Our Blog: Climate Change

By: Katie Douglas, WEA Intern

When Aring Rengsoring joined the WSDC training program in her village of Aimol Chingnunghut, she was already skilled in farming, weaving, and domestic work. Participating in the WSDC program allowed her to not only pass on these talents to others, but to strengthen her leadership abilities. It was leadership training that gave her the opportunity to challenge her community’s strict and discriminatory patriarchal structure. Aring was already a woman of many skills, but training from the partnership of WSDC and WEA gave her the resources to assert herself as an activist advocating for the rights of women in her community.

Gender justice, food sovereignty, and the right to just livelihoods are the issues that WSDC aims to conquer by leading educational trainings that teach women about their basic community rights to lead in their communities and government. When women are trained in peace and conflict resolution and sustainable livelihoods, they are better equipped to handle the amounts of violence, and food scarcity that have increased in the Chandel district due to climate change.

Although women have long been disregarded as “second-class citizens” in certain regions, this has not stopped the women of Manipur from rising forward to assert their rights throughout history. In 1939 women led a series of social movements known as the Nupi lan, or the “women’s war”, to protest British free trade laws that facilitated food shortages in their communities. However, today new issues have presented themselves in the form of dam construction, foreign farming practices, and the onslaught of climate change. Women’s rights are stressed by these newly introduced practices, which have forced the abandonment of traditional resource management and farming practices. In many communities women like Aring have no control over their earnings or land ownership, and many lack economic security because there is so little access to quality education or other skills training. As the women’s ability to provide for their family becomes increasingly limited, communities see consequential rises in sexual and economic exploitation, and violence that targets rural women.

To promote political, social and cultural rights is crucial for sustainable development and fundamental to the success of WSDC vision. WSDC creates opportunities for women to voice their concerns, and form women’s groups for collective training in advocacy and lobbying around the laws that directly affect their rights, and livelihoods. Through WSDC hundreds of women farmers are supplied with the resources for sustainable farming practices such as organic seeds and fertilizers, and training in organic crop management.

WSDC also assists over 300 impoverished families by informing them of their entitlements to government ration programs, and supports women’s groups on their efforts to change laws that sustain discriminatory practices of violence against women.

After Aring’s WSDC training, she formed the Peace Self-Help Group (Peace SHG). This group of 12 women advocates for the concerns of women at the village government level. The work of Aring and the other women activists of Peace SHG has touched her entire community from helping families to access once restricted ration cards to creating a traditional weaving center where all profits earned provide micro credits to women farmers. Today Aring is an inspirational activist in her community who has furthered her WSDC training by spreading her knowledge and advocacy work to benefit the lives of her entire village.

By: Katie Douglas, WEA Intern

All her life Sinumoni Bora has been an advocate on behalf of women’s rights. Sinumoni was born to an impoverished tribal family in the city of Jorhat, India. From an early age she was supporting her family and tutoring other youth. By the time she was an adult, Sinumoni had already established herself in a variety of grassroots women’s committees, going on to create a women’s self-help group to tutor rural women in literacy and train them to cultivate sustainable sources of income. Sinumoni additionally became an advocate on violence against women, leading campaigns for justice for women who had been murdered or sexually assaulted. As a volunteer for People’s Action for Development, Sinumoni is an inspirational and exemplary figure of empowerment within a project that aims to train female leaders from the Assam region to speak on the impacts of climate change, development, and gender inequality in their lives.

People’s Action for Development (PAD) deals primarily with the issues of gender justice, indigenous rights, land rights and climate change. With the support of WEA, PAD has played a critical role within the Assam region by addressing these issues through the identification of local women leaders and young girls to take part in leadership trainings. In a society where women often find themselves confined within strict patriarchal systems, there is little room to express their needs or voice their solutions to the increasing issues of climate change, development, and threats to indigenous traditional livelihoods.

Newly developed extractive industry policies in the Assam region have resulted in widespread and illegal mining, deforestation, water contamination, loss of agricultural lands, mega dam construction, and the subsequent increase in climate change-related issues. The northeastern region of India, in which Assam is located, is one of the most biodiverse areas in the world, and maintains nearly 44% of the country’s forest. Yet from 2001 to 2012 approximately 548,440 hectares of the forest were cleared. The impacts of such massive deforestation have been felt in particular by women as they lose further control over their traditional sources of livelihood, are being displaced by new populations, and levels of poverty and sexual or economic exploitation rise. The only way to change such vulnerability is to give these women the resources from which they can make their voices heard.

PAD’s top priority is to develop women’s leadership in order for them to hold positions at the forefronts of social and political movements. For this to happen, local women leaders from the Assam region take part in leadership trainings, and gather to discuss the impacts of development projects, and environmental degradation in the lives of women in their communities. From this these grassroots women activists are able to unite in recognizing the ways in which they are discriminated against and their voices disregarded. In many cases these meetings represent the first time these women have been able to leave their communities and gather with other women in the interest of opening their minds on new ways to critically address climate change and gender injustice.

As a volunteer for PAD, Sinumoni works to help these women organize and to understand their own potential as community leaders. For her work volunteering with PAD and other organizations she was awarded the C. Subramanian Award by the National Foundation of India, an award that given to volunteers and community leaders working tirelessly to promote volunteer efforts in food security and sustainable livelihoods. Her leadership is an inspiration to women across the globe and a lesson in how the vision of female leadership can help a community to thrive.

By: Katie Douglas, WEA Intern

“Each time I plant a tree I realize that I am not only contributing in a small way to sustain the livelihood of forest dependents like me, but also toward [addressing] global warming.”

In the northeastern state of Manipur, India, Sangpui is a mother of three, and raises her children on the little income she earns from growing vegetables, and selling forest food items to local markets. Though her actions may seem small, they are part of a larger and incredibly significant global movement. For her part in this movement Sangpui refuses to be a powerless victim of climate change, and instead has established herself as an active participant in sustainable change.

Sangpui’s determination to create change for herself and her community is reflected in her actions and her participation in the Rural Women Upliftment Society’s (RWUS) climate training. This partnership between RWUS and WEA supports the local women of Manipur by addressing issues of natural resource management, gender inequality, environmental degradation and climate change at local and policy levels.

RWUS tackles these issues with trainings that provide women with the resources to become voices of change and sustainable development within their communities. As massive developments and national deforestation programs challenge the wellbeing of Bangladesh’s lands and rivers, traditional female knowledge represents the key to climate mitigation and conservation.

Manipur is regarded as one of the most ecologically sensitive regions in the world, but in recent decades this beautiful land has experienced widespread deforestation with 38% of the state’s land seeing rapid forest cover change. This has resulted in agricultural challenges, and water and food insecurity. Severe droughts have led health officials to fear for increased levels of water-borne diseases as people increasingly drink from impure and contaminated water sources.

Sangpui and the other women of Manipur’s tribal communities represent the primary food providers, water collectors, and economic contributors. This means that these unsustainable developments have affected their lives the most. And without empowered female figures to raise these issues, either in their traditional societies or around government resource management, those with the most information to bring to the environmental discussion are left with no way to contribute their knowledge.

RWUS trainings are a critical element in tackling Manipur’s local issues of gender and environmental injustice. Through awareness-raising workshops on climate change and female leadership, grassroots environmental campaigning, and tree planting days, the women who were once vulnerable can take a proactive role in addressing issues of environmental degradation. As community leaders these women can work to improve the effectiveness of initiatives around climate change adaptation. Example workshops may focus on increasing awareness around forest biodiversity, sustainably managing natural resources and giving the women the capacity to address emerging issues of dams and mining. This provides the women with the critical opportunity to discuss how these destructive developments have impacted their Indigenous livelihoods, culture and general existence.

Today Sangpui continues to work on how to take personal responsibility in protecting her local environment. In fact, learning about the impacts of forest degradation led her to personally plant over 1,000 saplings. Just as in WEA’s vision, she is literally sowing her seeds of knowledge in the hope of creating for herself and her community a more sustainable future.