On the Frontline and Under Fire: The Women Defending Our Forests, Rivers, and Rights

This International Women’s Day, Environmental Defenders honors the women across the Congo Basin and Uganda’s Albertine Rift who are risking everything to protect land, water, forests, and the communities that depend on them.

She knows what it costs to speak. When a fisherwoman from the shores of Lake Albert stands before local authorities to document illegal oil spills on the Waki River, she is not just filing a complaint. She is taking a risk that can follow her home, her marriage, her livelihood, and, in the worst cases, her physical safety. When an Efe woman in Mambasa, Ituri, maps ancestral land being stripped for gold mining, she is doing so without legal protection, without institutional backing, and often without the outside world knowing she exists. When a journalist in Hoima publishes an investigation into forced evictions linked to the Tilenga oil project, she does it knowing she may be next.

These women are not peripheral to the environmental struggles of our time. They are at the absolute center of the group. And this International Women’s Day, Environmental Defenders honors them by name, by cause, and by commitment.

A Coalition of Over 2,000, Rooted in the Most Contested Landscapes on Earth

Environmental Defenders works alongside a coalition of more than 2,000 individual environmental human rights defenders across the Albertine Rift of Uganda and the Congo Basin of the Democratic Republic of Congo. These defenders are organized across 180 formal and informal groups, organizations, community associations, and traditional institutions, ranging from well-structured civil society organizations to grassroots women’s circles and customary chieftaincy councils that have governed their forests and rivers for generations.

The landscapes where they work are among the most ecologically significant and politically contested on the planet. In Uganda, the Murchison-Semliki landscape, the Bugoma and Zoka forests, the banks of the Waki, Aswa, Kakoi, Koda, and Wambabya rivers, and the fisheries of Lake Albert are all sites where biodiversity of global importance collides with the advancing frontiers of fossil fuel extraction, agribusiness, and illegal logging. In the DRC, the Ituri Forest, the fishing communities of Lakes Albert and Edward, the gold and coltan mining zones of Mambasa, and the war-affected landscapes under state of siege in eastern provinces all form the terrain where our community partners are working under extraordinary pressure.

Women defenders are present and often leading across every one of these fronts. Their leadership is rarely celebrated. Their risks are frequently compounded by gender. And their resilience, documented across years of partnership with Environmental Defenders, is remarkable.

What They Are Fighting: A Landscape of Interlocking Threats

The issues that women defenders in our coalition are confronting in Uganda are wide-ranging and interconnected. Some are opposing the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), a 1,443-kilometer heated pipeline project led by TotalEnergies and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) that will carry crude oil from the Lake Albert oilfields in western Uganda through Tanzania to the port of Tanga. The project, alongside the upstream Tilenga extraction fields and the Kingfisher development operated by CNOOC near Kikuube district, threatens to displace over 100,000 people along its route and passes through ecologically critical areas, including the edge of Murchison Falls National Park and important wetlands in the Albertine delta.

Women defenders in Hoima, Kikuube, Buliisa, Nwoya, and surrounding districts are among those facing the heaviest pressure. They are documenting inadequate land compensation, recording the contamination of rivers and springs used for drinking water, supporting affected families through legal processes, and broadcasting findings through community radio and investigative journalism at platforms supported by our coalition. Some are the primary breadwinners in households that have had land seized without fair process. Others are traditional leaders whose authority is deliberately bypassed by project representatives seeking to minimize consultation.

TIMELINE OF REPRESSION:

Since 2021, Uganda has arrested or detained at least 100 defenders who oppose EACOP-related projects. Police raided civil society offices in Hoima, Buliisa, and Kampala in 2021. Police intercepted and detained 47 students en route to a protest in August 2024. In April 2025, 11 defenders known as the KCB11, a group advocating for environmental and human rights, were arrested for presenting a letter to a bank financing EACOP. In August 2025, 12 youth climate defenders, including three women, were remanded to Luzira Maximum Security Prison after a peaceful protest. As of October 2025, their bail applications had been denied four times.

In the Bugoma and Zoka forests, defenders are fighting illegal logging and encroachment enabled by corruption and the absence of accountability. Women in communities adjacent to these forests are often the first to notice and report illegal activity, because they are the ones collecting firewood, medicinal plants, and water. Their testimony is essential evidence, and it is also what makes them targets.

In the fisheries of Lake Albert, women fisherfolk and fish traders are contending with the militarization of the fisheries sector, rising pollution from oil infrastructure, and the displacement of traditional fishing communities with little or no compensation. They are organizing, documenting, and speaking out at personal risk.

“They told me to go home and look after my children. I said my children drink from that river. That is why I am here.”

Woman EHRD, Lake Albert basin, Uganda, 2024

In the DRC: Ituri, Mambasa, and the Compounded Burden of Conflict

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, our community partners are working in some of the most difficult conditions faced by any environmental defenders anywhere in the world. The eastern DRC provinces under state of siege, including Ituri and North Kivu, have seen civic space dramatically constrained since 2021. The presence of armed groups, military operations, and governance gaps creates an environment where documenting abuse carries mortal risk.

Despite this, our partners in the Ituri Forest, Mambasa, and the Lendu Plateau are doing precisely that. Women defenders and their organizations are documenting the environmental and human impacts of illegal and large-scale gold and coltan mining, including the use of mercury at artisanal mining sites and its devastating effect on river systems, aquatic biodiversity, and the health of surrounding communities. They are investigating illegal timber harvesting and transboundary trade in wildlife products across the Ituri, Mambasa, and surrounding landscapes. They are building community forestry systems that give indigenous communities, including Efe and Batwa groups, formal standing to manage and protect their ancestral territories.

Indigenous women in Mambasa are providing livelihood support to communities at risk of losing everything. They are mappers, legal advocates, community organizers, and witnesses. They sit with families after forced evictions and help them understand what rights they still have. They collect testimony that may one day matter before a court.

When they came to take the land, they did not speak to us. They spoke to the men who had already agreed. We are the ones who plant on that land. We are the ones who know what it produces. No one asked us anything.

Indigenous woman defender, Mambasa, Ituri, DRC

The Specific Dangers Facing Women Defenders

Environmental Defenders has documented the gendered dimensions of risk that distinguish what women defenders face from their male counterparts. These risks are not merely additional layers of difficulty. They are qualitatively different and frequently designed to target women specifically.

Women defenders in our coalition report sexual harassment and threats of sexual violence used as tools of intimidation. They report online smear campaigns containing misogynistic language and explicit threats, including cases where perpetrators demonstrate knowledge of the woman’s home address and daily movements. They report being dismissed by local authorities, police, and project representatives in ways their male colleagues are not. And they report the particular cruelty of intimate partner violence weaponized against their activism, where husbands or community members use domestic pressure to force women to stop their work, a form of threat that rarely reaches official documentation.

Globally, women and children are 14 times more likely to die in a climate disaster than men. An estimated four in five people displaced by climate-related events are women and girls. Women own less than 15 percent of the world’s land yet are responsible for most of the food and water security of their households. In our working landscape, these statistics have faces and names that we know. And still, only 0.22 percent of official development assistance for climate change and gender equality reaches women’s rights organizations directly, which limits their ability to effectively advocate for policies that support women’s land rights and enhance food and water security.

What Environmental Defenders Does: Our Approach

Environmental Defenders responds to the reality of what women defenders face with concrete, practical, and dignified support. Across our coalition of more than 2,000 defenders in Uganda and the DRC, our EHRD program provides emergency protection grants to defenders at acute risk, enabling them to relocate temporarily, secure legal representation, or implement basic security measures when threats escalate.

We provide psychosocial support to women defenders who have experienced trauma related to their work, including the trauma of sustained harassment, loss of livelihood, and community ostracism. We build capacity through training in digital security, legal rights, organizational resilience, and advocacy strategy. Knowing how to protect one’s communications is not a technical luxury in a region that documents and increases digital surveillance of activists. It is a basic safety requirement.

We amplify. Through our community radio network, Terra FM, and our investigative journalism platforms, we give women defenders a public voice that is harder to silence than an individual. We connect our partners to international human rights networks and legal support organizations such as CERJI, Land is Life, Chapter Four, Civil Rights Defenders, and global coalitions including the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action and Frontline Defenders. And through our grant-making program, we support women-led organizations across the Albertine Rift and Congo Basin to sustain their work financially when no other funding is available.

Our Impacts: What This Work Has Made Possible in 2025

2,000+ defenders in our coalition

180+ organizations & groups supported

340+ women defenders directly supported in 2025

120+ emergency protection cases handled since 2021

Each of these numbers conceals a story that would have otherwise remained unrecorded. The impacts of Environmental Defenders’ work in the EHRD space are sometimes less visible than the impacts of planted trees or mapped hectares. They are measured in cases that did not escalate because a defender received timely support. In the land that remained in community hands, someone documented the violation and brought it to a lawyer. The woman pursued her investigation due to the availability of safe digital tools.

In Uganda, defenders supported by our network have successfully challenged illegal compensation processes tied to EACOP and Tilenga land acquisitions, with at least three high-profile land cases brought to legal proceedings through our access-to-justice grant program since 2019. Lawyers in our coalition have represented over 80 individual families in Hoima, Buliisa, and Kikuube districts facing forced eviction or undervaluation of land seized for oil infrastructure. In several documented cases, fair compensation was renegotiated after legal intervention, directly improving outcomes for women-headed households who would otherwise have had no recourse.

Our community radio and journalism program, operating through Terra FM and affiliated journalists, has published over 150 investigative and community-based reports since 2021 on oil-related pollution, land rights violations, illegal logging in the Bugoma and Zoka forests, and the impacts of extractive industries on food security along the Waaki and Wambabya rivers. Several of these investigations were carried out by women journalists in our network and reached international audiences, generating responses from diplomatic missions, UN bodies, and international and local as well as national media outlets, including Al Jazeera and Kazi Njema creating external pressure that contributed to investigations being opened or suspended projects being reviewed.

In the DRC, our support for defenders documenting mercury use in artisanal gold mining in Mambasa and the Ituri region has contributed to the evidence files now in the hands of environmental legal organizations pursuing accountability for pollution affecting fishing communities and indigenous peoples. Our mapping support is helping communities in the Lendu Plateau and Ituri to formally document over 40,000 hectares of customary land, providing a legal foundation for resisting corporate land acquisition that would previously have gone unchallenged, and this may pave the way for establishing notable numbers of community forests in the region.

Our digital security training program has reached over 110 individual defenders in 2025, most of them women, across Uganda and the DRC. Of those trained, follow-up surveys conducted by our team found that over 90 percent reported a measurable change in their security practices, and more than 60 percent had used specific skills from the training to protect sensitive communications or respond to a threat incident. We supported three defenders in our network who faced targeted digital surveillance, enabling them to identify the intrusion, secure their devices, and continue their work uninterrupted.

Our emergency protection grants have supported over 120 defenders in acute risk situations since 2021. These grants have funded temporary relocation for defenders facing death threats, covered legal fees for defenders facing politically motivated prosecution, and enabled safety planning for women whose domestic situations were weaponized against their activism. Each case aimed not only for immediate safety but also for the defenders to resume their work. The vast majority did.

After the threats, I thought I would have to stop. The support from the network, the legal help, the training, it gave me the means to continue. Two years later, the community I was defending still has its land. That is the result.

Woman, EHRD, and land rights advocate, Albertine Rift, Uganda

In the broader coalition work, Environmental Defenders has supported 28 organizations led by or significantly composed of women to improve their organizational resilience, financial management, and security protocols since 2021. Several of these organizations have gone on to secure independent international funding for the first time, expanding the scope and sustainability of their work beyond our direct partnership. Organizations that began as small community groups are now engaging with UN treaty bodies, submitting shadow reports to the Universal Periodic Review, and representing their communities at international forums on extractive industries and human rights.

None of such efforts is sufficient. The scale of need in both Uganda and the DRC exceeds the resources available to any single organization, highlighting the urgent need for increased collaboration and support among multiple organizations to address these challenges effectively. Defenders continue to be arrested. Forests continue to be cleared. Rivers continue to be polluted. Women continue to bear disproportionate risk. But each of these impacts represents a life changed, a right defended, and a community that knows someone is standing with them. In environments where impunity is the default, that knowledge matters enormously, as it can empower individuals to seek justice and support, fostering resilience and solidarity within affected communities.

The work continues.

The threats facing women as environmental human rights defenders in our region are not easing. The combination of accelerating fossil fuel infrastructure, closing civic space ahead of Uganda’s 2026 elections, ongoing armed conflict in eastern DRC, and the global backlash against women’s rights movements is creating conditions of compounding risk. The defenders we work with know this. They continue anyway.

Lawyers in Hoima are providing pro bono legal support to families challenging compensation processes for EACOP land acquisitions. Journalists in Buliisa are publishing investigations into pollution in Lake Albert at personal and professional risk. Fisherwomen on Lake Edward are documenting the militarization of their sector while feeding their families with shrinking catches. Mappers in Ituri are recording the boundaries of indigenous territories using GPS tools we helped them acquire. Researchers in Mambasa are building evidence files on mercury use in artisanal gold mining that will one day support environmental litigation.

None of them are asking for recognition. Most of them are asking only for the ability to continue doing what they believe must be done. Environmental Defenders’ commitment on this International Women’s Day, and every day that follows, is to make sure they can.

Environmental Defender’s Environmental Human Rights Defenders and Civic Space program operates across Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. To support this work, visit https://watetezi.org/. To report threats against defenders in our network, contact us directly.