Increasing women’s capability to participate in meetings

September 23, 2019

In Kenya, we are working with 500 hard to reach women in two counties. Here, we have learned that it is women’s lack of capability to attend training meetings that is holding them back.

I have seen tremendous changes in their lives as a result of our Women’s Rights Programme. Identifying problems is important but the way we intervene is key in realising change. I love our programme because it’s adaptable and encourages ongoing learning. Our behaviour change approach – analysing capability, opportunity and motivation – has been instrumental in sustained behaviour changes.

We analysed their capability to attend meetings

In Kishushe for example, the hard to reach women live difficult lives. Their daily struggles are so bad that they hardly have time to attend to any meeting. Here many people cannot read or write, many don’t go on to secondary school and the land is extremely dry. This year the community is looking at drought as there hasn’t been sufficient rainfall. ActionAid and the community recognises that more women attending and participating in meetings and training would help make long-lasting changes happen. At these meetings we provide training and knowledge to enable them to challenge inequalities in their community and demand gender responsive services.

Our task has been to introduce these women to a local women’s group, Sauti Ya Wanawake. Also we gave them information on how and where they can access group meetings. In addition, we help them plan their home duties and distribute household tasks among other family members to create time for meetings. We also help with negotiation skills so they’re able to persuade their husbands or fathers to allow them to attend group meetings. Further, as they were secluded, we needed a way to identify and engage with them, so we identified a village representative.

Improved capability in practice

Brenda Mwadabiro, 22, is a mother of three children under four. She said: ‘I am married to a herdsman. I want to say that I have really benefited from meetings conducted by Sauti Ya Wanawake and ActionAid on protecting ourselves, kitchen gardening and unpaid care work. I have really benefited from knowing how to plan my household chores. I have been able to negotiate help from my husband. I rarely found time to leave my house and was completely reliant on my husband to provide.

The best thing that has happened to me right now is that I am getting help from my husband. We plan our day together. I ensure that am ready early in the morning and ride my bike 3.7kms to watering point with 8 jerrycans. I queue and when it’s my turn I fill all of them. My husband then comes and rides the bike home with the jerrycans. This saves me several trips like I used to do earlier on. In the afternoon, I have some time to join other groups and learn. I thank ActionAid and Sauti Ya Wanawake and look forward to more lessons.’

Brenda represents the voices of hard to reach women in the community. As a women’s movement, they are now working to improve access to gender responsive services through our Women’s Rights Programme. Working on the project, it is encouraging every time I meet women like Brenda who have strong testimonies on the impact our work has on their lives.

Read more about our Women’s Rights Programme here.

Photo caption: Brenda Mwadabiro, 22, from Kishushe in Kenya. Photo by Caroline Nkirote/ActionAid

Protestors at COP 28 in Dubai. Photo: Konrad Skotnicki.

Belfast Climate Change March, 2019. Photo: Trócaire.

The Profit Driving the Crisis

Despite their overwhelming contribution to global emissions, fossil fuel companies continue to attract significant financial backing—driven by their enduring profitability. This is starkly illustrated by the case of ExxonMobil, the top fossil fuel investment held by asset managers based in Ireland. In 2023, ExxonMobil reported €33.63 billion ($36 billion) in profit. That is almost twice the GDP of Botswana (€18.1 billion) and nearly three times Namibia’s GDP (€11.5 billion).

Ireland plays a hugely disproportionate role in facilitating investments into fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. In 2023, the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland generated an estimated 72.5 million tons of CO2e. This is more than the CO2e emissions for the entire country of Ireland—and more than ten times that generated by Sierra Leone.

The Global Human Impact

The climate crisis is here, now, and it is causing disproportionate harm in the Global South. In Bangladesh, rising sea levels and increasingly severe cyclones are displacing coastal communities, with projections indicating that 17% of the entire country could be underwater by 2050. The legally binding Paris Agreement on climate change explicitly acknowledges the importance of tackling private finance. Its three overarching goals are: keeping below 1.5C of warming; increasing adaptation and making finance flows consistent with low emissions and resilience.

This gives a clear mandate for action: both tax reform and corporate regulation are needed to tackle financial flows, and both nationally in Ireland and at EU level, ‘polluter pays’ taxes are lacking and regulation of the financial sector remains weak and fragmented. While EU regulation exists, it is designed more to nudge investors toward more sustainable investment practices by increasing transparency and reporting levels than to enforce strict standards. And it is moving in the wrong direction: the recently passed EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive excluded investments; and now the EU Commission’s Omnibus legislative proposal threatens to undo the limited gains made on climate plans, as well as blocking future attempts for stronger action at national level.

The Risk of Inaction

Fossil fuel investment is too profitable to remain weakly regulated. If Ireland continues with its current strategy of encouraging FDI at all costs, and relying on weak EU regulation, we are headed for catastrophe. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly warned that every fraction of a degree beyond 1.5°C brings irreversible consequences: collapsed ice sheets, vanishing coral reefs, and extreme weather events that will make vast regions of the planet uninhabitable. And yet, companies are developing oil and gas fields that could push global warming beyond 2°C.

Our research found that 91% of the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland were to companies that have plans for fossil fuel expansion like these. Ireland cannot afford inaction on this issue.

About This Research

The figures in this report regarding investment from Ireland are based on new research commissioned by ActionAid Ireland and Trócaire. In the paper, we uncover the scale of fossil fuel investment through Ireland, who the investors are, and in which fossil fuel companies they are investing. We analyse the current regulatory framework and explain why it is inadequate—and moving in the wrong direction. And we make specific recommendations for change, which are summarised below.

Summary of Recommendations

Regulate the private financial sector
Ireland must end its outsized role as an enabler of destructive fossil fuel investment. Ireland should introduce a strong gender-responsive national human rights and environmental due diligence framework which includes the regulation of investors with respect to human rights and the environment and climate. The transposition of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive could achieve this if downstream activities are included and the Omnibus proposal is rejected. Ireland should prohibit investments in fossil fuel expansion and require investors to implement climate transition plans consistent with a 1.5°C climate limit.

Endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
Ireland should endorse developing a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to curb fossil fuel expansion and commit to a fair and funded phase out of fossil fuels.

Support tax justice
Ireland should support bold and fair new global tax rules through the UN Framework Convention on Tax, should adopt all OECD BEPS measures, and should conduct an updated and comprehensive spillover analysis of its tax policy. Ireland should take coordinated action globally, at the EU level and domestically to introduce a range of new taxes to mobilise finance needed for climate justice, based on ‘polluter pays’ and social equity principles such as wealth taxes for the highest earners, climate damages tax on investors, fossil fuel production taxes and levies on aviation and shipping.

Finance a just transition
Ireland must also meet its fair share climate finance obligations under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, and pay our ecological debt to the Global South. Ireland should support conditionality-free debt cancellation for countries on the front lines of the climate crisis, commit to a new UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt, moving debt negotiations from the IMF to the UN, and to a debt workout mechanism that is fully representative and fair.

Increasing women’s capability to participate in meetings

We analysed their capability to attend meetings

Improved capability in practice

The Profit Driving the Crisis

The Global Human Impact

The Risk of Inaction

About This Research

Summary of Recommendations

Further reading

Your Support in Action

The Reality of Occupation in the West Bank

World Cup is a risk for increased gender-based violence against women