Rahel Diro is Senior Research Staff Associate at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University. Rahel is an expert in building farmers resilience to climate change. In this episode we discuss how women's experience of climate change and natural disasters are different to those of men, and we talk about what needs to be done to help women become more resilient. Rahel explains how initiatives in Ethiopia and around the world have been successful in doing so by putting the most vulnerable first. Find out more about the International Research Institute for Climate and Society: https://iri.columbia.edu And the R4 rural resilience initiative: https://www.wfp.org/r4-rural-resilience-initiative And follow Rahel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahel-diro-01817637/
Find out more about the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and the R4 rural resilience initiative.
To read more about forecast-based financing, you can start with this short summary from the World Food Programme.
And you can follow Rahel on LinkedIn.
Alice Merry (00:08):
Welcome to the podcast that takes a feminist look at the world of money. My name is Alice Merry and this is the Feminist Finance Podcast.
Alice Merry (00:20):
Today I spoke with Rahel Diro. Rahel is Senior Research Staff Associate at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University. Rahel is an expert in building farmers' resilience to climate change, and her experience spans research, policy and leading programs directly to support farmers.
Alice Merry (00:41):
She completed her bachelor's degree in agricultural business management in Ethiopia and also has a Master's in Agricultural Economics as well as a Master in Public Administration from Columbia University. I'm particularly interested to speak to Rahel to find out about how she sees climate change affecting women in particular, and what financial tools can do to help them manage it.
Alice Merry (01:05):
During our conversation today we talk about two programs that have proved very successful. The second is forecast-based financing and I'll let Rahel explain to you what that means later in this episode. But first we talk about the HARITA program in Ethiopia, which was later renamed the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative. This program helps farmers by bringing together practical activities to make their environments more resilient to climate change and financial tools to help protect them against natural disaster as well as grow their production. I started by asking Rahel to tell us about the farmers covered by this program and the kind of risks that they face.
Rahel Diro (01:46):
In Ethiopia the project started in Tigray region, which is very, very vulnerable to drought. Persistent drought is one of the biggest risks for the community.
Alice Merry (02:03):
And when you were going out and speaking to these farmers and meeting people in the villages where you started off the program, did you see that men and women had the same perceptions or the same attitudes to these risks like drought, or did you see some differences?
Rahel Diro (02:20):
A big part of my work has been going to the field and being within the community and trying to understand their experience in terms of historically how the climate affected them, what were the droughts they faced, how do they remember them? And I mean it's different of course from country to country, but some places there may be like a few women but they don't get a chance to speak. And as much as possible I always try and say, "Okay, let the women speak." Because when they get a chance to speak, you get the most detailed information about what happened in 1984 for example. Because they remember everything that everything's connected to family. Maybe it's like, "I was pregnant that year and I was going to give birth at the hospital..." You know, they have a much bigger memory.
Rahel Diro (03:24):
And also they, when the risks happen, they're usually, like the men have a chance to migrate - they probably migrate to some other place, looking for work - but the women are there. So they experience the everyday impact of the disaster risk. So in terms of the kind of risks they faced, I mean all of the farmers say their biggest risk is drought, of course they face other risks - there is hail, sometimes there's some flooding, and other times pests.
Rahel Diro (04:03):
So these are risks that are faced by the community at their whole. But because of their vulnerability, women are affected differently by these risks than men. Because women are less likely to have access to, for example, credit, they have less access to education, to technologies. So all these things make them much more vulnerable.
Rahel Diro (04:38):
In addition, their role in the community is also different. For example a lack of rainfall for a male farmer means just about the crops. So the crops won't have enough water. For women farmers it means there is less water for the crops, right? The same risk that the men face, but also there's less drinking water and they worry about the health of their family. So I think the way women look at it is, or the way it affects woman is slightly different from the way men are affected by this same risk.
Alice Merry (05:25):
It's interesting that you mentioned that, because all the kind of classic tools that we use to speak with farmers about risk are very much around cashflow, aren't they? And this is such an important risk that wouldn't come up with that kind of analysis, right?
Rahel Diro (05:36):
Right, exactly. And the recommendations we make based on this risks, it's also let's say, "Okay, there's a risk for these crops so maybe you should switch to this crop." But then women also care about food preparation and they are responsible for that. So maybe they prefer other crops than the one that you're recommending, right? So these are the things that are usually overlooked when we do climate risk, specifically how it affects men and women differently. And if so, what are the solutions?
Alice Merry (06:17):
So the solution that Oxfam decided to implement was the HARITA program, which later became called the R4 program. Can you tell us a bit more about how this program worked?
Rahel Diro (06:29):
So it was back in 2010, when I was in Ethiopia working for Oxfam America. I was managing that program. And the program is designed to be a holistic risk management program where farmers are offered access to manage their risks using different mechanisms. One of those mechanics were natural resource management activities they do within their community to be more resilient to the impacts of climate change - for example, things like tree planting or water harvesting, like building water harvesting structures, which are risk reduction activities. And by working on these risk reduction activities, they have the ability to pay for an insurance, a drought insurance program, which is the other risk management element. And the insurance program was targeting drought risks. So it was a program based on rainfall shortage.
Rahel Diro (07:55):
The third one was create access to credit. So this program combined all these three things, and because the farmers didn't have cash, they were offered to pay for the insurance using their labor by working on these risk reduction activities. So this was how the program was designed and it has several partners, both from non-government, government and private sector partners. And for about, I started in 2009 in one village and it's expanded to five villages in 2010. And they went to more than 40 villages in 2011. And after that point Oxfam partnered with the World Food Program. And since then it has been expanded to within Ethiopia and also in other countries around the world. And it's now called the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative. And it has been one of the success stories in terms of a holistic risk management approach that's targeting the most vulnerable populations in Africa.
Alice Merry (09:29):
And when we spoke about this before, I remember that you said to me that the HARITA program, or now the R4 program, actually seems to have had a greater impact on women than on men. And that's so unusual among the programs that I see that I was really curious to hear from you why you think that was?
Rahel Diro (09:49):
Yeah, so one of the things that the HARITA program and now the R4 program does really well is targeting. So from the get go they target the most vulnerable communities and even within one community they target the most vulnerable households. So since women tend to be the most vulnerable, they are a part of their program. And another thing they do is they provide different risk management solutions to women compared to men. For example, I mentioned the risk reduction activities that are usually done as a community in the community land, for example, when they did harvesting, or when they do tree planting, they do it within the community, right? Or within the environment that they're in.
Rahel Diro (10:46):
But for women farmers, they provide them to do these activities in their own garden. So women are allowed to work in their own garden. They plant vegetables that they provide them with inputs for that. They provide them with advice, advisory services for that. So the programs are slightly customized for the needs of women. So that's why they're able to get the biggest impact for women farmers. For instance, women farmers usually don't have enough labour in their household, so they usually sharecrop their land. But because of this program, what they found out was female headed households who are in the program stopped share cropping. They actually invested more in their farm.
Rahel Diro (11:46):
They increased, they hired more labor, they hired more oxen, which is used for plowing the land and they took out more loans and they increased their savings. So they actually improved their outcomes by being in the program. So I think the main, what makes this program successful is from this targeting from the beginning of the program, from the design of the program.
Alice Merry (12:18):
And that's so unusual, isn't it? Because most of the time when programs had been running a couple of years at that point somebody realizes, "Yeah, we don't have enough women clients and we don't have enough women beneficiaries. What can we do about it now?" When it's almost too late.
Rahel Diro (12:32):
Right. I mean a lot of programs do have that in their plans, in their statements, right? We are including women. But is it only the most connected within that community that have access? Or is it the most vulnerable? I think that's the key question. Because representation matters, right? It is not just because you have a couple of women in the group that you tick a box and say, "Oh yeah, I met this target." But are they the most vulnerable or are they really the most politically connected in the community. I think this is very important.
Alice Merry (13:20):
I know that you're now working on forecast-based financing, which aims to help organizations and governments respond better to natural disasters. Can you tell us what that means and what it allows organizations to do differently when a disaster happens?
Rahel Diro (13:35):
Usually what happens is: the drought happens, there is no harvest, then a humanitarian agency starts fund raising based on what the outcome is, and then when the funds come, a lot of the disaster has happened, children have lost a lot of weight or they're stunted. So the idea is to avoid that and to act in advance. So this is a risk management mechanism that's gaining popularity now with improvement of forecast capabilities.
Rahel Diro (14:16):
So the idea is for governments or humanitarian organizations, instead of responding when after the crisis has happened, what if we use a forecast and take some action based on that forecast. So what we have been doing, it's working in Malawi with the World Food Program and local partners. We are trying to see how many months in advance can we forecast a drought, and then how much that information is useful, for example for WFP to reorganize its resources to respond to that, like a forecasted crisis.
Alice Merry (15:07):
What kind of actions might that involve? If an institution suspects that a drought is coming in four months or something, what kind of financing or other actions might that involve?
Rahel Diro (15:18):
Okay, so it could be, for example the first year that we did this with WFP, the idea was to use the resources that you already have and expand certain activities you're already doing. For example, it could be a school feeding program, or a nutrition program for lactating mothers, right? So instead of waiting until the crisis hits and they no longer have enough food in the household to feed their children, or even for themselves, then you can expand based on a forecast, "Okay, three months from now there's going to be a drought. So it will be less likely that the harvest would be a good harvest. So maybe we can expand this nutrition program now, and then make sure that the nutrition status for the mothers and also the children is going to be consistent across the next few months."
Rahel Diro (16:17):
And also governments are looking into this, because instead of acting once the disaster happened, for example, in pasture communities instead of acting once there is no rainfall, so there is no pasture and animals didn't have anything to, any grass to eat so they are dying and then you start responding. Instead of doing that, you can see a forecast, you can see if there is not going to be enough rain there won't be enough pasture, so you can start providing pasture to the animal, like animal feed to the animals, so you save their lives. So that's the idea and it's gaining popularity, because now the forecast skills are improving because of several factors, so there is a lot of optimism in using this humanitarian response.
Alice Merry (17:21):
That's fascinating. It really responds to one of the main criticisms or weaknesses around humanitarian responses, right? That that's so slow, so poorly organized.
Rahel Diro (17:31):
Exactly, yes.
Alice Merry (17:32):
I think it also goes back a bit to what you said before about helping the most vulnerable first. Because it's the most vulnerable who really can't afford to wait one, two, three, four months while the donors and the humanitarian agencies get their act together and decide what to do.
Rahel Diro (17:48):
Exactly. Exactly, yes.
Alice Merry (17:51):
And it sounded to me like from the examples that you gave, it sounded like WFP and the other partners are taking kind of equity concerns and women's needs pretty seriously in the design of these programs?
Rahel Diro (18:05):
Yes. That has been my experience. The women are given due attention and the most vulnerable are given due attention in their programming.
Alice Merry (18:18):
This has actually been a really nice interview for me, because it's been very optimistic and very hopeful, in the sense that sometimes in these interviews you hear a lot about the negatives and that women's needs aren't being met. But these I think are a couple of really powerful examples of how they are being met, especially seeing the HARITA and R4 program. I think it's a really powerful example for donors, for other organizations. The main takeaway that I personally took from that is the importance of addressing the most vulnerable first, addressing their needs first.
Rahel Diro (18:48):
Yes. I mean there's too more to be done obviously, but there is hope.
Alice Merry (18:54):
I wanted to wrap up the interview by asking you a question, and that's what does feminist finance, if I say the term feminist finance, what does that mean for you?
Rahel Diro (19:07):
That's not an easy question.
Alice Merry (19:09):
It's a big question.
Rahel Diro (19:10):
Yes. And I have been thinking about that since you reached out to me. I think you can look it up from, I mean I can look it up from different angles. But I think the first thing that comes to mind is that the finance world is usually dominated by men in terms of the decision making side of things. But in terms of the most benefit that it could serve, it's actually women. So I think it's trying to untangle that disconnect. For me that is how I see it, like one: how do you make sure that women are reached using financial products in general? And two: how do you make women the decision makers in the finance world, right? They're at the bottom of the chain, but how do you also bring them to the top?
Alice Merry (20:28):
I thought what Rahel had to share was so interesting, particularly the way she highlighted elements of climate change adaptation and climate change resilience that are so easily overlooked. As soon as you start looking from the perspective of women, and particularly the perspective of the most vulnerable in a community, you quickly start to notice things that Rahel pointed out. Like the time invested, and the labor invested that are so easy to ignore if we only look at the crops that are destroyed or the income that's not received. And I was really happy that Rahel was able to share with us two examples of programs that have been able to be successful by putting the needs of the most vulnerable first from the very beginning.
Alice Merry (21:24):
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