What do women’s funds have to do with climate justice? How is it linked to other critical issues, such as gender justice and LGBTQI+ rights? Mama Cash, the world’s first international women’s fund, shares its approach to philanthropy, and why supporting feminist movements is critical to the climate movement as a whole.
Who is Mama Cash?
In 1983, five women in Amsterdam gathered around a kitchen table and founded Mama Cash. What began as a €1.2 million inheritance, has since grown into €140 million invested in advancing the rights of women, girls, and trans and intersex people around the world.
Today, Mama Cash is a global funder that invests our resources in movements leading change on a wide range of interconnected issues: from reproductive justice and racial justice to frontline solutions to the climate crisis.
Since awarding our first environmental justice grants in 1991, we have prioritised those most affected by climate change. This includes women, girls, LBQTI groups, and Indigenous communities on the frontlines of climate change. Over the past four decades, we’ve provided €15 million in funding through 330 grants across 45 countries. We fund activists who mobilise their communities, build movements, influence decision-makers, and lead climate action.
As founding members of the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action, we direct climate finance toward gender and environmental justice by supporting organisations that lead locally driven, gender-just climate solutions. In Mongolia, for example, our funding has helped women’s rights activists address the effects of a coal mine expansion. These activists educate women in their community about their rights and support them to secure compensation from local authorities for forced resettlement.
Our approach
At Mama Cash, we ensure that movements in the Global South led by women, girls, and LGBTQI+ persons have the resources they need to shape and scale up climate solutions. Our funding model is built on trust, long-term commitment, and grassroots leadership.
Our approach is based on five key pillars:
- Self-led collective activism. We support groups around the world that speak and act for themselves, based on their lived experiences of stigma, violence, and exclusion.
- Flexible, core support. Our grantee-partners know best what they need. We provide unrestricted funding so they can use resources where they matter most.
- Long-term commitment. Structural change takes time. We provide up to 10 years of ongoing grant support, allowing movements to plan ahead, build resilience, and grow.
- Tailored accompaniment. Beyond funding, we provide mentorship, skills training, and networking opportunities based on each group’s needs and goals.
- Participatory grantmaking. We have feminist activists review, discuss, and vote on grant applications. This collective approach ensures funding decisions are rooted in lived experience and drive lasting change.
We partner with feminist organisations, including women’s and feminist funds, to channel more and better funding toward self-led feminist movements. Acknowledging the power imbalances that exist in funding and philanthropy, we also work with institutional and individual funders to transform funder practices and ensure resources reach those who need them most.
Everyone benefits
Our 40-year Impact Study proves that addressing climate, economic, and racial injustice together leads to stronger, more sustainable solutions. Feminist and women’s rights activism doesn’t just benefit women: countries with strong, autonomous feminist movements see better access to land, inheritance, and financial institutions as well as smaller gender wage gaps. They also see stronger legal protections for domestic workers, stronger sexual harassment laws, and less unpaid work.
The evidence is clear; investing in women’s movements accelerates change by:
- Tackling key factors behind gender-based violence. Research shows that gender-based violence is often linked to access to and control of natural resources, the threats that come with environmental changes, and the danger people face when they defend their ecosystems and resources. Investing in women’s movements increases community resilience to the climate crisis and makes communities safer.
- Connecting climate justice to other issues. Our grantee-partner Diva for Equality in Fiji works at the intersection of LGBTQI+ rights and climate adaptation, in a small island state that is highly vulnerable to hurricanes, floods, and other climate-related disasters. LGBTQI+ people often face more challenges due to social exclusion, which limits their access to vital resources. To address this, DIVA for Equality has built networks across Fiji and the Pacific, developing the leadership of LGBTQI+ communities and supporting activists to organise collectively, including regional campaigns for financing loss and damage. Today, their advocacy extends to global platforms like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
- Improving women’s access to land ownership and recognising Indigenous land rights. This helps formalise their role in land management decisions and allows them to govern the land in ways that adapt to the climate crisis. When Indigenous Peoples with strong ownership rights manage land, deforestation rates are lower than on lands governed by other systems, including protected areas.
- Scaling local impact to global influence. In Malawi, the Green Girls Platform is led by girls and young women working to protect their communities from the increasing threats of floods and drought, which endanger food security and livelihoods. Since 2020, Mama Cash’s support has helped the group expand their reach from 150 to 10,000 girls and young women. Their work caught the attention of the Malawi government, which invited five representatives to join its delegation at the 2022 UN Climate Change Conference.
- Advancing women’s rights in the economy and policymaking. Climate change makes existing challenges worse – it increases care burdens and keeps more girls from accessing education. By supporting women’s rights to decent jobs, full participation in the economy, and engagement in national and international policymaking, we are promoting a just transition to a green economy.
If you champion effective climate action, supporting feminist movements is key to driving lasting change. Our approach works because everyone benefits.
Stay tuned
What you’ve read is just a snapshot of our work, there’s much more to explore. Stay tuned as we share more about the role of women’s funds in climate justice, their impact on our shared future, and our policy brief on climate finance. In the meantime, check out our Impact Study or visit mamacash.org to learn more.
Q2 2025 Climate Solutions Magazine
We encourage you to read this edition of the F20 Climate Solutions Magazine in full. The articles centre on the transformative impacts that can result from incorporating lived experiences into climate action, whether that be by approaching activism through a gendered lens, or by using decades of evidence to boldly shape national environmental policy.
Expand the preview below and immerse yourself in these thought-provoking articles.