Intersecting Crises: Climate Change, Gender, and Socioeconomic Barriers to Women's Empowerment in South Sudan (2021–2026)

This original research investigates the compounding effects of climate change and socioeconomic structures on women’s empowerment in South Sudan from 2021 to 2026. It addresses a critical gap by examining how intersecting crises—environmental degradation, entrenched gender norms, and economic fragility—impede women’s leadership, entrepreneurship, and access to sustainable energy. Employing a sequential mixed-methods design, the study integrates longitudinal climate trend analysis with primary data from surveys and in-depth interviews with 150 women entrepreneurs and community leaders across three states prone to flooding and drought. The findings demonstrate that escalating climate shocks, particularly catastrophic flooding between 2021 and 2024, have systematically eroded women’s economic assets, disproportionately increased their labour burdens, and restricted mobility, thereby curtailing business operations and civic participation. A novel, critical contribution is the empirical identification of a direct linkage between unreliable, expensive energy access and enterprise failure, with over 70% of respondents citing energy poverty as a primary constraint. The analysis contends that prevailing climate adaptation policies in South Sudan remain gender-blind, overlooking these structural barriers. It concludes that transformative empowerment necessitates integrating gender-responsive sustainable energy solutions and targeted economic support into national climate action frameworks, thereby enabling women’s full agency in building community resilience.