Women and Climate Activism in Morocco and Tunisia

The Maghreb countries—Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia—are facing a variety of acute climate change challenges. Water scarcity is on the rise, and dams are drying: On average, Al Massira Dam in central Morocco holds only 3 percent of the water it did nine years ago.¹ The Maghreb region’s coastlines are receding faster than nearly all others globally, and within the region, Tunisia’s 1,300-kilometer coastline is eroding the fastest.² Temperatures are rising: Since 1950, Algeria’s mean temperature has steadily increased nearly every year.³ Climate change is also impacting traditions across the Maghreb. Farming methods have changed because of land desertification caused by cash crops and prolonged, persistent drought.⁴ Government policies attempting to limit water usage have occasionally shut down North African bathhouses, called hammam in Arabic, that play significant cultural roles, including in pre-wedding traditions and religious cleansing rituals.⁵ Migration induced by climate change is also on the rise, with the World Bank predicting that North Africa will have up to 19 million internal climate migrants by 2050.⁶

These climate consequences disproportionately impact the women of the Maghreb because women bear the burden of domestic labor, including cooking, cleaning, and fetching water—activities impacted greatly by a changing climate. Furthermore, women in the Maghreb are significant contributors to the agricultural sector and make up over a quarter of agricultural workers⁷ in an industry facing acute and urgent climate challenges.

Recognizing the crucial role women play in building resilience, each Maghreb country has tasked a woman to lead governmental efforts to mitigate climate change: Leila Rachel Benali is the minister of energy transition and sustainable development in Morocco, Fazia Dahleb is the minister of environment and renewable energy in Algeria, and Leila Chikhaoui is the minister of the environment and sustainable development in Tunisia. Nevertheless, women’s voices are often underrepresented in discussions around local climate adaptation and mitigation. In Morocco and Tunisia, several civil society organizations are attempting to reverse this trend. They pay homage to the fact that women are disproportionately disadvantaged by climate change.⁸ The intersection of gender and climate is worth policymakers’ attention, as women’s knowledge and experiences can be leveraged to develop strategies to mitigate the harmful consequences of climate change, including the aggravation of existing gender inequalities.

The Gendered Impact of Climate Change in the Maghreb

Gender roles in the Maghreb prescribe men and women to certain vocations and duties. The key climate-related challenges in the region—water scarcity, desertification, and extreme weather—primarily impact domains for which women are responsible. The tasks of laundry, cooking, cleaning, and childcare in most Maghreb homes fall to women. In rural farming communities, women are overwhelmed with work requiring water, arable land, and moderate temperatures.⁹ Demand for female labor coupled with male control over the flow of money into households in rural provinces puts women in an incredibly vulnerable position. Climate change exacerbates such vulnerabilities.

Women in the Maghreb have engaged in activism around climate change for several years; however, their efforts are often either ignored by local and national officials or disconnected from their country’s broader feminist movement. While some efforts aim to connect feminist climate activists who advocate for gender-sensitive climate policies, these efforts have proven to be largely inconsistent and ineffective.¹⁰ There has been a great disconnect between climate activism and gender activism, despite the obvious interplay of the two issues. However, in both Morocco and Tunisia, there are examples of climate activism and gender activism coming together and working in tandem.

Morocco: Despite Occasional Protests, Climate Change and Gender Remain Disconnected

Almost a decade of drought has threatened Morocco’s agricultural and livestock industries greatly. For the first time during his more than two decades in power, King Mohammed VI canceled the 2025 Eid al-Adha festivities, which typically involve the sacrifice of a sheep. The minister of Islamic affairs cited the drought-induced lack of livestock and climate change’s overall strain on the economy as reasons for canceling the important religious holiday, revealing how pervasive climate change’s impact is on Moroccan traditions.¹¹

Despite Morocco’s image as one of the most climate-prepared countries in the world, adaptation programs are facing implementation challenges.¹² Protests have cropped up as drought and climate change impact people’s lives and as Moroccans feel dissatisfied with the policies of their government.¹³ Although the gender and climate activism movements have largely failed to recognize their shared interests, women have joined the climate movement and elevated their gender or gendered perspectives within the climate space. In the case of protest, women have drawn explicitly on their gender to justify their activism.

Over several months in 2024, residents of Figuig, a small town along the border with Algeria in central Morocco, protested a national water management plan that was intended to begin that year. The National Drinking Water Supply and Irrigation Program aimed to strengthen the supply of drinking water and ensure water security.¹⁴ It would have transferred control over water systems from individual towns to a regional agency.¹⁵ Water management in Morocco is steeped in tradition, with towns such as Figuig using centuries-old canal systems. Facing a threat to their traditions and anxious about a change in control, the residents of Figuig took to the streets. Women organized a protest on International Women’s Day in support of the movement aiming to maintain local control.¹⁶ This example illustrates a broader trend: Women are key participants in protests regarding issues related to water scarcity. Simultaneously, such gendered protests around climate change issues remain uncommon.

Women are key participants in protests regarding issues related to water scarcity.

The fact that women are disproportionately disadvantaged by water scarcity’s impacts on the agricultural industry helps explain their involvement in water scarcity activism. For instance, watermelon was introduced to rural, traditionally grazing lands around 2008, when the Moroccan government began assisting with irrigation.¹⁷ A popular cash crop, watermelon has exacerbated water scarcity because of its high water demand. As lands have dried, rendering farming difficult and not financially prosperous, men have migrated to cities such as Rabat and Casablanca to seek work. While men are gone, women take on additional farming responsibilities and simultaneously care for their families.¹⁸ A gender scientist in a Moroccan agricultural organization said that “women, mainly because of their social responsibilities, are unable to use the coping mechanism of out-migration.”¹⁹ Despite women’s workload increasing, “policies are not catching up,” said the gender scientist.²⁰ Women only receive assistance from the government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in very traditional industries, such as soap and carpet making.

Even when policies protecting women’s rights exist, gender norms prevent Moroccan women from exercising their rights, most notably in the case of land ownership. Without owning land, the gender scientist indicated, women will not be able to make decisions to adopt climate-conscious irrigation methods. In the Middle East and North Africa generally, women’s land ownership is the lowest in the world at only 5 percent of ownership.²¹ Despite a successful melkinisation, a privatization of collective lands campaign led by feminist NGOs to grant women land ownership in Morocco in 2019, cultural gender norms have limited the implementation and scope, excluding climate change issues from the picture.²²

Although not always explicitly gender focused, NGOs across Morocco work to create solutions for those who are impacted by climate change, especially women. Youth for Climate Morocco, one of the most prominent NGOs in the country working on climate change and whose board of ten has nine women, uses inclusive activism to improve the ways Morocco responds to climate challenges.²³ Co-founder Fatna Ikrame explained:

“Gender inclusivity is central to our mission. We intentionally create spaces for women and girls to lead, share their stories, and contribute to climate solutions. From training programs and community dialogues to national campaigns, we ensure that women are not just participants but active decision-makers.”²⁴

By raising women’s voices, the organization contributes to developing solutions to Moroccan climate issues that have long harmed women. Ikrame argues that “climate change has a distinctly gendered impact in Morocco,”²⁵ thus climate policy must consider gender. She pointed to the specific ways women are impacted:

“[Women are responsible for] managing household resources like water, food, and energy. As climate change intensifies . . . women’s daily responsibilities become significantly harder. . . . In regions experiencing water scarcity, women and girls are forced to walk longer distances to collect water, which not only affects their health but also limits their access to education and income-generating activities.”²⁶

Ikrame reveals exactly why a gendered lens in the climate space is vital: The burden of needing to handle climate change’s effects prevents women from actualizing their basic rights, including to education and health. By considering the cultural expectation that women be responsible for daily tasks requiring natural resources, Moroccan activists can push for policies that prevent women from experiencing disproportionate harm from climate change.

Tunisia: A Strong Foundation of Activism but a Lack of Results

Like other Maghreb countries, Tunisia is already experiencing several impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels and changing weather patterns. Climate change has also contributed to a multiyear drought and a water crisis that some experts date back to the 1990s.²⁷

As in Morocco, water scarcity has a disproportionate impact on women, who are traditionally responsible for water collection and food preparation. As one Tunisian woman put it, “Fetching water, once a routine task, has become arduous due to environmental changes. We spend hours seeking clean water sources, affecting our overall well-being.”²⁸ Access to water is not only a necessity for Tunisian women but also a right guaranteed in the constitution. Article 48 of the 2022 constitution states that “the State must provide potable water to everyone equally, and it must preserve water resources for future generations.”²⁹ However, in practice, the Tunisian state is increasingly failing to meet its obligation to provide access to water for women in particular.³⁰ This has led to protests in some areas, highlighting the intersection between climate activism and rights-based activism. A further challenge accompanies women on their way to access water: Development agencies have reported that women face “harassment and sexual assault” on their way to water standpipes.³¹

Women also take on a disproportionate amount of agricultural work, again echoing issues in Morocco. Women in Tunisia make up 70 percent of the agricultural workforce, compared to only 8 percent of the total working population.³² Over time, women have also taken on more traditionally male responsibilities in the agricultural sector, including in irrigation, livestock grazing, and buying and selling in markets, in addition to their traditional workload, further increasing their exposure to climate-related challenges.³³ Yet women have little access to resources and training to help adapt their agricultural work to the changing climate or address the negative impacts on their lives. This is due, at least partially, to the fact that only 5 percent of women farmers own land.³⁴ 

Tunisian climate activism has struggled to address these problems. Beginning with the Arab Spring protests in 2010 and 2011, Tunisian civil society has been globally lauded for its advocacy for change. However, despite a strong civic infrastructure and large amounts of foreign assistance to support Tunisian civil society efforts between 2011 and 2021, “civil society actors have consistently struggled to put environmental issues on the national agenda,” according to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.³⁵ No major climate activism movement emerged in the post-2011 period, and under President Kais Saied, the civic sphere is becoming increasingly restricted. While there is more space for climate activists to operate in Tunisia than other types of activists (such as human rights and prodemocracy groups), the entire civic space is under threat because of a combination of state repression and donor withdrawal.³⁶

While there has been an uptick in protests related to water scarcity in both rural and urban areas,³⁷ the number of protesters has been quite small. This is especially true in the ecofeminist space, where few organizations have taken on climate from a gendered or intersectional perspective. Although gender-based climate activism grew in Tunisia following the negotiation of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, which highlighted the importance of addressing gender in climate action on a global scale, a strong gender-based climate movement has not yet emerged in the country.

There are, however, some success stories of feminist climate activism in Tunisia. One female farmer started a women’s farmers group in 2016 that has grown to more than 200 members who help each other with technical training and promote each other’s agricultural products.³⁸ The founder, Rim Ben Soud, explains that rural women are “at the front-lines of the battle against climate change, social injustice and a patriarchal society.”³⁹

Another example is the Global Water Project’s pilot in Beja, Tunisia, which addressed climate change from a “gender transformative approach.” The project developed a working group, including representatives from civil society and the local and national governments, whose goal was to create a gender action plan. Participants worked on capacity building; awareness around gender, water security, and climate change; and implementation at the local level. For example, they had trainings about the legal system related to both gender equality and the right to water to help them better advocate for their rights and inform others of their rights.⁴⁰

But these positive examples belie a situation where climate activists are operating primarily at a small scale with little interaction across groups. Climate activists often form ad hoc partnerships that are short-lived and can be donor-dependent. Furthermore, there is a lack of coordination between feminist NGOs in Tunisia and climate activists.

Conclusion

Morocco and Tunisia present two similar landscapes of climate activism and gender activism. Their differing governance models—Morocco a constitutional monarchy and Tunisia a republic—result in differing approaches to climate adaptation policy. But women in both countries experience the disproportionate impacts of climate change. Morocco’s civic space is currently much more free than Tunisia’s because of significant democratic backsliding in the republic. But Tunisia’s historic protection of women’s rights provides a strong foundation for climate activism to intersect with gender activism. The recent focus in Morocco on land rights for women and the ongoing revisions to Morocco’s family law, which governs women’s rights, present the same opportunities in the kingdom.

To adapt climate policies in a way that pays tribute to women’s experiences, the governments of Tunisia and Morocco should go beyond appointing women to lead their energy ministries. The governments could incorporate the ideas of women from across the country—particularly those hailing from rural backgrounds (who help feed the entire countries with their farms)—into their water policies. Furthermore, a government-led campaign to educate both men and women in rural areas regarding their rights to education, water, and safety would benefit existing climate adaptation programs. In both countries, expanding women’s land ownership could allow women a greater say in how their households adapt to the consequences of climate change, thus helping to mitigate the disproportionate harms that women experience.

At the civic level, there is space to improve climate activism so that it has real benefit for women. Currently there is a disconnect between the work of climate activists and that of gender activists in the Maghreb. Marrying these activists’ efforts would make their activism more effective. Better connecting the networks of existing climate activists within the Maghreb and outside the region could also improve the climate movement in Morocco and Tunisia. By joining with organizations from outside of their own contexts, all activists could learn lessons and tools for developing resilient climate policies that will ultimately help women reduce the undue burden of climate change.  

In this series of articles, Carnegie scholars and contributors are analyzing varieties of climate activism from around the world, focusing on the intensification of activity both from the protesters themselves and from the authorities and forces who are the objects of their discontent.

Read more from the series here:

• Why Climate Sabotage Remains an Unlikely Strategy
• The Growing Criminalization of Climate and Environmental Protests