"Women, Natural Resources and Climate Change"

I chose this session with interest to learn more about the W+ standard. This was a parallel event cosponsored by multiple NGOs focused on gender mainstreaming in the area of climate change and natural resource conservation.

The session was lead by the founder of WOCAN, along with other Washington D.C based organizations. Wocan has been successfully working in the rural areas connecting rural women to professional women within their communities. The W+ standard has been adopted by World bank as well, and Wocan aspires to promote W+ to measure and certify outcomes at community level. W+ is a framework that can help to measure, quantify and monetize the social capital created by the rural women. By quantifying the social capital, it is possible to reward the women who are contributing towards this objective. The W+ measures women’s empowerment in six domains: Time, Income & Assets, Health, Leadership, Education & Knowledge and Food Security. It produces quantified women-benefit units that contribute towards post 2015 Sustainability Goals (SDGs), Climate Financing or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) targets.

The director explained the vision of Wocan, stating that the main purpose of the organization is to advance women’s empowerment and encourage collective action to tackle climate change and poverty with enabling environments. Besides the W+ standard developed by Wocan, the organization has multiple projects taking place globally, trains people in leadership and gender, and organizes women leadership circles in agriculture and natural resource management. Wocan also provides incubation for innovation and has seen recent success in Nepal.