Gender roles, relations, norms, and expectations significantly affect women’s and men’s decisions to migrate and their experiences of migration in the context of climate change. In Ethiopia, drought has been linked to decreased marriage-related mobility for women. The ACMI research found that more women had moved previously (presumably for marriage) than men, but fewer expected to move in the future.

Women are roughly 14 times more likely to die in a disaster than men. While disasters strike everyone, women in Africa are more vulnerable because they tend to have a lower socio-economic status. They are more often illiterate, poor, and food insecure. The impacts of climate hazards are particularly harsh for those women who are sole breadwinners, who rely on small-scale farming to feed their families or work in the informal economy.

When men leave to tend to livestock or seek work in the city, women often stay behind and take on new responsibilities, including those traditionally carried out by men. Women also have to carry on with their usual household tasks, such as collecting water or firewood, which may become harder as the environment around them becomes more degraded. These traditional and expanding responsibilities can expose women to new security risks, including sexual and gender-based violence, or create additional barriers to education. Increasing burdens often occur within the confines of discriminatory legal frameworks that exclude or marginalise women in land tenure or property rights.

When men move away from rural areas, it can increase women’s work burden, but also their autonomy. Even though women and female-headed households are generally poorer and more at risk than men and male-headed households, women can be more resourceful in their individual and collective responses to stressors. They may have more social capital to draw on when they stay in their home situations. For example, female-headed households in South Africa often diversify their food and income sources in times of difficulty by turning to natural resources and other local, small-scale sources of self-employment. And, while women on the continent have an overall lower awareness of climate change than men, they are more likely to take adaptation actions when they are made aware of climate change and given adequate climate information.