Womens Environment and Development Organization Wedo

Across all areas of WEDO’s work, women’s organizing is key. Women’s capacity to act, speak, innovate and lead is a driver for sustainable change— and drives the mission of the organization.

As a global women’s advocacy organization, WEDO envisions a just world that promotes and protects human rights, gender equality and the integrity of the environment. Believing that women’s empowerment and leadership are key levers of change, the organization mobilizes and facilitates women’s participation and perspectives in global, regional and national policy-making spheres – especially for sustainable development and effective global governance.

WEDO was officially founded in 1991, before the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, also known as the Earth Summit,) in Rio de Janeiro. WEDO’s visionaries recognized a major gap in environmental policy-making: women’s perspectives were seldom to be found. Given that women’s time and labor is so often tied to natural resource management, especially in rural and least developed parts of the world, WEDO determined to bridge the gaps. It promoted women’s perspectives from around the globe to influence the UNCED negotiations—helping to secure monumental policy commitments on gender equality and environmental issues. This was the start of a two-decade history of high-level UN-related advocacy on the nexus of sustainability and women’s rights.