Social capital and resilience: how women’s grassroots participation drives climate adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa.

It is widely known that women are disproportionately impacted by climate change. In this article, Penelope Nortey, Sharon Boateng and Robert C. Richards Jr demonstrate how women are also best placed to develop effective climate action in Sub-Saharan Africa. By delving into the relational and structural dynamics of grassroots participation, they show how women are innovating to address both environmental vulnerabilities and economic security in the face of structural challenges.

The Sub-Saharan African region is widely recognised as the most vulnerable to climate change. With the agriculture sector employing more than 65% of Africa’s labor force, climate change is also detrimental to economic development.

Women in Sub-Saharan Africa play central roles in agriculture, natural resource management and caregiving, and are thus disproportionately vulnerable to climate-induced challenges. However, their voices and needs are often sidelined in policy discussions and adaptation strategies. Increasing women’s participation and leadership in decision making around climate action in Sub-Saharan Africa is critical for the region’s successful response to the climate crisis.

Women across Sub-Saharan Africa occupy key roles in communities. Often responsible for both economic activities and food production, their voices are essential in shaping effective climate change adaptation policies. With 70-90% of all women across Sub-Saharan Africa working in informal sectors, their livelihoods are very vulnerable to climate-related events such as droughts and floods. Despite these challenges, women are already leading grassroots efforts to adapt to climate change in innovative and community-oriented ways.

Women in Sub-Saharan Africa are leading innovative community-based adaptation strategies that build on local strengths while addressing systemic vulnerabilities.

Women’s social capital – developed through participating in networks, cooperatives, and local associations – improves access to resources, information, and collective support. This in turn increases resilience by allowing for faster recovery and adaptation to climate-related shocks. Participation in these networks also creates space for deliberation, where women collectively discuss challenges, share knowledge, and co-develop locally appropriate solutions. Community-based adaptation strategies are closely tied to women’s adaptive capacity because they are grounded in local knowledge, responsive to specific community needs, and inclusive of marginalised voices. However, persistent vulnerabilities like limited access to land, financial exclusion, and restrictive social norms can hinder this process. The figure below shows how we conceptualise the influence of women’s social capital, resilience, and vulnerabilities on community-based adaptation strategies. It also shows how empowering women through inclusive, community-driven approaches can reduce these vulnerabilities and reinforce women’s adaptive capacities through meaningful participation and deliberative engagement.

Women in Sub-Saharan Africa are leading innovative community-based adaptation strategies that build on local strengths while addressing systemic vulnerabilities. In northern Ghana, women farmers are reviving drought-resistant indigenous crops like millet and sorghum in response to declining soil fertility and erratic rainfall. This tackles environmental vulnerabilities while drawing on ecological knowledge shared through intergenerational networks and community dialogue. This is a prime example of community-based adaptation in action, where localised responses enhance resilience and preserve the environment as well as reduce economic insecurity, thereby strengthening women’s capacity to withstand climate shocks.

In Senegal, women’s cooperatives are pooling resources to create emergency food stores that act as a buffer during climate-related food shortages. This intervention uses social capital through collective savings, resource sharing, and communal governance to create a grassroots safety net. These networks not only reduce household vulnerabilities but also speed up post-crisis recovery, demonstrating how social cohesion enhances long-term collective resilience.

Meanwhile, in Nigeria, women-led environmental groups combine adaptation with livelihood strategies, including tree planting, clean energy advocacy, and eco-friendly waste initiatives. These groups train women in sustainable business practices, directly increasing their adaptive capacity by promoting income diversification. By transforming vulnerabilities into economic opportunities, these women are actively reshaping their communities’ climate futures.

Initiatives must not only focus on adaptation strategies but also investigate the gender-specific barriers to deliberating about, choosing, and implementing those strategies in an inclusive way.

Despite their contributions, women face persistent structural barriers that limit their ability to respond and adapt to climate change measures. When addressing climate change, it is just as important to assess the barriers preventing women from initiating and adopting climate solutions. Growing research indicates that women may encounter more limitations in responding to climate change due to factors such as insecure land tenure, limited access to climate information, social norms, lack of decision-making authority, and restricted access to assets. Therefore, climate change initiatives must not only focus on adaptation strategies but also investigate the gender-specific barriers to deliberating about, choosing, and implementing those strategies in an inclusive way.

A growing number of organisations are moving beyond gender-mainstreaming to embed women’s rights and leadership directly within climate adaptation programming. The Adaptation Fund’s gender-specific programs seek to secure sustainable and reliable water sources for disadvantaged communities while emphasising women’s involvement in decision-making. What distinguishes this strategy is the Fund’s use of contextual research to reveal hidden barriers to implementation, particularly the prevalence of gender-based violence (GBV) among program participants. The high rate of GBV not only put beneficiaries at risk, but it also prevented women from taking part in and profiting from water collection efforts. In response, the Fund added a specific GBV intervention to the program. This helped with both physical and mental trauma and removed the barriers leading to their project’s success. This demonstrates how adaptive methods must be intersectional and sensitive to power relations, emphasising the importance of social safety and well-being in women’s adaptive capabilities.

In Nigeria, Women Environmental Programme (WEP) designs its interventions around local women’s lived experiences and resource use, ensuring that climate projects are community-driven and inclusive. Their work places a strong emphasis on grassroots involvement, especially in fields like sustainable water management, climate-smart agriculture, and environmentally friendly waste management. What differentiates WEP is its emphasis on intersectionality: programs are designed to address how gender interacts with age, ethnicity, and marital status, ensuring that women from all social groups are effectively engaged. WEP’s participatory training programs, coordinated by local women, help to create knowledge and social capital, resulting in stronger, more cohesive community-based adaptation networks.

Women-led and gender-sensitive programs are more than just theoretical goals; they are critical components of effective climate adaptation, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. NGOs, national governments and research agencies must avoid a one-size-fits-all approach and should allow for flexible strategies that consider the diverse needs of women across intersecting identities. Gender-disaggregated research is one component essential to increasing the implementation of gender-responsive climate change programs.

Community-based adaptation strategies based on social capital, resilience building, and vulnerability awareness can greatly improve women’s adaptive capability. Women’s involvement in environmental decision-making can result in more sustainable, equitable and effective outcomes. By approaching climate adaptation through a gender lens, we are able to identify challenges, amplify local power, and ensure that women are positioned as important actors in the fight against climate change.

About the Authors

Penelope Nortey is a Master of Public Service candidate at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service and a Graduate Research Assistant for the Participedia Project. She has been admitted to a Ph.D. program in Political Science with a concentration in public policy and international politics, where she plans to explore issues related to women’s participation in climate adaptation decision-making in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her academic interests broadly span democratic practices, citizen participation in governance, and the intersections of political communication, and the use of artificial intelligence in public policy and international politics.

Sharon Boateng is a Master of Public Service candidate at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, where she works as a Graduate Research and Course Support Assistant in the first-year course in communication and civic engagement, and regularly facilitates public dialogues in the community. Sharon recently worked on evaluations of programs focused on women’s empowerment and climate change at Health Poverty Action in Kigali, Rwanda.

Robert C. Richards, Jr., PhD, JD, is an associate professor at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, an interdisciplinary affiliate at the University of Arkansas Center for Communication Research, and a co-investigator on Participedia Phase Two: Strengthening Democracy by Mobilizing Knowledge of Democratic Innovations. He teaches courses in communication and civic engagement, legal and ethical aspects of public service, and artificial intelligence in public service, and conducts research on democratic deliberation, citizens’ participation in governance, and political, legal, and group communication.