#women

🇳🇵 Nepal · Empowering Women of Nepal (EWN)

Three sisters in Pokhara built a free training pipeline that has turned nearly 2,000 disadvantaged Nepali women into trekking guides in a profession once reserved for men.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · HANDS Welfare Foundation

HANDS reports 5,380 villages declared open-defecation-free through its work, alongside constructed wetlands that clean toilet wastewater and school WASH clubs run by students.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · ColdHubs

A tomato farmer with no refrigeration has about two days to sell everything. A solar cold room at the market turns that into twenty-one, for fifty cents a crate a day.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia · Mela for Her

Mela, whose name means 'solution' in Amharic, employs Ethiopian women to handcraft reusable pads and period underwear and sells them door to door through 179 women agents.

🇸🇱 Sierra Leone · Freetown City Council

The women who sell produce in Freetown's open-air markets stand in direct sun all day and watch their stock rot by afternoon — so the city's heat officer built them roofs.

🇦🇹 Austria · Verein Amazone

Amazone runs Vorarlberg's dedicated girls' center and free counseling line for girls, young women and gender-diverse youth aged 10 to 25, at a time when demand for support keeps climbing.

🇷🇼 Rwanda · Ampersand

A motorcycle taxi driver cannot wait two hours for a battery to charge — so Ampersand built a network where you swap it in three minutes instead.

🇸🇻 El Salvador · Asociación Mangle

A grassroots community group is hand-dredging clogged mangrove channels to bring fish, shrimp and floodwater relief back to El Salvador's Jiquilisco Bay.

🇮🇳 India · Barefoot College International

Rural grandmothers from dozens of countries train in Tilonia, Rajasthan to become 'Solar Mamas' who electrify their own villages.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Boxgirls Kenya

Boxgirls Kenya teaches boxing and self-defence to girls in Nairobi's informal settlements, using the ring to build confidence, leadership and protection from gender-based violence.

🇦🇫 Afghanistan · DACAAR (Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees)

Afghanistan's largest WASH NGO drills wells, monitors groundwater and rebuilds water networks across all 34 provinces, even as aid budgets shrink.

🇮🇳 India · Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group (GEAG)

In flood-prone Gorakhpur, women farmers are turning the city's peri-urban wetlands and fields into working flood buffers that also feed their families.

🌍 Global · CAMFED (Campaign for Female Education)

Young African women who once relied on CAMFED scholarships to finish school now lead a UN award-winning movement teaching climate-smart farming to rural communities.

🇧🇧 Barbados · Coral Reef Restoration Alliance (CORALL)

A volunteer-run alliance of Barbadian divers, fishers and residents grows coral fragments in nurseries and transplants them onto the island's degraded west coast reefs.

🇨🇦 Canada · The Period Purse

Volunteers at Period Purse packing parties stuff zip bags with pads, tampons and liners, and lit up 70 Canadian landmarks red for Menstrual Health Day.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Volunteer Wildfire Services

More than 350 unpaid volunteers form South Africa's largest wildfire brigade, racing into the Western Cape's mountains to stop fires before they reach fynbos and homes.

🇨🇴 Colombia · SWISSAID Colombia

Colombian peasant, Indigenous and Afro-descendant custodians now run community seed houses that together hold over 1,500 native and creole varieties, and in Boyacá farmers just rescued four lost native potatoes.

🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau · Tiniguena (Esta Terra É Nossa)

Guinea-Bissau's oldest conservation NGO helped Bijagós islanders create West Africa's first community-run marine protected area and still co-manages it with them.

🌍 Global · Modern Energy Cooking Services

Around 2.1 billion people still cook over fire, and the usual fix is a slightly better stove — this programme argues the answer is an electric pressure cooker.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Coral Catch (Yayasan Gili Matra Bersama)

Indonesia's first all-female coral restoration program trains young local women as reef scientists and divers on the Gili Islands.

🇸🇳 Senegal · Bokk Diom Association

Bokk Diom's 1,300 pickers, who have worked West Africa's biggest dump for decades, stopped Dakar's garbage trucks in 2023 and are now demanding a just transition as the World Bank-financed closure of Mbeubeuss proceeds.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Nipe Fagio

In one Dar es Salaam ward, waste picker cooperatives run door-to-door collection that diverts 95% of waste from disposal, and the NGO behind it helped launch a national waste pickers' association.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Bangladesh Waste Pickers Union (BWPU)

Dumpsite pickers around Dhaka's Matuail landfill, led by women, have formed a union demanding to be legally recognised as environmental workers.

🇸🇱 Sierra Leone · Eco-Soap Bank

Discarded hotel soap bars that would otherwise go straight to landfill are sanitized, reprocessed and given to families who can't afford basic hygiene products.

🇱🇷 Liberia · FACE Africa

A Liberian-founded nonprofit builds wells, latrines and rainwater systems while training women-majority water committees across rural Liberia.

🇭🇹 Haiti · EarthSpark International

A Haiti-focused nonprofit builds solar-powered microgrids that bring 24/7 metered electricity — and a feminist approach to energy access — to rural towns cut off from the national grid.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Dhaka North City Corporation

Dhaka North appointed Asia's first chief heat officer for a city of fifteen million where the people most exposed to heat are the ones living under corrugated metal.

🇲🇦 Morocco · AGIR (Association de Gestion Intégrée des Ressources)

A grassroots association co-manages Morocco's only marine national park with local fishers, turning no-take zones into a model for the Mediterranean.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Flone Initiative

After women were stripped at Nairobi bus stages, a group started training the matatu crews themselves rather than only condemning them.

🇫🇷 France · Règles Élémentaires

Supermarket collection drives run by volunteers in towns across France feed a national stockpile of pads and tampons that goes to people who cannot afford them.

🌍 Global · Free to Run

A nonprofit founded by an ultrarunner and human rights lawyer that uses running, hiking and climbing to build confidence, leadership and community for women and girls in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine.

🇺🇬 Uganda · Generous Designs Africa

South Sudanese refugee youth and single mothers in Uganda's Bidibidi settlement turn discarded plastic and aid tarpaulins into waterproof bags and household goods.

🇺🇸 United States · GirlTrek

A grassroots health movement that has mobilized more than a million Black women across the US to walk daily for their physical, mental and community health.

🇲🇾 Malaysia · Impactlution

In Selangor, women's craft groups wash, crush and cast used wine and beer bottles into glass-sand planters, trays and coasters, in a country where glass recycling sits near 10%.

🇪🇸 Spain · Fundació Espigoladors

A Catalan gleaning network rescues 'ugly' fruit and vegetables that farms would otherwise discard, turning them into meals and jobs.

🇰🇪 Kenya · GROOTS Kenya

A national movement of grassroots, women-led community groups training Kenyan women to map, register and defend their names on land titles in a country where only 3% of women hold a title deed solely in their own name.

🇨🇩 DR Congo · Green Congo Initiative

An indigenous youth-led team in Goma is replanting the Congo Basin, paying mostly women to grow the trees that hold eroding hillsides together.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Grootbos Foundation

Grootbos leads a roughly 50-landowner conservancy protecting over 1,500 fynbos species in the Cape Floral Kingdom while training unemployed young people for green jobs.

🇭🇹 Haiti · Fonkoze

Fonkoze -- Haitian Creole for 'Shoulder-to-Shoulder Foundation' -- built the country's largest microfinance network to reach rural women that banks never bothered to serve.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Bicara Udara (Yayasan Udara Anak Bangsa)

Three worried mothers turned a change.org petition against Jakarta's smog into a nationwide youth movement for the right to clean air.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Keiskamma Trust

In the small village of Hamburg, rural women turn embroidery, beadwork and applique into monumental tapestries that have hung in South Africa's Parliament and museums worldwide.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Coastal and Marine Resource Development (COMRED)

At Munje on Kenya's south coast, a 40-hectare patch of reef is left alone for months, then opened for a few days so women can gather octopus that have grown fat.

🇮🇳 India · Kheti Virasat Mission

A former journalist's grassroots mission is replacing Punjab's smoke-choked stubble fires with mulching, composting, and organic farming.

🇷🇼 Rwanda · Kosmotive

Kosmotive, founded in Kigali in 2014, sews reusable KosmoPads that its site says have prevented 7,200 tons of plastic waste.

🇰🇮 Kiribati · Kiribati Climate Action Network (KiriCAN)

Kiribati's first homegrown climate NGO mobilizes women and youth to replant mangroves and carry i-Kiribati voices into UN climate negotiations.

🇰🇮 Kiribati · Kiribati Family Health Association (KFHA)

Kiribati's leading sexual and reproductive health charity keeps family planning, HIV testing, and counselling running from Tarawa's clinics to the outer islands.

🇨🇭 Switzerland · Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz

A Swiss association of older women sued their government over climate inaction and won the first-ever human-rights ruling on climate change.

🇹🇴 Tonga · MORDI Tonga Trust

In Tonga's villages, MORDI Tonga turns community-written development plans into seed banks, cyclone-ready infrastructure, and new income for rural families.

🇲🇬 Madagascar · Masontsika

Masontsika's Bazary model lets villagers rent solar lamps, charge phones and chill food at a health centre, and that income pays for the clinic's own power to run free.

🇮🇳 India · Mahila Housing SEWA Trust

An Ahmedabad-founded women's NGO training female construction workers in Delhi to monitor air quality and demand clean-air action.

🇲🇬 Madagascar · Malagasy Red Cross Society (Croix-Rouge Malagasy)

Two days before Cyclone Gezani hit Madagascar's east coast, Malagasy Red Cross volunteers knocked on 600 doors, put 630 households' cash in hand and opened eight evacuation sites.

🇲🇱 Mali · Mali-Folkecenter Nyetaa

A Bamako NGO founded in 1999 says it has set up 17,000 solar panels in Malian schools, maternity clinics and emergency rooms, and now funds solar-pumped market gardens run largely by women.

🇬🇲 Gambia · Maruo Farms

A Gambian rice company organizes thousands of smallholders, 90% of them women, into a climate-resilient local rice supply chain.

🇬🇹 Guatemala · Asociación Qachuu Aloom "Madre Tierra"

After a civil war and a flood of hybrid seed wiped out their own, Maya Achi' women in Baja Verapaz started over with 20 families and now guard heirloom corn, amaranth and beans in earthenware jars.

🇹🇬 Togo · Mivo Énergie

A Togolese social enterprise sells solar lamps and clean cookstoves on flexible credit so families can quit costly, smoky kerosene and charcoal.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Monkeybiz

A Cape Town bead cooperative pays township women immediately, in cash, for hand-beaded art now sold everywhere from the V&A Waterfront to international folk art markets.

🇬🇭 Ghana · AquaLife Conservancy

In five fishing towns of Ghana's Ahanta West district, fishers once paid by the fin are now trained to release critically endangered guitarfish, and some earn more from snail farms and soap than from the sea.

🇲🇿 Mozambique · Micaia Foundation

In Manica Province, Micaia trained 52 villagers as seed-keeping facilitators, and 196 of the 340 people it trained were women.

🇧🇯 Benin · Nature Tropicale ONG

Benin's first IUCN-member NGO patrols the coast to rescue sea turtles, manatees and dolphins while running the country's first two marine protected areas.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · Hinckley Recycling

Hinckley turns the 100,000-strong army of informal e-waste scavengers around Lagos into trained, protected, paid collectors, and is building Nigeria's first lead-acid and lithium battery recycling lines.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · Pad-Up Creations

A factory in Minna, Niger State, stitches washable period kits that women sales agents now carry to 21 African countries.

🇵🇼 Palau · Ebiil Society

In Palau, where sea cucumbers are a women's fishery, local women now raise sandfish seed and farm giant clams instead of stripping the reef.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · Snow Leopard Foundation Pakistan (SLF)

A Pakistan-founded NGO builds predator-proof livestock corrals and community insurance schemes across Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral so herders stop losing snow leopards to retaliatory killing.

🇨🇻 Cape Verde · Project Biodiversity (Projeto Biodiversidade)

Every summer night on Sal Island, this Cabo Verdean NGO's patrols protect the world's third-largest loggerhead turtle nesting population from poachers and predators.

🇸🇱 Sierra Leone · Namati

Community paralegals trained by Namati are helping Sierra Leonean villages fight exploitative land leases and win back territory signed away without their consent.

🇨🇰 Cook Islands · Punanga Turuturu Itivaine (PTI)

The Cook Islands' only dedicated women's counselling centre has spent three decades showing up when families are in crisis.

🇮🇳 India · SWaCH Pune Seva Sahakari Sanstha

A wholly worker-owned cooperative of Pune's waste pickers now walks into roughly one million properties a day, collecting the city's waste door to door.

🇮🇳 India · Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR)

WOTR mobilizes villages across India's drought-prone drylands to build check-dams, contour trenches and ponds that recharge groundwater and bring barren common land back into production.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Rede de Sementes do Cerrado (RSC)

A Brasília-based seed network pays indigenous, family-farmer and urban collectors to harvest native Cerrado grasses and wildflowers, turning them back into standing savanna.

🇲🇦 Morocco · High Atlas Foundation

High Atlas Foundation runs community tree nurseries that turn arid, degraded ground on the edge of the Sahara into productive fruit and nut orchards.

🇲🇱 Mali · Sahel Eco

Malian farmers are turning back the desert and rebuilding food security using centuries-old tree-regeneration techniques revived by a homegrown Sahelian NGO.

🇺🇸 United States · Sogorea Te' Land Trust

The first urban Indigenous women-led land trust in the US is quietly buying and receiving back parcels of Ohlone territory across the San Francisco Bay Area, acre by acre.

🇩🇿 Algeria · Association pour la Protection de l'Environnement de Béni-Isguen (APEB)

In a Saharan oasis founded on ancestral water and palm-grove wisdom, a local association is training a new generation in agroecology and composting.

🇫🇯 Fiji · Rise Beyond the Reef

Connects women in remote Fijian villages to markets for their traditional crafts, lifting incomes and resilience.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Pastoral Women's Council

Founded by ten Maasai women in 1997, the Pastoral Women's Council has helped over a thousand Maasai women win formal title to rangeland in a culture where women traditionally could not own land.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Seed Savers Network Kenya

A Kenyan farmer network that has revived dozens of vanishing indigenous crop varieties by building a nationwide web of community seed banks.

🇸🇳 Senegal · Association Sénégalaise des Producteurs de Semences Paysannes (ASPSP)

Founded in 2003 by farmer Lamine Biaye, ASPSP stages seed fairs where Senegalese growers swap local millet, sorghum and vegetable varieties instead of buying hybrids.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · Rural Aid Pakistan

In Punjab's Narowal District, seven solar-powered irrigation systems let farming households ditch diesel, save water and diversify their crops, and 1,280 women were trained alongside.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Soil for Life

Since 2002 this Cape Town nonprofit has taught more than 9,000 people to turn small urban plots into organic food gardens that feed their families.

🌍 Global · Solar Sister

A women-led network of clean-energy entrepreneurs bringing solar lights and clean cookstoves to off-grid Africa.

🇲🇿 Mozambique · Alongside Hope

At Muripotana Health Centre in Nampula, a midwife who once began every night shift in darkness and could not admit patients now has lights, a fetal Doppler and phone charging from a wall-mounted solar box.

🌍 Global · We Care Solar

A Berkeley nonprofit equips last-mile health clinics with rugged 'Solar Suitcase' kits, giving midwives reliable light and power to safely deliver babies after dark.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Mums for Lungs

A group of South London mothers pushing prams through Brixton smog now has primary-school children painting clean-air banners that hang on Lambeth and Southwark lampposts.

🇰🇳 Saint Kitts and Nevis · St. Kitts Consortium of Farmers & Food Producers (SKCFFP)

A grassroots network is mobilizing St. Kitts and Nevis's crop farmers, livestock keepers and agro-processors to cut the country's reliance on imported food.

🇰🇪 Kenya · International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW)

Kenya's first all-women ranger unit, made up of young Maasai women, patrols the wildlife corridor between Amboseli and Tsavo to stop poaching and defuse human-elephant conflict.

🇹🇭 Thailand · WWF Thailand

In Surat Thani, WWF is helping a Saleng Association of informal tricycle-and-sidecar waste collectors sign formal MoUs with junk shops so the shops owe the collectors incentives.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Transfrontier Africa NPC

South Africa's Black Mambas patrol Greater Kruger unarmed, using visible presence and community roots to push rhino poaching toward zero.

🇰🇪 Kenya · The Green Belt Movement

Wangari Maathai's grassroots movement that empowers Kenyan women to restore forests.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Porgera Red Wara (River) Women's Association

Only a handful of industrial mines on Earth still tip their tailings straight into a river. Three of them are in Papua New Guinea, and the women downstream named theirs the Red River.

🇦🇫 Afghanistan · UN Women Afghanistan

Thirty-five women run businesses in a Bamyan market that the grid never reached — so the roof became the power station.

🇨🇱 Chile · Mujeres de Zonas de Sacrificio en Resistencia Quintero-Puchuncaví

Chile zoned this bay for the industry nobody wanted anywhere else, then acted surprised when schoolchildren started collapsing — so the mothers took the phrase 'sacrifice zone' and made it the state's problem.

🌍 Global · International Land Coalition (ILC)

Hosted by IFAD in Rome, ILC unites more than 300 civil society and intergovernmental members across 86 countries to fight land grabbing and secure tenure rights for farmers, pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples and women.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT)

UCRT helps Maasai, Hadzabe, Datoga and other pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities in northern Tanzania win legally binding titles to the rangeland their livelihoods depend on.

🇬🇭 Ghana · Toyola Energy Limited

A Ghanaian social enterprise sells ceramic-lined charcoal stoves that cut smoke, fuel bills, and burns for low-income households across West Africa.

🇬🇭 Ghana · Trashy Bags Africa

A Ghanaian sewing workshop turns the drinking-water sachets that choke Accra's gutters and beaches into bags, wallets and accessories, paying collectors and seamstresses for waste most people just step over.

🇳🇪 Niger · Sahara Sahel Foods

Sahara Sahel Foods pays rural Nigerien women to harvest native trees and shrubs, turning stigmatized wild foods into a growing regional market.

🇮🇳 India · Under the Mango Tree Society

A Mumbai-based nonprofit trains marginal and tribal farmers to keep indigenous bees, lifting both crop pollination and household incomes.

🇻🇳 Vietnam · VietCycle

Hanoi-based VietCycle has grown a network of Vietnam's ve chai scrap collectors, mostly women, from 1,200 to about 3,000 by giving them protective gear, bicycles and social insurance.

🇼🇸 Samoa · Women in Business Development Incorporated (WIBDI)

Since 1991, Samoan village women have turned certified-organic coconut oil and hand-woven fine mats into a global supply chain.

🇮🇳 India · Warrior Moms

Five worried Delhi mothers turned lockdown blue skies into a pan-India movement demanding clean air for every child.

🇦🇺 Australia · Waves of Wellness Foundation

Waves of Wellness pairs group cognitive behavioural therapy with free surf lessons to help Australians rebuild their mental health in the ocean.

🇾🇪 Yemen · UNDP Yemen

Ten women in Abs district built and now run the first private solar grid in a country where the war took the power out years ago.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · Heritage Foundation of Pakistan

Yasmeen Lari stopped designing landmark buildings at seventy and started teaching flood survivors to build their own shelters out of bamboo, lime and mud — for about forty dollars each.