Why climate finance claims success while women’s lives remain unmeasured

Nasrin tends her vegetable plots on the char lands of northern Bangladesh — the low islands that appear and vanish with each monsoon. The soil here floods in summer and salts in winter. She has been working these plots for thirty-two years, as her mother did before her.

In 2022, a climate adaptation project arrived in her union with an $8 million budget. The project document ran 247 pages. It acknowledged the problem: women’s income vulnerability during climate shocks. Its solution included diversified livelihoods, rainwater harvesting, and aquaculture training. The gender strategy took up a neat 47 pages and promised to “ensure women’s economic empowerment through cooperative structures and income-generating activities.”

Nasrin was counted. She attended training sessions. Her name appears in the project database as one of 1,200 women reached.

The project’s monitoring framework tracked the things projects usually track: number of women trained, systems installed, and rates of adoption. The baseline survey set targets. The endline counted how many targets were met. That is standard. That is tidy.

What the monitoring did not ask — and here is the critical omission — was whether Nasrin’s unpaid work actually decreased. It did not establish a baseline for women’s time use, nor did it measure shifts in decision-making control or asset ownership. When the rainwater harvesting system failed in the 2023 monsoon, the repairs were improvised by cooperative members — often women — and the project had no maintenance budget to hand to the women’s group. There is no recorded tally of the hours spent fixing pumps or of the domestic tasks traded away to make that time possible.

This is not an isolated oversight. Multiple evaluations and reviews of climate funds show a pattern: projects commonly measure inputs and outputs — trainings delivered, infrastructure installed — but they rarely measure the social outcomes that determine vulnerability: time use, agency, and control over assets. UN Women’s technical work and other reviews document that time-use baselines are infrequently established and that many climate projects lack indicators for women’s decision-making at community levels. At the same time, broad analyses of climate-tagged aid show only a small share of finance explicitly prioritizes gender equality as a principal objective, and many adaptation flows are not screened for gender at all.

For Nasrin, the record and the reality diverge. The project counted 1,200 women trained and reported 340 rainwater systems installed. It tallied roughly 8,000 taka in aquaculture income for some households over four months, and the final report called the gender component “implemented.” Those outputs are real. What the report did not show was that Nasrin’s total unpaid and underpaid labor rose. Her water-fetching hours fell from three to one and a half per day, but she added two hours of aquaculture duties: tank cleaning, feeding, monitoring. Her youngest daughter missed a year of school that followed the labor spike. The project’s accounting looked good; the household accounting did not.

Why does this matter beyond outrage? 

Because unmeasured burdens compound vulnerability. If a program increases women’s income but simultaneously increases unpaid labor or leaves decision-making unchanged, resilience has not meaningfully improved. Funders can measure hectares planted or pumps installed, but without social outcome indicators, they cannot say whether the intervention reduced risk, redistributed labor equitably, or strengthened women’s bargaining power.

There are exceptions that show a different architecture is possible. Evaluations of some community-led interventions in flood-prone areas — where financing was channelled directly to women’s groups, where maintenance funding and simple governance training were built into project design — yielded clear social gains: steady food availability during flood months, visible income that women controlled, and measurable reductions in time spent on crisis coping. Those cases are instructive because they treat measurement as part of the intervention, not an afterthought.

If climate finance wants to be gender-responsive, it must change three things. First, monitoring frameworks must include baseline time-use surveys and decision-making indicators so projects can measure the things that actually reduce vulnerability. Second, budgets must ring-fence maintenance and governance support for women’s groups so installations do not become symbolic monuments. Third, donors should create simplified direct funding windows for women-led cooperatives so communities are not filtered out by 200-page applications and capital-city procurement rules.

Nasrin’s income from aquaculture was real. So too was the cost. Her daughter’s missed school days are real. Those human records matter more than any line item in an $8 million project report. Until climate finance begins to measure women’s lives the way it measures outputs, reports of “success” will continue to travel from the capital to the donor, while Nasrin’s workload increases and her daughter falls further behind.

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