• Login
NORVANREPORTS.COM |  Business News, Insurance, Taxation, Oil & Gas, Maritime News, Ghana, Africa, World
  • Home
  • News
    • General
    • Political
  • Economy
  • Business
    • Agribusiness
    • Aviation
    • Banking & Finance
    • Energy
    • Insurance
    • Manufacturing
    • Markets
    • Maritime
    • Real Estate
    • Tourism
    • Transport
  • Technology
    • Telecom
    • Cyber-security
    • Cryptocurrency
    • Tech-guide
    • Social Media
  • Features
    • Interviews
    • Opinions
  • Reports
    • Banking/Finance
    • Insurance
    • Budgets
    • GDP
    • Inflation
    • Central Bank
    • Sec/Gse
  • Lifestyle
    • Sports
    • Entertainment
    • Travel
    • Environment
    • Weather
  • NRTV
    • Audio
    • Video
No Result
View All Result
No Result
View All Result
NORVANREPORTS.COM |  Business News, Insurance, Taxation, Oil & Gas, Maritime News, Ghana, Africa, World
No Result
View All Result
Home Features

African Women Entrepreneurs Are a Smart Bet For Climate Change Investment: Research Shows Why

2 months ago
in Features, highlights, Home, home-news, latest News
3 min read
0 0
0
41
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on Linkedin

African Women Entrepreneurs Are a Smart Bet For Climate Change Investment: Research Shows Why

Women in Africa are often framed as especially vulnerable to climate change. Our earlier research suggested that women entrepreneurs often face a “triple differential vulnerability” to climate risk compared to men.

What we mean is that there are three possible reasons for their additional vulnerability. First, their livelihoods are often in climate sensitive sectors. Second, they face additional barriers to accessing resources for adaptation in the business environment – such as finance, new adaptation technologies and markets for climate smart goods and services. Last, they also hold primary responsibility for managing climate risk at the household level.

However, our new research also suggests a parallel, more overlooked reality. Women entrepreneurs may also be leading the way in action on climate resilience in Africa.

Through the Women Entrepreneurs in Climate Change Adaptation (WECCA) project we are researching this role of women as strategic actors in inclusive adaptation action.

Women’s entrepreneurship is key to development outcomes in Africa. This is because their businesses make wide ranging contributions to economic activity. They are active in critical agriculture and food processing value chains, which boosts export earnings. And through cooperatives, and savings groups, at the local level, women create access points to finance and markets for others in underserved regions. Studies also suggest women are more likely to use their profits to address the most critical household needs.

Small businesses form the backbone of most African economies. They generate most employment opportunities and provide essential goods and services.

RelatedPosts

Parliament Adjourns Sine Die After Intense Legislative Session Marked by Reform Calls and Tributes

GACL Terminates Evatex Revenue Assurance Contract Amid OSP Probe

Cyber Security Authority Flags Rising Mobile Data Scam, Cautions Public

Yet, these businesses are on the frontline of climate impacts. Floods, droughts, and concurrent disruption to power, water and transport networks threaten supply chains, disrupt markets, interrupt livelihood activities and damage business assets.

Businesses must adapt to survive. But how they adapt can make the difference between building long-term resilience and deepening vulnerability.

Results from our study of small businesses in climate vulnerable regions of Kenya and Senegal suggest that businesses with women leaders take a more sustainable approach to adaptation than those with only male leaders. This safeguards long-term business resilience. Our results also found adaptation assistance has a stronger impact on helping women-led small businesses adjust to climate change, compared to those led only by men.

These results suggest that supporting adaptation for women entrepreneurs isn’t just about fairness. It’s also a smart strategy for scaling up climate resilient economies. Building an inclusive business environment for adaptation may deliver bigger returns on investments for governments and donors.

Women entrepreneurs as strategic actors

Our study analysed survey data of small businesses in semi-arid regions of Senegal and Kenya. The aim was to consider how having female owners and managers shaped a business’s adaptation to extreme events.

Our dataset covered the Senegalese regions of Louga, Saint Louis and Kaolack. In Kenya, it covered the county of Laikipia. The regions experience extreme drought and flooding that is expected to increase in the coming decades. Entrepreneurship in these regions is particularly concentrated in agricultural sectors. These are highly exposed to the impacts of these extremes.

We investigated how a business having female leaders impacted the number of sustainable and unsustainable adaptation strategies that they adopted.

Following earlier literature, we classified adaptation strategies as:

  • “sustainable” when they maintain business operations at existing levels
  • “unsustainable” if they help businesses “cope” in the short term but result in a temporary (or sometimes permanent) reduction in business activity. This could reduce the resources that they have to cope with future climate impacts.

We found that businesses which include women within their management and ownership teams adopted fewer unsustainable adaptation measures than those led solely by men. Unsustainable adaptation actions are typically reactive coping strategies that can help businesses address immediate needs to minimise the negative impacts of climate shocks in the short term. These might include selling off business assets or cutting staff.

But these actions often come at a cost. They reduce business activity, undermine future growth, and may limit a business’s ability to recover from subsequent climate impacts.

In contrast, we found that businesses with female leaders were more likely to adopt sustainable adaptation measures that protected the long-term health of the business. These included:

  • diversifying income sources
  • switching to different crops
  • taking out loans or insurance.

Such strategies can help to reduce vulnerability to future climate shocks, and support income stability and recovery during periods of climate stress.

These findings are striking given the additional barriers that women face when trying to adapt.

It is well documented, for example, that women entrepreneurs in Africa face deeper constraints than men in accessing adaptation resources. This includes finance, training and technologies.

Similarly, gendered expectations around domestic responsibilities can limit women’s time and mobility, restricting their ability to attend training sessions or participate in external markets.

Social norms may also limit their decision-making power within households or businesses. This can make it harder to act independently on adaptation investments.

Given these constraints, the use of more sustainable adaptation strategies by women-led businesses deserves careful interpretation. Many of the sustainable measures we analysed – such as switching crops or diversifying income streams – can require less upfront capital than the unsustainable ones. Actions like selling assets or scaling back staff, meanwhile, are only possible if the business owns significant physical or financial resources to begin with.

The lower use of unsustainable strategies by women-led businesses may therefore reflect more limited coping capacity: they may simply have fewer assets to draw on when a shock hits.

Yet this makes the findings even more important. Sustainable strategies can still be highly effective. Our research suggests that women business leaders are often finding ways to adapt that are both practical and forward-looking, even when working with limited capital. In this sense, women entrepreneurs are not just more vulnerable – they are also strategic actors driving adaptation innovation, often with fewer resources.

What’s needed

These findings highlight not only the constraints women entrepreneurs continue to face, but also their untapped potential in adaptation.

What’s more, our study suggests that this potential can be especially powerful when the right support is in place. We found that when adaptation assistance (whether financial or technical) is made available, women-led businesses didn’t just catch up with their male-led counterparts. They often outperformed them.

This points to a highly strategic opportunity: that investing in adaptation for women entrepreneurs could deliver outsized benefits for climate resilience. For their businesses as well as the communities and economies they support.

This finding points to the need for governments to develop a business-enabling environment for adaptation that targets women entrepreneurs. This means designing policies, programmes, and support that address persistent gaps in access to tailored finance, technologies, and adaptation goods and services.

Better data is also needed. Our study used the best available data. But it was based on a relatively small sample from specific regions in Kenya and Senegal and should not be overgeneralised.

To test the strength of our findings, there is an urgent need for additional high-quality, gender-disaggregated datasets on business level adaptation behaviour.

The World Bank Enterprise Surveys could play a vital role, as one of the most extensive sources of data on small and medium-sized enterprises globally.

Source: theconversation
Via: norvanreports
Tags: African Women EntrepreneursAfrican Women Entrepreneurs Are a Smart Bet For Climate Change Investment: Research Shows WhyClimate Change Investment

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

No Result
View All Result

Highlights

Gov’t Reopens Talks With PayPal to Restore Full Service Access in Ghana

Financial Sector Assets up 34.6% in 2024 to GHS 525.59 Billion

Banking Sector Soundness Remains Robust in 2024 Amid Strong Profitability, Adequate Capital Buffers

Sha’Carri Richardson Withdraws from US Trials Following Arrest

From Singuluma to El Kaabi: Can CHAN 2024 Unleash the Next Hat-trick Hero?

Ghana to Welcome King’s Baton Relay on August 8 Ahead of 2026 Commonwealth Games

Trending

Features

Parliament Adjourns Sine Die After Intense Legislative Session Marked by Reform Calls and Tributes

August 2, 2025

Parliament Adjourns Sine Die After Intense Legislative Session Marked by Reform Calls and Tributes Parliament has adjourned...

GACL Terminates Evatex Revenue Assurance Contract Amid OSP Probe

August 2, 2025

Cyber Security Authority Flags Rising Mobile Data Scam, Cautions Public

August 2, 2025

Gov’t Reopens Talks With PayPal to Restore Full Service Access in Ghana

August 2, 2025
Bank of Ghana

Financial Sector Assets up 34.6% in 2024 to GHS 525.59 Billion

August 2, 2025

Who we are?

NORVANREPORTS.COM |  Business News, Insurance, Taxation, Oil & Gas, Maritime News, Ghana, Africa, World

NorvanReports is a unique data, business, and financial portal aimed at providing accurate, impartial reporting of business news on Ghana, Africa, and around the world from a truly independent reporting and analysis point of view.

© 2020 Norvanreports – credible news platform.
L: Hse #4 3rd Okle Link, Baatsonaa – Accra-Ghana T:+233-(0)26 451 1013 E: news@norvanreports.com info@norvanreports.com
All rights reserved we display professionalism at all stages of publications

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
    • Agribusiness
    • Aviation
    • Energy
    • Insurance
    • Manufacturing
    • Real Estate
    • Maritime
    • Tourism
    • Transport
    • Banking & Finance
    • Trade
    • Markets
  • Economy
  • Reports
  • Technology
    • Cryptocurrency
    • Cyber-security
    • Social Media
    • Tech-guide
    • Telecom
  • Features
    • Interviews
    • Opinions
  • Lifestyle
    • Entertainment
    • Sports
    • Travel
    • Environment
    • Weather
  • NRTV
    • Audio
    • Video

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Create New Account!

Fill the forms bellow to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
NORVANREPORTS.COM | Business News, Insurance, Taxation, Oil & Gas, Maritime News, Ghana, Africa, World
This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. Visit our Privacy and Cookie Policy.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.