I went into the Africa Climate Collaborative program, Mastercard Foundation’s initiative to get more young Africans, especially young women, working on climate resilience, expecting to learn about climate. Which I did. What I didn’t expect was to spend so much of it thinking about gender instead, and to come out realizing those two things were never actually separate topics to begin with.

The thought I couldn’t shake

Somewhere in the middle of the program, sitting with everything I was learning about climate resilience, my mind kept drifting to something nobody was actually presenting on a slide, how differently a single disaster lands depending on gender roles. The more I sat with it, the more specific and uncomfortable it got.

After a flood recedes, someone has to clean the house, salvage what’s left, boil water, keep children fed and clothed in the wreckage of a routine. In most households that’s still the woman, and it doesn’t pause just because everything around her collapsed. During a drought, it’s often the children who inherit the consequence in the most literal, physical way, walking further and further each week as the nearest water source dries up, sometimes for hours, sometimes instead of going to school, and that’s before you even get to what happens to a child crossing unfamiliar terrain alone to fetch water a family needs to survive.

And then the part that actually stopped me: in a flood, the expectation is that men will be the ones to go in after people, pull out the vulnerable, the elderly, the people who can’t get themselves to safety. Except plenty of men can’t swim either. Nobody ever asked them to prove it before handing them that expectation; the assumption itself is the danger, “strong” standing in for “capable,” when the two aren’t the same thing at all. Some of those men don’t come back. And it runs the other direction too, a mother searching for a missing child in floodwater, going in after them without a second thought and without ever having learned to swim, because the alternative, not going in, isn’t a real option for her, no matter what the water can do to her. Both of those are the same failure, really: a role someone is handed by default, with no actual assessment of whether they’re equipped for it, and the water doesn’t care that the assumption was wrong.

Why this stuck with me longer than I expected

I came into this program mostly thinking about climate the way I think about most problems, as a systems question. Emissions, adaptation infrastructure, resource allocation. What actually got under my skin was realizing that “vulnerability” isn’t one line item that says “women and children,” the way I’d half-absorbed it from somewhere without examining it. It’s a set of very specific roles, assigned by default, that put different people in different kinds of danger for different reasons, a boy walking an unsafe route he shouldn’t have to walk, a man drowning trying to live up to an assumption nobody checked, a mother going into water she can’t survive because turning back isn’t something she’s allowed to consider. None of those are the same risk. They all get flattened into the same word.

That’s a very unglamorous, very important distinction, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that’s easy to skip if you only ever look at climate data in aggregate, as death counts, evacuation rates, damage estimates. Every one of those numbers is made of individual people who were standing in a very specific, very gendered spot when the disaster arrived.

Where this leaves me

I don’t work in climate policy, and I’m not about to pretend a few weeks in this program made me an expert on gender studies. But it did plant a specific, nagging question that I haven’t been able to put down since: most of my actual technical work is in machine learning, and I keep asking myself, is anyone building the disaster-response tools that actually account for this? Not just “predict where the flood will hit,” but “predict, and act on, who inside that flood zone is going to have the hardest time responding to it, and why.” I don’t think that question has a tidy answer yet. I’ve got a whole separate post brewing on an idea I want to actually try building around it.