Rural Women Assembly (RWA) has recently launched in Malawi’s Zomba city, a move that will ensure that climate change related issues and interventions are gender sensitive but are also featuring highly on development agenda in the district and beyond.
Seeing how crucial the role RWA could play in the Gender Transformative Climate Resilience project, Oxfam supported the mobilization of women in the city but also participated in the launch that was done in collaboration with the National Rural Women Governance structure and other district level stakeholders who included female members of parliament from the city. The event took place in Traditional Authority Mwambo in the city.
Lingalireni Mihowa, Oxfam Malawi Country Director says the collaboration of RWA and Oxfam through the Gender Transformative Climate Adaptation project will help empower women’s local movements and this is important to achieving gender equality and shaping effective and just responses to climate change.
“Through this nature of mobilization and working with women movements, Oxfam and RWA will help create agency among women to inform climate resilience interventions and policy direction from a transformative perspective,” says Lingalireni Mihowa. “This is important because it will mean that women will be taking lead in finding solutions to an issue that impacts on them disproportionally”.
Launch of RWA in the city is therefore a milestone and a win for women because it will empower women to organize, raise their voices, and help in building their transformative leadership to advocate for their own needs and solutions to be included in climate policies at the local, national, and international levels such as the COP 28 agenda.
The Gender Transformative Climate Resilience project being implemented in Malawi and Mozambique aims to improve gender-transformative, low carbon and climate resilient development in selected vulnerable communities, especially for women and girls in Africa.
