As the world marks the International Women’s Day, governments have been called on to adopt measures that put children and women at the heart of adaptation. The call is informed by irrefutable evidence that women and children bear the brunt of climate change, further worsening their vulnerability in many ways. From increasing the burden of unpaid care work on women to causing greater risk of more frequent and destructive climate hazards for children, climate change is probably the single most important challenge of our time. Globally, the day will be marked under the theme, ‘Gender Equality Today for a Sustainable Tomorrow’, while the national theme for Rwanda is ‘Gender Equality to Address Climate Change’. Both emphasise the need to ensure gender equality to help address the impact of climate change or foster sustainable development. As with the rest of the world, in Rwanda, women and children are at the forefront of climate change in terms of its impacts, both in the short- and long-term. This has been brought to bear by natural disasters that have battered the country in recent years, with women and children on the receiving end of the harshest consequences. For instance, when schools get destroyed by climate change-induced disasters its schoolchildren who suffer the most in terms of learning disruptions and losses, while extra burden for gathering and producing food, as well as collecting water and firewood/charcoal will always almost certainly fall on the shoulders of women and children. As such, activists have urged deliberate measures to reverse the trend, including the need to further raise awareness around Liquefied Petroleum Gas as an alternative source of clean fuel for cooking, and for the government to provide incentives for the private sector to invest in storage and filling facilities to improve LPG availability and reliability. To this, we add another critically important aspect: affordability. Other measures could include rallying the local government structures to improve in their response to disasters so that the impacts can be addressed immediately. This calls for an increase in budgetary allocations for such emergencies and to treat such emergencies as indeed a matter of extreme urgency. Climate change is wreaking havoc on the present while threatening the future. We must all rise to the occasion and take corrective measures by mobilising and deploying resources in the most effective way.
