In the Miombo woodlands of Zambia, elderly women remember how farming used to work.
Before synthetic fertilizers, they built ridges of grass and soil, composting weeds back into the earth. Before hybrid seeds, they preserved groundnuts and beans in clay pots with ash and chili which were viable across seasons, even years, without chemicals. Before forests shrank, they collected caterpillars from trees, caught fish with woven baskets, and knew which wild mushrooms would carry a family through drought.
This is ecological knowledge. And if conservation projects don’t pay enough attention to it, it is at risk of being lost.
At WeForest, we’ve learned two things. First: elderly women and men hold traditional ecological knowledge that is related to their line of work. Women in particular are holders of irreplaceable wisdom about soils, seeds, water, and forests. Second: including women doesn’t mean counting how many attend a meeting. It means accommodating their needs to make space for them to be heard and shape decisions.
Successful restoration should ensure equitable participation for all, and provide spaces for traditional ecological knowledge to be shared, documented, and used.
Women’s relationship to forests
For decades, the focus of forestry was on timber. And timber, in most cultures, is perceived as being men’s work. But when we shift our gaze from timber and start looking at other forest uses, such as food and energy for daily subsistence, a different picture emerges.
While there isn’t a fine line between gender roles when it comes to forests, in many places, women and girls tend to have responsibility for sourcing, collecting and transporting natural resources for domestic purposes. Men are more prone to use natural resources for commercial ones like agriculture, fishing, timber. This division of labor means women and men interact with forests differently, and hold different types of knowledge, often complementing each other.
In our Mukungule project in Zambia, women talk about how farming used to work. What they describe is sophisticated ecological management with soil care without chemicals, crop diversity and rotation, seed preservation and food security achieved through foraging and wild protein.
Today, much of this knowledge is fading. Pushed by deforestation, large-scale agriculture and climate change, almost all farmers use synthetic fertilizer, believing they would harvest nothing without it.
They use weed killer or pesticides which kill the natural compost. Wild foods have diminished as tree cover shrinks. Fish stocks collapsed when mosquito nets replaced woven baskets. Bushmeat is now illegal, and poaching continues in secret.
Is there a space for older generations to share their traditional ecological knowledge?
Participation is not presence
The second truth we’ve learned is harder to see and even harder to address.
Women’s work in natural resource management is often invisible. The forest products they collect such as water, food, and fuel, don’t generate cash directly. The World Bank estimates that about half of the world’s forest contributions to livelihoods is a “hidden harvest.” Unvalued and unseen.
This invisibility carries over into restoration projects. Women are always invited to meetings but are their voices heard? Information flows through male extension agents to male household heads. Women’s domestic responsibilities mean they have less time to attend, let alone stay and speak.
Barriers to women’s meaningful participation
Studies show that women spend up to 3-4 hours each day collecting household fuel. On average, women in many developing countries walk 6 km daily to collect water (UNESCAP, 2017). In degraded landscapes, these distances grow longer which increases time burdens and, tragically, susceptibility to gender-based violence.
Women-headed households face additional challenges: migration of men from rural areas leaves women with more responsibilities but less access to financial services, social networks, and decision-making forums.
Even when women attend meetings, cultural norms may silence them. Who speaks first? Whose opinion is sought? Whose knowledge is trusted? These dynamics don’t appear in attendance records.
This is the gap between presence and participation. A project can count 40% women in a room and still fail entirely to include their perspectives.
What we're trying differently
Across our projects, we’re experimenting with approaches that move beyond counting heads.
Overcoming logistical barriers in Mukungule, Zambia
To enhance female participation during the Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) process in Mukungule, the project divided meeting sessions to reduce travel distance for women. Instead of holding meetings only at Village Action Group level, each group was further divided into three zones. Travel distance, and the time it consumes is often a major barrier to women’s participation. Smaller, closer meetings made attendance possible for women who couldn’t walk for hours.
Equity over equality for Bee Mentors
Our projects in Zambia struggled to convince women to become bee mentors. One key barrier: the criteria to enroll them in the project required prior experience in beekeeping, an activity traditionally undertaken by men. Women had the knowledge but not the formal experience.
We modified the criteria, requiring only prior knowledge of beekeeping. Today, out of 39 bee mentors recruited in our Mukungule project, 20% are women. None have dropped out.
This is equity in practice: different support for different needs, to reach a fair outcome.
Influencing male attitudes in Mukungule
In its first year of implementation (2022), the Mukungule project noted low female participation both in community meetings and in the beekeeping programme. We asked the men why.
Their answers were revealing: women had “other responsibilities” taking care of the house. And deeper still: men feared that allowing women to participate meant handing over land ownership. In a context where land ownership is patrilineal, this felt like loss.
The following year, after several sessions on gender awareness and the importance of involving both women and men in natural resource conservation and explicit conversations that involving women did not signify a loss of land ownership, women’s participation increased.
The lesson: men’s resistance often stems from misunderstanding. Dialogue matters.
Livelihood interventions that work for women
Women participation in conservation and restoration projects is completely tied with whether project activities fit women’s lives or if they add to their burdens.
In consultation with key stakeholders, several WeForest projects have purposely selected livelihood activities that take women’s needs and interests into account. This includes activities compatible with other responsibilities typically carried out by women: small livestock (poultry, sheep, goat) or agroforestry.
Poultry for egg or meat production is particularly attractive. It generates income rapidly while providing protein for the household. The work fits around other tasks. The benefits are visible and immediate.
What we're still learning
We don’t claim to have this figured out.
Important steps have been taken. But there are still aspects of our work that do not sufficiently address gender inequality. We’re honest about that because transparency is the first step toward doing better.
Getting women into meetings, ensuring they actively participate, and finally enabling women as decision-makers requires addressing the asymmetries of power and cultural norms that influence gender equality.
Approaches to do that can include:
- Women-only interviews
- Gender-specific focus groups
- Gender-specific group consultations
- Alternative communication channels (not meeting-based)
The path forward
The contribution of women in managing and using natural resources, and their knowledge of the latter, are widely known. Yet they remain overlooked and insufficiently accounted for in Forest and Landscape Restoration projects that do not take specific action to ensure meaningful inclusion. Projects that are “gender blind” risk both developing inappropriate restoration roadmaps with limited impact, while creating or exacerbating further inequalities and exclusion.
WeForest recognizes these critical risks. Although there is still a long road ahead, efforts made to overcome barriers to gender equality and the benefits that follow are visible in many aspects of our projects.
*WeForest thanks the women and men from our landscapes for sharing their invaluable traditional ecological knowledge.
