Climate finance allocation practices to support gender responsive energy transitions: GCF case-study

This chapter explores the existing gender responsive resource allocation practices and policies of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which is the largest climate finance fund and one of the key financial instruments of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Using the example of the GCF energy generation and access portfolio, the author proposes a methodology for gauging the extent to which women empowerment considerations are applied within specific categories of energy investments. This chapter reveals that the most significant variations in women empowerment considerations are observed among projects implemented by public and private sector organisations and projects that target utility and small-scale technologies. The main finding of the study is that more in-depth research on the effect of various implementation modalities and the scale of technologies is needed for increasing gender responsiveness of broader climate finance and specifically climate finance that supports low-carbon energy transitions.