Raymond’s hands look worn from sourcing water for people in his community.
In an image, his left hand is shown draped over a block of wood, reflecting years of hard work and determination as he pushes a cart filled with pails of water through the streets.
The picture was taken by Danelle Fraser, a woman in her thirties who lives in Rose Town, Jamaica. She puts herself, and her family, into the photo essay, revealing how they must wake up early every day and travel to neighbouring communities to fetch water.
The residents of Rose Town, in West Kingston, have been forced to do this for decades after their own water pipes stopped working.
The photos are personal history, depicting the efforts of local people making do without access to a reliable water supply, leaving their community less resilient and more exposed to climate-related shocks.
“It has been over 23 years now since I saw water running through the pipes of my house in Gordon Lane,” writes Danelle in the essay.
Women's lived experience
She is one of six women in Jamaica chosen to take part in the first phase of the Envisioning Resilience initiative in 2023. Led by the NAP Global Network and Lensational, a non-profit social enterprise, the project is designed to enable women to tell their own climate stories through photography.
So far, these stories have ranged from how street vendors are surviving extreme heat to the Rastafari community’s attempts to adapt to drought.
The project, extended to another seven women in 2025, was born out of an understanding that women and girls are more severely impacted by climate change. The UN estimates the crisis is pushing tens of millions more women than men into poverty and food insecurity around the world. Global warming is worsening gender inequalities and making it harder for women to survive and become more resilient to extreme weather events.
“Women are one of many vulnerable groups and one that often lacks agency when it comes to decisions of critical importance such as climate change,” explained Orville Grey, head of secretariat for the NAP Global Network.
“Empowering women to speak to their lived experience [and] capture that through creative communication tools such as photography is a unique way to get them involved in the process of developing adaptation plans that are fit for purpose and inclusive,” he added.
The power of individual action
Starting in 2021, Envisioning Resilience initially ran pilots in Ghana and Kenya before expanding to Jamaica in 2023. The initiative formed a new partnership with GirlsCARE, a feminist climate justice organisation, based in the Caribbean country. Ayesha Constable, founder of GirlsCARE, told Climate Home News that participants on the programme are selected through a targeted call shared across their national network.
“We intentionally focus on reaching young women and girls from vulnerable communities, including rural and inner city areas,” she said. “The selection process... ensures a cohort that is both engaged and reflective of the communities most impacted by climate change,” she added.
The group goes through a training programme of between four to six months, learning professional photography skills through workshops and individual assignments. Participants are also provided with policy training and a grounding in how their stories are connected to wider climate concerns.
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"We sometimes say if you only had one day to tell this story, what words would you use, what actions would you take to do so?" explained Lydia Wanjiku, CEO of Lensational.
Envisioning Resilience offers a rare opportunity for women from different backgrounds to tell these stories, reach a wider audience, and gain valuable skills along the way. The photo essays are collected online and the stories have received widespread media attention.
“Ultimately, we want participants to embrace their own agency, and recognise the power of individual and collective action in driving change, and to carry forward the principles of justice, care and equity in whatever paths they choose,” added Constable of GirlsCARE.
From pilots to policy
The wider intention in Jamaica is that the photo essays influence the development and implementation of new climate policies. When the stories are complete, they are shared in a dialogue that brings the newly trained photographers together with adaptation policymakers.
According to Angie Dazé, director of gender equality and social inclusion at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), the policy dialogues "flip the script, allowing the conversation to be led by the women and their stories, placing the government representatives in listening mode”.
Lensational is seeing interest from some countries in using the programme as a core part of national policy processes. The essays have validated some issues that government departments have known about, while others have shone a light on new areas of concern.
Women must be a starting point, not an afterthought, for adaptation
“We have really tried to embed policy and storytelling elements into the training, ensuring the projects are more targeted and aligned with what policymakers are working on," added Wanjiku. The intention is to support women to articulate their stories with policy concepts in mind, broadening their reach and impact.
The approach seems to be paying off in Jamaica. Wayne Robertson, permanent secretary at Jamaica's Ministry of Water, Environment and Climate Change, said the initiative had “meaningfully supported the Jamaican government in strengthening climate adaptation policy development by bridging the gap between technical planning and lived community experience”.
He added that the photo essays are supporting Jamaica’s National Adaptation Plan process and contributing to existing efforts by reinforcing the need for “inclusive, locally informed and participatory adaptation planning” and allowing for “a more people-centred understanding of climate risk.”
Jamaica’s growing climate impacts
Jamaica is a natural choice to run an initiative of this kind. As a small island developing state in the Caribbean, it is vulnerable to rising sea levels, coastal erosion and intense cyclones and hurricanes. A 2024 USAID assessment found tha
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