· 6 min read
At first light in Marsabit, Amina tightens the cloth around her head, lifts two yellow jerrycans onto her hip, and sets off with her daughters.
The nearest functioning water point is a five-mile walk. If she does not make the trip twice before noon, the goats will go thirsty, and the small vegetables that feed the family will wither.
Water is not a background problem in Amina’s life, it is the resource that influences every hour, every decision, every missed school day.
Two years ago, a donor-funded solar pump was installed at the edge of the village. There were ribbon-cutting photos, a project launch with logos on a plywood sign, and a press release that called the intervention “gender-responsive climate adaptation.” On the same day in Nairobi and Geneva, bureaucrats logged it as a success project, with funds allocated, equipment delivered, gender box ticked.
In Marsabit, the panels are caked with dust, the pipes leak, and the maintenance contract was never renewed. A signboard with donor logos still leans against the fence.
On site, the pump is a monument to failed follow-through, but in the ledger books, it is a completed line item.
This gap between ledger and livelihood is the central failure of much climate finance, that claims to be gender-responsive.
The phrase is meant to mean more than a catchy label. It is intended to ensure women are not passive beneficiaries, but active decision-makers in how funds are designed, allocated, and measured.
Yet the evidences show that this principle rarely becomes practice.
One analysis found that in 2019, only a vanishingly small share of climate-focused official development assistance designated gender equality as a principal objective, a sign that gender was usually an afterthought rather than a driver (According to OECD DAC data, in 2019 only 1.7% of climate-focused bilateral aid had gender equality as a principal objective).
Why does the money stall at the edge of the village? The failures repeat in the same sequence.
First, access. Application processes and accreditation systems are written for consultants and ministries in the capital cities, but not for village-level women’s cooperatives. The application forms run to dozens of pages and require technical studies, audited accounts, and complex procurement plans. Small groups that manage the daily work of water supply, seed distribution, and food storage cannot compete.
Second, allocation. Budgets often include a line item called gender, but the money is not ring-fenced. It is folded into larger contracts for equipment and consultancy fees. What looks like a gender investment in a donor report, on the ground becomes a token training session or a pamphlet.
Third, accountability. Reporting frameworks reward disbursement velocity and visible “outputs”, such as number of pumps installed or hectares planted. They do not reward reductions in unpaid labor, nor increases in women’s decision-making power. So long as auditors can point to equipment delivery, the project reads as successful in a portfolio review, even when local women are still walking for miles to get water.
The consequences are not theoretical. When projects fail to fund maintenance, often due to political turnover in local governments, a lack of technical capacity, and perpetual funding cycles that are out of sync, with long-term needs.
When contracts exclude local committees, and when gender components are underspent, the cost is paid by women. Girls are pulled from school to collect water. Small businesses stall because time for market travel evaporates.
Household budgets are strained by the cost of hiring labor or buying supplementary food. From an investor or donor posture, such failures are hidden losses. From Amina’s household, they are immediate regressions in welfare and resilience.
There are exceptions worth noting, as they point a way forward. In Bangladesh, women-led community adaptations, such as floating garden projects and smallholder initiatives created rapid, measurable benefits; steady vegetable yields in flood months, income from surplus sales, and reduced hours fetching food or tending distant plots.
These local, simple interventions delivered outcomes because design and management were local, the financing was flexible, and technical support was embedded in community structures (For example, community-led adaptation projects in Gaibandha District supported by organizations like Practical Action).
These exceptions prove a central truth. Gender-responsive finance is not primarily a new tranche of money. It is a different architecture for moving money. That architecture requires three basic shifts.
One, direct pathways to women-led entities. Donors and multilateral funds must create simplified accreditation and smaller-grant windows that allow cooperatives and women’s groups to apply without prohibitive overhead. While due diligence is essential, current systems are often designed to mitigate financial risk to the donor rather than to maximize efficacy for the recipient.
Two, ring-fenced gender allocations tied to clear local deliverables. If a project claims gender-responsive objectives, a named share of the budget must be reserved for outcomes that affect women’s workloads, incomes, and decision-making, and those funds must be audited to the community level.
Three, outcome-based accountability. Disbursements should be linked to verified social outcomes, not only to technical outputs. Did unpaid labor hours drop? Did girls remain in school during crisis months? Did women gain seats on management committees? Those are the questions that reveal whether finance moved resilience, not just hardware.
The scale problem is real. Ambitious initiatives with global headlines, such as the Great Green Wall, attract large pledges. But pledges are not the same as money on the ground. The Great Green Wall initiative saw billions announced, yet independent reviews show that only a small fraction of promised funding reached program implementation by recent reporting dates (A 2020 UNCCD status report indicated only 4% of the pledged funding had been disbursed on the ground).
When high-profile money fails to translate into local delivery, the biggest losers are the communities, whose lives the programs purported to help.
Here is the brutal arithmetic: gender-blind climate finance is a poor investment. It misses half the social machinery that adapts to climate shocks, it reduces local buy-in, and it wastes capital on assets that rust without maintenance plans.
If donors want resilience, they must stop believing paperwork equals progress. They must start building funding channels that end where people live.
Back in Marsabit, Amina will rise again before dawn tomorrow. She will shoulder the jerrycans and walk. The pump will remain a weathered sign on the horizon.
Counting the dollars that left a London or Paris ledger will mean nothing to her family. The true audit of gender-responsive finance is written in the hours she walks, the meals she skips, and the school days her daughters lose. If climate finance cannot change that accounting, then it is not gender-responsive. It is just a louder way to say we tried.
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