Funding Feminist Climate Action

Mama Cash supports trailblazing feminist organisations driving environmental action globally, including climate adaptation and mitigation. Since our first environmental justice grant in 1991, Mama Cash has channelled over €14.9 million towards transformative climate action, through 330 grants across 45 countries. Currently we support 45 organisations through core flexible funding, with an average grant of €35,000 annually over 10 years. 

The organisations Mama Cash supports are driving robust, sustainable, and scalable climate adaptation solutions while addressing the root causes of the climate crisis. Their work covers multiple themes including transforming food systems, just transition, inclusive governance, resource management, land rights, and the intersections of climate change, gender-based violence (GBV), and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Specific adaptation initiatives include the conservation of forests, biodiversity and water, agroecology, restoring mangroves and estuaries, developing early-warning systems and disaster risk reduction measures, as well as documenting and protecting native species of flora and fauna.  

Mama Cash brings its expertise in accompaniment to grantee-partners, offering tools, skill-building, and strategic advice for organisational strengthening and sustainability. It also facilitates connections and access to regional and international decision-making spaces such as the UN Climate Change Conferences and the Commission on the Status of Women. Mama Cash is also a member of the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action (GAGGA), which has a 10-year track record of funding, convening, and catalysing climate action among women-led organisations on the frontlines. GAGGA facilitates capacity strengthening, peer-to-peer learning, collective organising, and donor advocacy in international climate policy and philanthropic spaces.  

In collaboration with GAGGA, feminist funds, allies and members of the Women and Gender Constituency, Mama Cash engages in donor advocacy to help shape climate finance flows from both governments and private philanthropy. It does so by demonstrating the impact of feminist climate action and its alignment with global goals, with the aim of increasing the quantity and quality of resources available to feminist movements driving transformative solutions on the frontlines.  

The following resources showcase the depth and breadth of Mama Cash’s work to channel more, and better, resources to feminist movements and to support the transformative climate action of its grantee-partners: 

Thematic briefs 

• Equitable food systems: advancing food security and building resilience

• Transformative action on gender and biodiversity

• Feminist movements leading just transitions

• Women with disabilities leading inclusive climate adaptation  

• Sexual and reproductive health and rights and climate justice

Policy briefs  

• Funding our Future: RESOURCING THE FEMINIST MOVEMENTS DRIVING CLIMATE ACTION  – Mama Cash  

• Policy brief: Shifting climate adaptation finance to local communities through effective intermediaries – Mama Cash  

Case studies  

• SERUNI: healing the land with agroecology   – Mama Cash  

• Reclaiming the Land: Women-Led Solutions from Zambia   – Mama Cash  

• Climate change is not equal: Indigenous women with disabilities are taking action – Mama Cash  

• Tikna’oj Brings Traditional Knowledge to Climate Action  – Mama Cash   

Blogs  

• Climate finance that works: supporting the women driving locally-led adaptation – Mama Cash 

• Climate change and the gender justice backlash | International Institute for Environment and Development 

• F20 blog series: 

• 1) How women’s funds are leading the charge for climate justice – Foundations 20  

• 2)  Women’s Funds in Action – Moving Resources to the Heart of Climate Solutions – Foundations 20  

• 3) How feminist climate action transforms people and planet – Foundations 20 

Explanation of Mama Cash grantmaking model

• Shifting power in philanthropy: The Mama Cash model – Impatience Earth