Women at the frontlines: Driving peace and climate resilience in the Kenya-Ethiopia borderlands 

As peacebuilders, we see day in and day out how climate change isn’t just altering landscapes – it’s reshaping conflict. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Kenya-Ethiopia borderlands, where prolonged droughts, floods and erratic rainfall are turning competition for water and pasture into cycles of violence between the Turkana, Dassanech, and Nyangatom communities.

In contexts like these, where challenges to security and social cohesion are felt even more acutely, women and girls often interact most directly with natural resources and land yet remain systematically excluded from shaping solutions. In this blog, we’ll explain how we are working to change this – and why climate action in fragile and conflict-affected settings benefits from including all gender perspectives. 

The double bind 

In areas where long-standing intercommunal tensions escalate against the backdrop of changing climate and intensified competition over scarce natural resources, gender can determine the way different groups experience and contribute to these stresses. 

Despite being primary users – and, in many instances, providers – of natural resources like water, firewood, and agricultural outputs, women and girls remain largely excluded from resource management decisions and disproportionately vulnerable to climate and conflict risks. 

With less control over (natural) resources, finances and decision-making structures, they have fewer means to cope with climate and conflict-related shocks.  

Women and girls also experience sexual and gender-based violence in times of conflict and can be subjected to exploitation when forcibly displaced.  Additionally, women are often excluded from leadership roles and rarely have a say in peacebuilding, natural resource management and climate adaptation structures and processes.  

But even in these circumstances, local women emerge as informal influencers of inter-community relations. Daisy Cheruto Kosgei, Senior Project Officer at International Alert Kenya, says:

Women actively participate in community peace meetings, where beyond logistical activities such as preparing meals, they share personal experiences of how conflict affects daily life. They also act as advocates for peace within their business networks, encouraging fellow traders to uphold communal cohesion.

Rewriting the script 

Amplifying women’s voices in local governance to advocate for climate action and peace has been an essential component of our project working with local partners at the Turkana-South Omo border of Kenya and Ethiopia.

We consult local communities and together identify women and girls for training as peace champions, supporting them to work across divides. The training sessions cover topics including mediation, dialogue facilitation, the role of women in climate action and the need for gender and conflict sensitivity.  Some groups go on to receive further training so they can coordinate local community dialogue sessions without external support. 

As they progress through the training, not only do they build confidence but also reflect more on their personal biases and how those could further fuel conflict. 

The approach is transformative precisely because it’s structural. Rather than merely adding women to existing frameworks as tokens, we’re influencing local structures such as resource-sharing committees to ensure meaningful inclusion of women in conflict resolution. More importantly, we ensure women’s climate and conflict-related concerns reach relevant authorities for implementation. 

We make these transformations possible by drawing on our longstanding expertise in bringing different voices together to co-create solutions to their shared challenges. 

As part of the project, International Alert will organise a series of meetings with different voices to discuss challenges around the overlap between climate and conflict that consider peacebuilding, natural resource management and local structures. We have plans to establish a community of practice with like-minded actors working on the same topics in the last quarter of 2025 and throughout 2026.  

Peace in the borderlands depends on women’s continued leadership in peacebuilding and natural resource governance. When local authorities and structures are ready to provide them with the right support and guidance to enhance their role in these processes, new windows of opportunities open up to bring about inclusive and cohesive communities.  

The project “Addressing the intersection of climate, conflict and gender equality in the Turkana-Omo borderlands” is funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA), the operational unit of the Austrian Development Cooperation, and is implemented by International Alert, TUPADO and the Ethiopian Institute of Peace.  

International Alert will host a series of webinars starting in October 2025 to establish a community of practice on the intersection of climate and conflict in East Africa.