknowledged. But resilience should not be romanticized. It should be supported. If women are primary food producers, household managers, and frontline responders in climate-affected communities, then ensuring their digital inclusion is not a peripheral social objective. It is core climate adaptation infrastructure.

Closing the digital gender gap is not simply about expanding connectivity. It requires targeted policy measures: improving the affordability of smartphones and data plans for women, investing in digital literacy and skills training, addressing social norms that restrict women’s independent access to devices, and ensuring that climate information systems are designed with gender inclusion in mind.

The economic case is significant. The GSMA estimates that closing the gender gap in mobile internet adoption in low- and middle-income countries could add $1.3 trillion in GDP between 2023 and 2030. But the argument is not only about growth. Greater digital inclusion would expand women’s access to climate information, markets, insurance, and financial services in precisely the regions most exposed to climate disruption.

On International Women’s Day, supporting women’s resilience means confronting the structural barriers that limit adaptive capacity. In a climate landscape that is increasingly shaped by digital tools, equal connectivity is part of equal resilience.

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