Women are disproportionately affected by climate change. They are also, consistently, underrepresented in the engineering profession tasked with responding to it. FeME was built on the premise that these two facts are connected — and that both can be changed.
The network itself reflects that commitment. FeME’s leadership team is majority women. Its co-leads and specialists all bring expertise across engineering, systems thinking, environmental science, education, and social science. The network was conceived, designed, and is being led by women working at the intersection of climate, equity, and engineering practice.
That isn’t incidental. It’s what the network is for.
The same logic shapes how FeME’s seed funds were designed: open to lived-experience leaders, supportive of caring responsibilities, willing to fund individuals and small organisations rather than only institutions. The result is a cohort that looks different from most research funding portfolios. Across 19 projects spanning four continents, women are leading the majority of the work — often in the communities most directly affected by the climate-engineering challenges they’re addressing.
When you design funding to remove structural barriers, more women lead. When more women lead, the work goes to the places that need it most.
Here are ten projects in the 2026 cohort where that’s playing out.
Climate data, in farmers’ hands
Sarah Owuor is training 30 women smallholder farmers in Machakos County, Kenya, to record and interpret rainfall and crop data using offline mobile tools. The premise is simple: women farmers are already observing changes in rainfall, planting seasons, and crop performance. What they lack isn’t insight — it’s a way to turn observation into evidence that informs the next season’s decisions.
Monica Katanu Nyamu is leading a parallel project in Machakos, training 25 women and youth in organic waste valorisation. Her team includes five paid community co-facilitators — informal waste pickers and single mothers — who bring lived expertise to workshop delivery rather than being treated as participants in someone else’s research.
Engineering done differently
Hellena Nuwagaba leads an all-women team in Uganda co-designing a smart solar cooking and lighting system with women smallholder farmers in Kakumiro District. The team brings engineering, financial systems, and community engagement expertise. The project treats women farmers as co-creators, not beneficiaries.
Luz Dehni Acosta Moyado with Eduardo Walerstein Frenkel and a team of environmental engineering students at La Uni in Mexico City, is running a community lab with the Mujeres de la Tierra collective in Milpa Alta. The project will co-design circular solar technology for the school, with the women as decision-makers about which technology and how.
Listening as a method
Dr Rosephine Georgina Rakotonirainy at the University of Cape Town is leading work on humanitarian planning under climate stress, with discovery visits to communities in Madagascar or Chimanimani, Zimbabwe. Her team will work with women, youth, and elders as knowledge holders — translating lived experience of accessibility, vulnerability, and equity into the parameters that shape decision-support models.
Dr Zama Mahlobo at Stellenbosch University is bridging academic and indigenous knowledge across KwaZulu-Natal’s wetlands and Limpopo’s drylands. Her project draws on Ubuntu Dialogues methodologies and prioritises voices of women, youth, farmers, and elders — building community-led safety strategies for places where roads, farms, and livelihoods are increasingly disrupted by climate shocks.
Data, advocacy, and power
Dr Ronda Zelezny-Green, with the LauncHER Engineers’ Hub in Zambia, is delivering blended training to women engineers in Kitwe and across Zambia’s Copperbelt — equipping them to transform climate data into compelling advocacy. The premise is direct: when women engineers in Zambia can shape the narrative around climate, they don’t just inform policy. They shift power.
Vanessa Ngwi Fongwa is working in Bamenda, Cameroon, teaching rural youth to document infrastructure failure using smartphones and simple engineering observation. The project — The Visual Resilience Archive — starts from what people can already see and already have. The knowledge exists. The method makes it visible.
Lived experience as a starting point
Mhairi Sime at Heriot-Watt University is exploring local energy market structures to address fuel poverty in Bressay and Sandwick, Shetland. She’s an early-career researcher from a Scottish island community herself, with first-hand experience of living with fuel poverty in an area abundant in renewable energy resources. Her project treats Shetland residents as experts in their own energy system.
Knowledge rooted in place
Clyornique Durrant is co-designing a solar climate garden with the Fancy community in St Vincent and the Grenadines — integrating Indigenous knowledge and creating a living classroom at Fancy Primary School. The project holds several things at once: renewable energy, ecological knowledge, education, and a community’s relationship with its own land. It’s a model of what engineering looks like when it’s built from the inside out.
What this pattern says
Across these ten projects, the women leading the work aren’t an exceptional case to be celebrated separately. They’re a substantial part of what the cohort actually is. They’re working on what they know, with communities they’re connected to, in ways that take lived experience seriously as technical expertise.
That’s what FeME means by inclusive engineering — not just engineering that includes women, but engineering led by women whose lives are shaped by the climate-engineering challenges they’re addressing. The seed fund hasn’t created this. But it’s tried to fund in a way that makes it possible.
Marking International Women in Engineering Day
If you’re in Edinburgh on Tuesday, 23 June, FeME is collaborating with The Molly Fergusson Initiative, CeeD Scotland, and the Royal Society of Chemistry on an event to mark International Women in Engineering Day.
The afternoon features a keynote from Dr Nina Baker OBE, exploring 100 years of women in engineering through the stories of women whose work helped shape the profession. A panel of engineers from across industry and academia, facilitated by CeeD Scotland, will share their journeys, challenges, and the moments that shaped their careers. The event closes with a “Letter to Your Younger Self” workshop — with selected letters shared with Edinburgh schools to reach young people considering engineering.
Whether you’re a student, early-career engineer, experienced professional, or simply interested in the future of the field — it’s a chance to connect, reflect, and hear stories that matter.