[International Women’s Day 2023]

PROJECT SPOTLIGHT STORY- Costa Rican Women Farmers Find Empowering Touch

March 8, 2023 — In honor of International Women’s Day (IWD) today, the Adaptation Fund (AF) is spotlighting one of its National Implementing Entity partners, Fundecooperación para el Desarrollo Sostenible in Costa Rica.

Fundecooperación has completed a highly successful sustainable agriculture, water management and coastal management project funded by the Adaptation Fund that has been fostering gender equality and women’s empowerment at the local level, and is being scaled up by the organization in a second project, also funded by AF. The Direct Access project has exceeded several performance goals, while changing the lives of many female farmers for the better.

Please see video from Fundecooperación.

“This is a beautiful and powerful video, and really great to see the empowering work being carried out by Fundecooperación on the ground in Costa Rica,” said Mikko Ollikainen, Head of the Adaptation Fund. “I have visited the project personally in the past, and it is a great example of the Adaptation Fund’s gender equality actions empowering women and girls as active agents of change, which is what we are seeing being implemented across our portfolio, as we celebrate International Women’s Day and women colleagues and partners.”

The Fund’s gender equality and mainstreaming work continues to grow. AF has fostered gender equality from early on through its environmental and social policies, and continually updates and progressively evolves its gender work further through its gender policy and action plan, gender guidance for implementing entities, and as a key cross-cutting pillar of its overall five-year strategies. This year’s IWD theme of innovation and technology for gender equality is also well-aligned with the Fund’s innovation pillar, which counts advancing gender equality among its key themes.

“We are constantly striving to stay ahead of the curve in continually evolving and monitoring effectiveness of our gender policy and its implementation,” added Young Hee Lee, the Fund’s Gender Focal Point and Governance Specialist. “We updated the Gender Policy and Action Plan in 2021, and soon will be adding a Gender Scorecard to better track and monitor the gender progress at the Fund’s portfolio level. I’m thrilled to see the positive change and impact that the local women drive in Costa Rica. It makes all of the Fund’s gender work really worth the extra effort.”

It is also reflected in the numbers seen across the Fund’s projects portfolio, including: