African countries experience some of the most extreme effects of climate change. Within the continent, women are affected significantly more. With global temperatures predicted to rise around 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, it is now more pressing to consider the disproportionate effect climate change has on the lives of African women. A multiplicity of factors are contributing to women’s heightened vulnerability under global warming, predominantly in the categories of existing societal, social, economic, and cultural differences.

The impacts of global warming impact individuals from lower-income backgrounds at a higher rate/more substantially. For low-income women, the impact is even higher. Of the 1.3 billion people globally currently living in poverty, 70 percent are women. With this statistic in mind, 62.8 percent of the world’s impoverished women live in Sub-Saharan Africa. This large disparity is best explained through the longstanding influence of gender roles in African society and the scope of accessibility and economic opportunities, or lack thereof, that gender constructs enable.

In most African cultures, women are expected to fulfill multiple economic roles. The responsibility falls most directly on women to obtain sustenance for their families while also  working in labor-intensive food production. Women in sub-Saharan Africa are responsible for 80 percent of food production, and over 60 percent work in agriculture, putting them face-to-face with the immediate consequences of climate shocks as it becomes harder to produce necessary crops and, subsequently, to earn an income. 

Climate change exacerbates the difficulty of completing daily tasks such as cooking, water collection, and cleaning, because of the added stress rising global temperatures place on an industry that already exploits women as a form of cheap labor. Men, comparatively, are less vulnerable to the health impacts, access to water and energy, and overall effects of climate-related disasters, migration, and conflict. They focus on growing cash crops or working in the public sector to provide financial support, while women focus on subsistence crops to feed their families. With this in mind, it is important to consider how the majority of jobs accessible to African women fall within the agriculture sector and are therefore more insecure and lower-paying than those available to men.

Climate change also limits the time women can dedicate to non-laborious tasks. When crops die or water dries up, women, who already have unequal access to natural resources, must venture kilometers away to discover  solutions. Statistics displaying that women in sub-Saharan Africa collectively spend 40 billion hours a year collecting water exemplify how women bear the burden of natural resource collection, a task that climate change will only intensify. In these 24 sub-Saharan countries, 3.36 million children and 13.54 million adult females are estimated to be responsible for household water collection (greater than thirty minutes). Of the 3.36 million children, females were more likely to hold this responsibility than men, with a 62 percent to 38 percent split.

In countries where water is not as easily accessible, traveling and searching for reliable sources of water puts women at risk of facing attacks from violent groups and being hurt by environmental hazards on their routes, especially in countries considered dangerous such as Somalia, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic. 

Patriarchal systems present in developing African countries serve to further intensify the negative effects of global warming on women’s livelihoods. One example is Nigeria. Rural Nigerian women face social oppression, legal neglect, political exploitation, technological deprivation, and are “subordinated to the production unit of bearing and rearing children,” leaving them very limited access to upward mobility. Women in Nigerias typically suffer from a lack of formal education, often leaving no recourse for those who wish to migrate or enter other sectors when the burden of climate change becomes too great to bear.  The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) ranks Nigeria 152 out of 187 countries and classifies Nigerian women as “underprivileged and less economically developed.” Similar cases can be seen in other countries ranked lower on the UNDP and on the Gender Inequality Index, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Liberia, countries where women have been historically repressed by societal and governmental norms.

As temperatures continue to rise, it is even more important to evaluate the role of women in African societies and the disproportionate effects changing climates have on the tasks they perform in their everyday lives. Women are extremely important in society, especially African societies because of the unique economic roles they fulfill. The current environmental problems plaguing African societies will unfortunately force society to reevaluate the role women play. In order to remedy this issue perpetuating inequality in the continent, the UNDP needs to develop systems to address the gender gaps and climate change's growing effect on African societies to integrate female perspectives and promote growth in all areas of their communities.