The EU has scaled up its contribution to reach Sustainable Development Goal 5(link is external) in all internal and external policy areas. Gender equality and empowering women and girls are among the top priorities of DG INTPA. This is also reflected in the EU gender equality strategy 2020-2025 and the Gender Action Plan III, which sets out the EU’s political and operational roadmap towards a gender-equal world.
Increasing gender equality can be a game changer in tackling key environmental challenges, which include land degradation and biodiversity loss. Africa – a key EU partner – faces land degradation, which poses a serious threat to the continent’s sustainable development.1 The Sahel region is at the forefront of this challenge as desertification is expanding further south of the Sahara. This calls for urgent action to reverse land degradation and biodiversity loss, and to address climate change.
The case of Regreening Africa

Regreening Africa(link is external) is an example of EU-funded intervention which aims at restoring land ecosystems while supporting gender-equitable policies and practices to empower women and girls. The project contributes to the Great Green Wall(link is external) initiative and seeks to reverse land degradation across one million hectares, benefitting 500,000 households in Mali, Niger, Senegal, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Rwanda.

In the four years after its inception in 2017, the project reached over 600,000 hectares of land, and over 400,000 households. This initiative involves tree planting, farmer-managed natural regeneration, soil and water conservation, value chain support and policy engagement.

Enhancing women’s inclusion and agency – that is their capabilities, choices and actions as full citizens and agents of development – is essential for land restoration and also benefits the community.
Regreening Africa – Best practices:

Implementing a gender transformative approach
Stimulating the economic inclusion of women through a community savings programme
Shifting local perceptions over women’s land ownership
Implementing a gender transformative approach

Regreening Africa has incorporated interventions that reach and engage women by providing equal opportunities for participation while also adapting tools for addressing underlying causes of gender inequality. One approach to ensure women’s social and economic empowerment is to make sure they are included in decision-making, so that they can influence and make land decisions that are reflective of their preferences. The Gender Transformative Approach(link is external) (GTA) has been used to design targeted interventions to engage men and women in discussions about unbalanced access to resources, workloads, participation in decision-making and perceptions of women’s roles and contributions. This is done in the hope of improving household well-being, and ultimately resilience, from the redistribution of assets, control, and decisions.2

REDA further from the source