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

Executive Summary

As climate shocks and stresses intensify, it is essential to strengthen the resilience of rural women—not only for their own livelihoods and well-being, but also for the long-term viability of the rural businesses in the food and financial systems that surround them. Yet rural women remain underserved, despite their pivotal roles as customers, suppliers, laborers, employees, leaders, and household managers (Anderson, Clause, Mattern, and Zani 2023).

The ABERA (Accelerating Business to Empower Rural women in Agriculture), a CGAP and IDH collaboration, has identified seven practical business drivers (“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

Across these domains, inclusive financial services such as savings, credit, and insurance often act as a common enabler, providing the pathway through which women and businesses translate the drivers into measurable resilience and commercial outcomes. While businesses individually have limited influence over the broader contextual factors shaping their business climate (e.g., regulatory policy, national and regional infrastructure), they can act on and operationalize the seven drivers in tailored combinations for specific customer segments and market environments. Leaving aside the broader contextual drivers, this paper focuses on the practical, actionable business drivers that can unlock value for both rural women and businesses.

ABERA defines value for women as increased agency and resilience; for businesses, value is defined as improved commercial viability, particularly in the face of climate-related shocks and stresses. Early qualitative learnings from ABERA’s first cohort of partner companies demonstrates that when businesses strategically deploy these drivers, they achieve this dual value creation in measurable ways. When properly implemented, businesses can reduce customer acquisition costs, improve retention rates, and decrease business risk while simultaneously increasing women’s access to finance, productive assets, and decision-making power.

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.

By supporting gender-intentional business models that integrate climate resilience and financial inclusion, funders can help create commercially viable solutions that transform agricultural markets and strengthen rural women’s agency in the face of climate change.