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Convening 2025 - Three Key Shifts
Convening 2024 - Entry Points for Synergies
Convening 2023 - Strategy Workshop on WLR and the Rio Conventions
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In 2025, our Women’s Land Rights Initiative gathered in Nairobi to chart a fresh course for tackling some of the most pressing challenges blocking women’s land rights. When women’s land rights advocates from around the world come together, something powerful happens: conversations turn into shared purpose, and shared purpose into strategy. We asked what’s missing, right now, for our network to truly influence global policy and make it gender- and climate-just. With major negotiation moments ahead in 2026, the network recognised that the window for shaping global agendas is there now. And, for the first time, the network agreed on shared priorities and coordinated actions to take forward together, focusing on harmonising gender commitments, building solidarity in climate finance, and embedding women’s land rights in national agendas. These three pathways took centre stage, each offering a collective approach to build synergies across the Rio Conventions on biodiversity, climate, desertification and even beyond.
How can we better anchor women’s land rights in global and national Gender Action Plans, and how to align gender commitments across the three Rio Conventions?
Gender Action Plans (GAPs) and Women’s and Gender Caucuses are powerful frameworks within the Rio Conventions into which land rights can be solidly anchored. Gender Action Plans provide the policy architecture for integrating gender equity into environmental governance, so women play a prominent role in decision-making and have equal access to land and natural resources. Women’s and Gender Caucuses turn up the heat. As networks of feminist and women's rights organizations, they advocate, monitor progress, and push governments to both update and follow through on their commitments. The Caucuses play an important role in keeping pressure on negotiators so women’s lived experiences around access to land and resources, and their contributions to climate and environmental action inform solutions/global climate policy.
In 2025, we focused our discussion on two main elements: harmonising gender action plans across Conventions and identifying strategies to include women’s land rights into gender action plans.
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Why harmonising Gender Action Plans matters
The GAPs across the three Conventions largely correspond to each other: they recognize the essential role women play in achieving the goals of the Conventions.
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Anchoring women’s land rights strongly in the Gender Action Plans
Securing women’s access to land is one of the connecting threads between the Conventions and should therefore be strongly anchored in Gender Action Plans at global and national level.
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From grassroots to national advocacy
Grassroots women’s organisations hold essential knowledge and experience for designing and implementing effective environmental measures.
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Making the case for women’s land rights
WLRI partners will build a stronger evidence base linking women’s land rights to the Rio Conventions, the SDGs, and human rights frameworks, serving as evidence that placing women at the heart of climate action strengthens both outcomes and rights.
How can we jointly mobilize funds in the current funding landscape with limited funding for gender and environmental action? How can we collaborate differently, avoid competition, build on each other’s strengths and improve direct access by grassroots organizations to funding mechanisms?
One of the toughest systemic challenges to overcome is funding. But a powerful shared sentiment echoed during this event: we must stop competing for scraps and start rebuilding the entire kitchen together. As political actors set on achieving shared goals, we need to learn how to collaborate differently. That means democratising knowledge of and direct access to financing, especially for grassroots organizations, and asking questions about the roles, responsibilities and complementarities between organisations in the ecosystem. Women led grassroots organizations are at the forefront of resilience efforts, but they are cut off from critical resources, with less than a fraction of climate finance reaching them.
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Reimagining funding ecosystems
For 2026, WLRI members will conduct research on how funding competition affects community-based and national organisations, informing guidelines for funders to promote collaboration over competition.
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Engaging global funds for real impact
Women’s land rights cut across food security, climate action, conflict resolution, gender equity, economic development, and biodiversity conservation – connecting to funding streams from climate finance to peacebuilding, agricultural development, and conservation.
There is a growing recognition that women’s land rights must become visible and measurable at the national level. National Action Plans and Indicators are critical for moving beyond one-off projects toward coordinated, nationwide approaches that make women’s land rights a standard part of development and environmental planning.
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