The invisible engineers

Maria squints against the mid-morning glare as she adjusts the aluminum panels of her solar dryer. The metal is warm to the touch, humming faintly in the heat. Inside, trays of sliced okra and tomatoes glisten under the filtered sunlight. By evening, they'll be dry enough to last months. A small insurance policy against the next failed harvest.

She built the dryer herself. Salvaged scraps from a mechanic's yard, old glass panes from a school window. The women in her village laughed at first. Then they joined her. Now they come each week to dry their vegetables, sell them at the market, save what used to rot in the sun.

It's not high-tech. It's survival, engineered.

Maria doesn't call it innovation. That's what it is, though: an off-grid, zero-emission technology extending food security and income in one of the world's hottest regions. In another setting, she might've been called a founder. Here, she's just Maria. Farmer. Mother. Engineer by necessity.

The global conversation on climate technology has never been louder. From COP28 panels to venture capital forums, it's touted as the new frontier. The numbers back this up. PwC's 2023 State of Climate Tech report tracked over $50 billion in private investment flowing into the sector. That's real money moving fast.

Here's what the same data reveals. The International Finance Corporation found that less than 3 percent of global venture capital for climate tech goes to women-led startups. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the figure is virtually unrecorded. Not "low." Unrecorded. As in, nobody's even tracking it properly.

When reports claim innovation is accelerating, they're describing a specific kind. The patentable. The scalable. The tradable. What doesn't fit that model stays invisible. Maria's solar dryer will never make the news cycle. The FAO notes women produce 60 to 80 percent of food in developing regions. Her invention is part of a quiet revolution that feeds people. It just doesn't get counted as technology.

The definitional problem matters more than it seems. If "technology" only means high-capital hardware, women like Maria disappear from the story. Their work gets categorized as "livelihood support." It's a soft label that pushes them to the sidelines of serious finance. This framing shapes everything. Donor priorities. Investment theses. Metrics of success.

International frameworks already acknowledge this gap, at least on paper. The UNFCCC's Gender Action Plan and the Green Climate Fund's Gender Policy both say women's participation in climate technology is essential. The operational pathways tell a different story. Women usually show up in "beneficiary" roles within projects designed elsewhere. Not as innovators shaping solutions from the ground up.

A 2023 UN Women and UNEP report tracked climate-related innovation grants. 

Only a fraction included specific mechanisms to support women-led enterprises. Even fewer measured meaningful gender outcomes beyond participation counts. So you get this chasm. Climate technology gets funded in one place. It's most urgently needed for resilience in another. The two rarely meet.

Maria's story repeats across geographies. Across the Sahel, South Asia, the Pacific Islands, women are designing low-cost cooling systems. Regenerative agriculture techniques. Community-based water management tools. These are technologies of adaptation. Created without fanfare. Often without recognition. Almost always without capital support.

The policy narrative stays preoccupied with mitigation technologies. Carbon markets. Grid-scale renewables. Electric mobility. These are necessary. They're also insufficient for people already living inside climate disruption. Adaptation is the orphan of climate finance. The Climate Policy Initiative found that adaptation accounted for just under 10 percent of global climate finance flows in 2021/2022. Gender-responsive adaptation projects? A sliver of that already small pie.

Think about what that means on the ground. A woman in northern Nigeria invents a water filtration system using local clay and charcoal. Zero external inputs. Purifies water for fifty households. She can't access a microloan because she lacks formal land title. The system works. The finance doesn't reach her. Meanwhile, a grid-scale renewable project three hundred kilometers away gets $40 million in blended finance. Both are climate solutions. Only one gets funded.

This isn't about mitigation versus adaptation. It's about who gets to define what counts as innovation and where money flows as a result. Right now, the architecture favors scale and IP. It undervalues local ingenuity and immediate impact.

To shift this, climate finance needs to broaden its definition of innovation. Not as rhetoric. As operational practice. That means reforming how funds categorize, assess, and report on technology. It means investing directly in women's access to credit, training, and networks. Not as a side program tagged onto a bigger initiative. As a core strategy for deploying capital where resilience is actually being built.

A handful of initiatives are testing this. The African Development Bank's Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa, AFAWA, combines finance with capacity support. The UNDP's Climate Promise is pioneering models that recognize local innovation. These remain pilot efforts. Small scale. Compared to the mainstream pipeline, which continues to favor the familiar and the capital-intensive, they're drops in the ocean.

Maria's solar dryer works season after season. No maintenance contract. No technical assistance program. It stands because she built it to last and taught others to maintain it. That's proof that ingenuity is universal. Opportunity is not.

The women already engineering solutions in the margins aren't waiting for permission. They're solving problems with what they have. The question facing climate finance is whether it will evolve fast enough to see them. To fund them. To stop calling their work "informal" when it's actually the most formal response to survival there is.

Climate technology isn't only about engineering the future. It's about recognizing the invisible engineers already holding the present together. Maria is one. There are millions more. Some are drying vegetables. Some are filtering water. Some are breeding flood-resistant seeds in backyard plots.

They're not asking for charity. They're asking to be seen as what they are: innovators building the resilience the rest of us will eventually need. If climate finance can't figure out how to reach them, then it's not actually financing climate solutions. It's financing a narrow slice of them while the rest of the world adapts without support.

That's the gap. Not a knowledge gap. Not a technology gap. A recognition gap. And it's costing us more than we're willing to admit.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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