On March 8, International Women's Day, the Mango project in South Africa of Women for Climate Justice started. The project aiming at rising the climate resilience of mango farms, will receive almost 1 million euros from the Government of Flanders over the next 3 years.
The organization, Women for Climate Justice Southern Africa, combines in a unique fashion two of the focus points of the Government of Flanders in South Africa. Namely dealing with climate change and promoting human rights / gender equality. Through training, technical assistance, knowledge exchange and so on, the organization supports small farmers in reducing the negative impact of climate change and to increase their crop yields in a sustainable way. At the same time, the focus is on women and improving their situation; after all, these small, vulnerable farmers are often women.
The Mango project is one of the seven supported projects selected by the Foreign Affairs Department via the project call 'Increasing climate resilience in South Africa' in 2018. Together with two cooperatives, the organization Women for Climate Justice will support small-scale mango farmers in the provinces of North West and Limpopo to produce better quality mangos in a climate-friendly, sustainable way. More than half of these small farmers are women. At the same time, efforts are being made to develop other sources of income for these farmer households outside the mango season.
Women for climate justice – Gender CC: “Gender responsive climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practices and technologies provide an opportunity to close the gender gap as well as bring women into the forefront in the fight against climate change, poverty and inequality.”
General representation of the Government of Flanders in Southern Africa
Women for Climate Justice - Gender CC
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