Women Are Ideal Sustainability Leaders

BY NADÈGE NZOYEM | DIRECTOR, WEST AND CENTRAL AFRICA

To witness the impact of women’s leadership, look no further than the career of Nadège Nzoyem. With nearly two decades of experience in forestry and sustainable development, our West and Central Africa director has been an unstoppable force for positive change, catalyzing on-the-ground improvements by uplifting rural women and helping them transform their communities. We asked Nzoyem to explain the crucial role that women play in achieving sustainability goals.

For rural women, sustainability is not an abstract idea; it has a direct and tangible impact on their daily existence. Studies repeatedly show that unpredictable weather, natural disasters, and other climate-related changes disproportionately affect women and girls—threatening their education, employment, and even their physical safety.

In many rural communities, women are the ones tasked with finding water and firewood, and also growing and cooking food for the household. And it’s this special relationship with natural resources that makes them ideal sustainability leaders. While men will always talk about productivity, women will be thinking about the variety of crops to grow, water access, and so on—all the things that help them bring food to the table.

Despite being the backbone of the natural resource economy, however, women are often excluded from decision-making processes that directly affect their lives. That’s why so much of our work in Central Africa and elsewhere focuses on rural women.

In my home country of Cameroon, for example, we promote women as sustainability champions and work to strengthen their role in managing their natural resources. As part of our larger efforts to support the land rights and livelihoods of rural communities, we have set up community-led landscape management boards (LMBs), making sure that at least 30 percent of their representatives are women. We also provide crucial training in business management to local, women-led agricultural and forestry enterprises.

To facilitate success, it’s important to remove the everyday hurdles women face. Sometimes that means having discussions with traditional authorities, along with their husbands and family members, to secure their support for the women’s efforts. Other times, it means working around the women’s busy schedules, creating workshop spaces that are child- and infant-friendly, coaching them in public speaking, and finding solutions to their specific challenges.

Over the past 20 years of working in Central Africa, I have seen firsthand the good that can result when women have the chance to lead. For instance, when the Rainforest Alliance established plant nurseries at a local cocoa cooperative In the South region of Cameroon, its women members spoke up. They told our local Rainforest Alliance representative that, in addition to the nurseries, they needed access to good-quality water to help them take care of the plants. This access provides the added benefit of lessening the time they spend gathering water for cooking and cleaning.

Although our initial plan had been to focus on building the nurseries, the input these women provided inspired us to expand the initiative. Once we understood their needs, we installed a water pump at each nursery, to help the plants grow and improve the community’s water access.

When women’s voices, are amplified, the results are felt far and wide. It’s a simple equation: strong women equal strong communities and strong landscapes.

SNAPSHOT: OUR WORK IN CAMEROON