Locations
As the morning mist rises over the green mountains, Lo Lo May straps a straw-woven basket on her back and heads into the surrounding forest with her sister and the other women of Chu Kan Ho village. The 33-year-old mother of three belongs to the ethnic Dao minority whose lives are inextricably linked with the magnificent nature that abounds in Lao Cai, a province in the northwest of Viet Nam known for its mountains, rivers, waterfalls and ethnic hill tribes.
The Dao women possess indigenous knowledge of the uses of the forest’s medicinal plants to cure ailments from headaches and fever to pregnancy pains. “My mother took me into the forest as soon as I was able to walk,” says May. “And I will do the same for my daughters. This tradition has been passed on for generations in our community.”
May is emblematic of the close relationship that women and ethnic minorities have with forests in Viet Nam. However, this important co-relation has not always commanded the recognition it deserves and women’s inclusion in REDD+[1] has, and continues, to face many institutional and cultural barriers.
Even though women outnumber men in the production of agro-forestry products, forestry institutions tend to be gender biased in Viet Nam. Women’s representation in decision-making is limited due to a combination of factors, including cultural norms regarding social behavior. Additionally, officials who oversee forest programmes lack understanding of gender issues. This results in simple oversights, such as failing to plan consultations around women’s work and household schedules. There is also a tendency to measure gender inclusion by a simple count of whether women were present in consultations, rather than the quality of their inclusion. Consequently, women are often not fully included, and their perspectives are not adequately reflected in forest management decisions.
Women are also disadvantaged when it comes to forest land ownership and access rights. Despite laws that provide equal land rights to women and men, several issues – from local attitudes on gender and lineage practices, to access to legal services and inadequate institutions and practices – mean that in effect women hold only 20% of Land Use certificates. This means that, unless forest conservation-related programmes, such as REDD+, specifically target women and integrate gender considerations to address such issues, there will likely be gender inequalities in the way that women and men are involved in and benefit from them.
Acknowledging these challenges, UNDP, under the UN-REDD Programme, actively worked with the Government and local stakeholders to help ensure REDD+ action includes strong gender perspectives. This is important to make sure that women and men, across all stakeholder groups, not only benefit from REDD+ action but are also actively engaged in its implementation as well as decision-making processes.
Leona Liu/UN-REDD Programme
This support first began with a comprehensive gender analysis of REDD+ in Viet Nam, examining progress and room for improvement from the national to local levels. This revealed that the gender strategies designed to address the lack of women’s participation in REDD+ included (i) capacity building on gender and REDD+ with provincial level staff, (ii) the creation of provincial gender focal points and (iii) a gender-specific overhaul of Lam Dong’s Provincial REDD+ Action Plan. However, the initial Action Plan had largely failed to consider gender equality and women’s empowerment. Few women or women’s rights organizations had been included in its development. Important groups such as the Women’s Union, a major civil society body advancing women’s rights at all levels, were not assigned a clear role or financial resources.
Steps were taken to address these concerns and the revised Provincial REDD+ Action Plan included greater consideration of civil society groups working on gender issues in ethnic minority communities. This paved the way for more innovative collaborations between government and women’s groups. For instance, empowered by a special provincial decision, the Lam Dong Forest Protection Department has joined forces with the Women’s Union, developing joint work planning activities to raise awareness and promote women’s inclusion in forest management activities.
At the local level, UNDP has worked actively with the Government to develop markets and partnerships for natural forest-based economic models which support the active participation of women. In Lao Cai province, public-private partnerships are being piloted between the provincial government and ethnic minority communities and businesses focusing on traditional medicines. Most of the population use traditional medicines in Viet Nam and 90% of their active ingredients are sourced from forests. Nearly 4,000 species of plants in Viet Nam can be used for medicine. Yet only 5% of these plants are being commercialized. With domestic revenues estimated at USD $1.5 billion, Viet Nam still imports USD $1.7 billion annually of medicinal plants that could be derived from rich local sources that would channel some of this money to local communities.
Through this initiative, traditional medicines managed and harvested according to indigenous knowledge and practices are being sold by local women to partner companies that provide the market access that the women previously lacked. UNDP worked with the women to complement their ancestral knowledge with training on sustainable harvesting techniques. UNDP also helped to set up cooperatives at the commune-level comprised of the women involved in harvesting activities. These cooperatives oversee the collection of medicinal plants, ensuring environmental sustainability and product quality control, and ensuring that profits are distributed fairly to beneficiary households.
For local Dao women, who are dependent on forests for their income, these partnerships have had a significant positive impact on their livelihoods through increasing their incomes and securing a viable future for both their traditional knowledge and the sustainable use of the forest. These practices bring wealth to the family level, benefiting men and children in participating households. Lo Lo May has welcomed becoming part of a cooperative, an institution set up through this initiative that has allowed them to negotiate higher prices as a collective where lone sellers would have struggled. While she used to sell her plants for 7,000 Vietnamese dollars/kilo, she now can sell them for up to 12,000 Vietnamese dollars/kilo. She notes, “the company can open up a more stable market for our products. Before becoming members of the cooperative, we didn’t have a very stable market with each household doing business individually. But now, we work together (…) We protect the forest and gather medicinal herbs together which creates sustainable development”.
This work illustrates how the valuable traditional knowledge of women and ethnic minorities can be powerfully leveraged in the stewardship of forests and REDD+ action and for economic development that has the potential to operate at an influential scale. It also shows how a country can promote the equitable inclusion and empowerment of women across the complex landscape of REDD+ and forest governance. Doing so can not only preserve women’s traditional forest knowledge and ensure they benefit from forest programmes, but also promote the sustainable and long-term success of REDD+.
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[1] Officially defined as “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks”, REDD+ incentivizes developing countries to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
Acknowledgements: This knowledge product was coordinated, written and edited from UNDP Climate and Forests Team: Celina (Kin Yii) Yong, Elizabeth Eggerts and Ela Ionescu
Originally published in the Gender Equality Newsletter Vol. 4
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