Building Rural Women’s Climate Resilience: Seven Business Drivers Delivering Commercial Value

As climate pressures rise, strengthening rural women’s resilience is critical for their livelihoods and for the long-term viability of the rural businesses that serve them.

ABERA (Accelerating Business to Empower Rural women in Agriculture), a CGAP and IDH collaboration, has identified seven practical business drivers that simultaneously strengthen rural women’s climate resilience and improve commercial performance for the businesses that serve them. The seven drivers span three strategic domains:

• Social engagement, including the women’s groups and male allyship drivers
• Economic inclusion, comprised of the income diversification strategies and access to productive assets drivers
• Service design and delivery, covering the inclusive delivery strategies, digital tools, and data for insights drivers

This working paper shares early qualitative learnings from ABERA’s first cohort of partner companies, which demonstrates that when businesses strategically deploy these drivers, they achieve this dual value creation in measurable ways.

For funders seeking to scale these approaches, ABERA recommends three critical actions: (i) fund interventions aligned with the seven business drivers, (ii) invest in the systems, data, and partnerships that enable the seven business drivers and (iii) adapt organizational structures and incentives to more effectively respond to cross-thematic challenges at the nexus of agriculture, inclusive finance, gender, and climate resilience.