21 Jul 2024

United States (US) embassy funded project titled ‘Greening Women Enterprise’ which supports women at grass-root level to access existing climate change funds and support will come to an end September this year.

Implemented by Botswana Climate Change Network (BCCN) organisation, the two-year project supported disadvantaged women who largely depended on fuel wood for cooking and lighting.

The two-year project which started October 2022 was implemented in Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini and was intended to pilot the use of green products in support of the transition to a climate resilient and low carbon development in the three countries.

Further, the project focused on identifying women entrepreneurs who could infuse green technologies and services into their businesses.

Sharing achievements of the project during a workshop on Friday, BCCN project officer, Ms Duduzile Masuku said the project aimed to improve livelihoods of the marginalised women from the three countries and appreciated that it bore positive fruits.

Through the project, she said they turned climate change challenges into opportunities for women saying they managed to remove barriers to women’s economic advancement and facilitate equal opportunities for them to participate in the green economy.

She appreciated that an induction and training workshop was held last year February in Johannesburg where women from the three countries met and introduced to the project after an intensive profiling.

The workshops, she said covered topics such as green enterprise management and operation of a good business model and also provided knowledge and understanding climate change and green energy transition. The workshop also covered finance management, creative and innovate as well as greening and sustainability.

“About 100 women were profiled and empowered from the three countries and 58 were trained during the in-country training and capacity building of grassroots women entrepreneurs.

A selection was also done to narrow the number and currently we have 12 beneficiaries of which four are from each country who benefited from the project,” added Ms Masuku.

US Environment, science and technology specialist for Southern Africa Hub, Ms Phatsimo Kwenane said the US embassy was concerned about gender and climate change and believed that combating climate crises and how it affected gender equality would mitigate threat.

Climate crisis and gender equality, she said were inextricably linked citing that evidence increasingly demonstrated that empowering women politically, economically, socially and meaningfully including their needs and perspectives in decision-making leads to more equitable and sustainable policies, including those to combat the climate crisis.

“We believe that women are the pillars of their homes and we view them as people who can be part of the response in the fight against climate change hence the project to empower them in promoting renewable energy products and services to meet climate ambitions,” Ms Kwenane added.

She said climate adaptation was needed to significantly reduce the impacts of climate change on the communities, ecosystems, and economies, adding that women could act as agents of change at different levels of the adaptation process; at agriculture, natural resource management, and the development of early warning systems, to ensure that adaptation efforts were effective and implementable on the ground.

The embassy, she said recognised an opportunity to promote climate action and solutions by harnessing the potential of women, girls, and gender diverse persons through policy, programming, and public outreach as key change agents and leaders in solving the climate crisis, both at home and abroad, while also addressing the disproportionate impacts the climate crisis had on them. ENDS