IEI Pakistan
INNOVATE, EDUCATE, INSPIRE
Saheli First Responders is a grassroots, feminist climate justice model from Gilgit-Baltistan, one of Pakistan’s most climate-vulnerable regions. Young women from glacier-fed valleys lead locally led adaptation and disaster response, organise women and their communities, and win them a place in district disaster governance to claim the resources and loss and damage they’re owed.
Sources: UNDP GLOF-II project brief; Germanwatch Climate Risk Index 2025.
Saheli First Responders work along the Indus, Gilgit, Hunza and Shyok rivers.
IEI’s programme sites across Gilgit-Baltistan. Disaster Response Units are marked in amber.
Saheli First Responders live where disaster strikes. They’re there before help arrives, and they stay for the next season and the one after.
Every community they organise forms a disaster committee where women are half the members, registered with the district disaster authority.
In 2026 the work grows to five more climate-impacted districts, with seven new Saheli First Responders and five women-led disaster risk management groups.
Girls and communities learn what is changing, why, and who is accountable, drawing on indigenous knowledge.
Women and the whole community organise, and disaster committees with women as half their members are registered with the district.
Risk maps, resilience plans, stockpiles and drills are ready before disaster season.
Saheli networks lead relief built on women’s safety, care and dignity.
Communities claim adaptation resources, rehabilitation and loss and damage from the state.
Each year the community reviews the season and plans anew.
Climate finance rarely reaches grassroots women’s organisations. Our 2025 pilot shows what it delivers when it does. With modest funding, eight young women organised more than 1,500 community members, equipped more than 900 women and girls to prepare for disasters, and turned that organising into government action in their valleys.
When climate finance builds grassroots feminist leadership, communities become safer and organised to stay safe.
The model draws on Joan Tronto’s ethics of care and UN Women’s framework for feminist climate justice. Its core claim, from a decade of fieldwork, is that organising women and organising the community are the same process.
Organising women and organising the community are the same process.
The Saheli First Responder Model was developed by Innovate Educate Inspire Pakistan. Please credit IEI Pakistan when sharing it.
Ground rules that protect the dignity and privacy of women and families from cameras and social media in disasters, with consent literacy for communities.
Simple, safe templates so communities hold their own data and steer relief, from the household register to the record of losses.
A baseline drawn from disasters across the Global South on what relief must provide so women are safe.
Direct, flexible, multi-year funding for grassroots feminist leadership, from adaptation and loss and damage funds, feminist funds and donors.
Seats for Saheli First Responders in UNFCCC, Gender Action Plan and adaptation spaces, speaking for mountain women.
Membership of feminist climate justice, locally led adaptation and mountain networks.
Partners to build evidence on grassroots feminist leadership in adaptation and disaster governance.
Innovate Educate Inspire Pakistan is a grassroots feminist organisation working at the intersection of education, gender justice, feminist tech and climate resilience in Gilgit-Baltistan for nearly a decade.