Worldwide, over a billion people live in extreme poverty, trapped in impoverished communities surrounded by environmental collapse with no access to education or productive employment. Women - caretakers, mothers, community leaders, healers, farmers, artisans, and resource stewards – face the brunt of these hardships. In an effort to care for their families and address the mounting impacts of climate change, pollution, forest eradication, and international health crises, women around the world are making purposeful commitments to transforming the quality of their lives and their environments. Their efforts to sustain and protect their families, cultures, and natural resources are nothing less than heroic.

Decades of global and local environmental degradation disproportionately impact women’s abilities to provide their children with unpolluted water, clean and nutritious food, clean and healthy homes. The longstanding bias in development programs against women coupled with structural discrimination, (e.g., poverty, prejudice, isolation, violence and lack of political power,) in many societies has engendered an indelible hardship for women around the world. 

Yet it is also widely recognized that the most effective return on investment for development dollars is an investment in women –community caretakers, mothers, environmental and cultural resource stewards.  In the 2000 UN Millennium Declaration, 191 governments around the world agreed to “promote the empowerment of women as an effective way to combat poverty, hunger and disease and to stimulate environmental sustainability.”

This is a critical moment in history - environmental and financial pressures are at an all time high. The health of future generations and the sustainability of our world’s cultural heritage are predicated on the degree to which women worldwide have their basic needs met and importantly, are supported to be agents of change.