Climate Crisis and Gender Equality in the Euro-Mediterranean Region – Emerging Security Risks

The MENA gender gap remains substantially unchanged in the economic empowerment sphere. Women in the region still hold the lowest entrepreneurial activity at 4% of the overall population (OECD, 2022). When starting or growing business, Arab women continue to face a series of overwhelming constraints. These include a gender discriminatory environment, as well as lack of knowledge and access to networks to start to expand business, which together act as a powerful barrier to women’s entrepreneurship (LSE, 2022). Similarly, over 50% of agricultural workers in the region are women. Yet, they are disadvantaged in agriculture because of entrenched gender roles and responsibilities, restrictive sociocultural norms, and lower access to productive resources, technology, markets, finance, and information. These problems are further exacerbated by the gender and social norms that limit the mobility of women in some areas in MENA countries and limit the participation of women in certain sectors, such as the renewable energy sector, as these sectors have always been nominated “as male dominating sectors” (ICARDA, 2023). Arab businesswomen and women entrepreneurs face lack of access to knowledge and information that would enable them to start, expand and grow their business. They also face challenges in relation to accessing needed finance because of limited control over resources. Moreover, rural women suffer from struct culture and social norms that in most cases limits mobility and access to resources.

March 2025