GLF Live: How does the W+ standard make climate finance work for women?

Despite their enormous potential to produce and scale up solutions for climate change, food insecurity and poverty, women’s groups often still lack the resources and recognition they need to succeed.

Seeing this, Jeannette Gurung, Executive Director at Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (WOCAN), set out to provide new, direct, revenue streams to those groups, and so created the first framework measuring and monetizing women’s empowerment – the W+ standard framework.

Developed with women in rural Kenya and Nepal, the W+ standard framework provides metrics and procedures to quantify, verify and monetize women’s empowerment across six areas: time, health, education and knowledge, food security, income and assets, and leadership. In this GLF Live, learn what that means in practice and how the framework is being used to make climate finance work for women.

Listen back to our conversation with the Executive Director at WOCAN, Jeannette Gurung, and the founder and CEO of Ecosystem Regeneration Associates, Hannah Simmons.

Jeannette Gurung is the Executive Director at WOCAN – Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management. WOCAN is a global network to support advocacy and capacity building for women’s leadership and women’s empowerment through partnering women farmers with women professionals and decision makers, and through building men’s support. 

Hannah Simmons is the founder and CEO of Ecosystem Regeneration Associates (ERA), a female-driven carbon project developer based in Brazil, and is known for her pioneering conservation work in the Cerrado biome.