Inspire Inclusion: Invest in Women, Accelerate Progress in the HKH

Sangay Lham is dynamic community leader, a pioneer of an irrigation water revival project in Paro, Bhutan and one of just seven women to be elected local government leaders in the landlocked Himalayan Kingdom. Gup of Shaba Gewog in Paro.

Summera Fahmi Khan, lecturer in civil engineering at Pakistan’s Commission on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development in the South (COMSATS) is a graduate of ICIMOD’s Women in Geospatial Information Technology course who as a trainer now integrates geospatial science into water resource management – empowering students with next-generation skills.

Dr. Saudamini Das is a world-renowned expert in mangroves, but who only began her career in academia at the age of 44, following her years as a homemaker. Based in Delhi, Das secured two research grants from the South Asian Network of Development Economists which enable her to pursue her studies – allowing her to make significant contributions to environmental policy and research.

Professor Dr. Tehmina Mangan is Vice Chancellor of The Begum Nusrat Bhutto Women University Sukkur, Pakistan where she led the introduction of the undergraduate degree program in Environmental Sciences. Herself the first woman in her family to pursue a university education, she went on to become Pakistan’s first female Professor in Agricultural Economics.

Professor Xu Jun is a distinguished anthropologist from Sichuan University, who represented China on the Himalayan University Consortium (HUC) Steering Committee between 2017 and 2023. Over the course of a 30-year career, she has held leadership positions both within and beyond government. As HUC’s first female steering committee member, Xu introduced innovations targeted at nurturing future leaders in the Himalayan region and by supporting the set up of HUC’s 12 Thematic Working Groups, has fostered regional collaborations in research and training.

Nusrat Jahan Nilima is a disaster science advocate who has made significant contributions to the research of Urban Heat Islands using remote sensing. Leading the “She Leads She Inspires” project funded by APHub, OpenStreetMap, and Himalayan University Consortium, she mapped emergency routes with an all-female team, promoting women’s empowerment in technology. Nilima believes collective action is the driving force for change, particularly in empowering women to participate in data-driven decision-making and disaster preparedness.

Sameera Noori is an Environmental Engineering and Commerce graduate working at the Citizens Organization for Advocacy and Resilience, Afghanistan, and a pioneer in the use of open-geospatial technologies to increase the effectiveness of disaster response and build climate resilience. Major contributions to humanitarian work include the landmark collaborative stakeholder survey, which she presented to the World Climate Research Programme’s Open Science Conference in 2023.

Chimi Dema is an education, language, and technology expert who champions gender equality and community-led mapping projects within the Himalayan University Consortium. Recognized for her commitment to empowering students, she also won an award for Outstanding Dissertation and Thesis Award in 2021.

Dilshad Bano is a mid-career academic who works in geospatial information management, hazard mapping, remote sensing, technology, innovation, modelling, and spatial data infrastructure. Bano, who hails from Hunza Valley, in the extreme north of Pakistan earned her a master’s in Environmental Sciences in 2007, going on to work in humanitarian assistance. As a practitioner, she works on climate change adaptation strategies, approaches and ideas that are applicable for mountain communities, drawing on technology and indigenous knowledge systems.

Bidhya Chhetri Poudel is a 24-year-old bachelors of science graduate from the College of Natural Resource Management, Dhankuta, Nepal. She received the Embrace Equity Grant for conducting ground-breaking research on women-friendly agricultural tools. She’s a passionate advocate for climate-resilient practices, bridging theory and practice with work that enriches academia and improves the lives of women growers in her region.

29-year-old Sita Sharma Dhakal is a local resource person for ICIMOD’s Green Resilient Agriculture Productive Ecosystems project — championing climate-resilient agricultural practices in her community. Dhakal grows vegetables to support herself and her family of five: and is a powerful advocate for sustainability in farming among her peers.

Puna Rawat Bhandari, 31, from Dailekh District, Nepal, is a resource person at the Bhandaritol Community Learning Centre – where she has contributed to a 10-15% surge in vegetable production and a monthly income uplift of USD 150 – USD 300. Bhandari is a champion of resilient agriculture who actively targets women in the uptake of knowledge about commercial farming and the use of the latest climate-resilient tools.

Highland barley has been cultivated on the Tibetan Plateau for more than three thousand years and is the principal ingredient in local staple food, tsampa, and liquor, chang. But in Tingri, in the Tibet Autonomous Region, this ancient agricultural tradition is under threat – as flash floods, climate change and sand encroachment into the fertile floodwaters of the Pengqu River basin threatens crops. The Pendeba Society supports local women leaders to safeguard delicate highland wetlands, including helping Indigenous women mitigate environmental degradation and flood hazards using nature-based solutions – such as building stone-based diversion dams. The society won the UNDP Equator Prize in 2014.

When the local spring on which over 100 families depended for water started to dry up two years ago, the women of Moldhar, in Uttarakhand, India, took action. They established the Upla Shivani Dhara Spring’s Water User Group (WUG), and set about reversing the decline in water – digging 700 trenches that have increased soil moisture, and reversed the abandonment of agricultural land. The Water User Group, majority-woman-led, is now a beacon for nature-based spring revival across the Hindu Kush Himalayas.

In Koshi Basin in Nepal, 30 million people live in the ever-increasing shadow of climate, environmental and socio-economic risks.

This is where a team from the HI-GRID project delivered a series of sessions on the benefits of including gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) in the local planning process. The HI-GRID project (a collaboration between ICIMOD and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) is working in select municipalities in the lower Koshi Basin with local-level administration to encourage the mainstreaming of Gender Equality, Disability and Social Inclusion (GEDSI) practices in local level planning. Working with political representatives and municipal officials from 28 municipalities, the sessions delivered insights into how DRR planning could be tailored to account for GRB and disability. Some interactions also showed the complex cultural norms present in the municipalities where early-age marriage and denouncing of LGBTQI is still commonplace.

The trainings also saw important partnerships set up with rights-based organisations like Nepal Disabled Women’s Organisation, which greatly helped in understanding the contextual challenges faced by disabled people in the provinces. By doing this, the project is also directly addressing a national level mandated requirement while also filling in a critical and substantial knowledge gap where local level decision makers often struggle with the practical knowledge of incorporate GEDSI principles for better welfare of people.