IWD 2025 Accelerate Action Interview with Amina Aboobakar, Director of Strategic Development & Stewardship at The Rivers Trust

This International Women’s Day 2025, as the world rallies around the theme #AccelerateAction, we turn our focus to the intersection of gender equality and environmental change. In this insightful interview, we speak with Amina Aboobakar, Director of Strategic Development & Stewardship at The Rivers Trust, a passionate advocate for both climate action and the empowerment of women.

Amina shares her journey from a young woman navigating a male-dominated industry to becoming a leading force in the water sector, inspiring change both within her organization and beyond. Her work with grassroots communities, her mentorship of underrepresented groups, and her commitment to making the environmental movement more inclusive offer powerful lessons for both climate action and gender parity.

Join us as we dive into Amina's reflections on how we can accelerate progress toward a more inclusive and sustainable future, and why empowering women is critical to overcoming the world’s biggest challenges.

On this International Women's Day, can you tell us which women in your field or in history have inspired you the most and why? 

Wangarĩ Maathai, who was the first African woman to win the Nobel Prize, and really drove the environmental movements in Africa, particularly in Kenya, through the green belt movement, which inspired me to get into the environmental sector. She raised that level, showing that there are parallels between environmental sustainability and resilience to climate change and women's rights. She's inspirational and controversial at the same time, and she really inspired me to think beyond my limitations.

I came across Isatou Ceesay’s work when I did some volunteering work in in Mozambique with local communities to make their soil more sustainable, while also creating green corridors to enable biodiversity, so that was really inspirational. She was somebody that came from a very limited background. Her dad died, and her family wasn't very wealthy growing up, and there was really this sense of living in the third world culture. But that didn't stop her. She's inspirational, an entrepreneur. She's known as the ‘Queen of Recycling’ in The Gambia, and she showed women that you can recycle plastic and make an income out of the products you create, which is absolutely amazing.

Lots of other younger African women have gone on to take on that model, to create and disrupt, if you like, the market by tapping into that model, with things like soil health, how to maximize your yield from your farming practices, really putting women at the heart of the model, which is absolutely inspirational.

There's obviously Muhammad Yunus - he's not a woman - however, he invented the concept of microloans. He showed that women were a safe investment, a low-risk investment opportunity, and if you could show them how to develop business models by giving them microloans, they were the core of growth in the community. And if you empower them, you're empowering their families and their communities to grow. And, actually, they were a safe bet in terms of banks getting their money back.

These examples show that if you put women at the heart of economic growth and environmental resilience, there’s actually a return on investment, it grows and grows. It's absolutely amazing and inspirational.

In terms of personal mentorship, I joined Severn Trent Water when I did my PhD, looking at the water impact on biological treatment – which is the core of how we treat wastewater – and when I joined, there was a change in CEOs, and we got Liv Garfield who is a disruptor, by any other name.

She had to overcome quite a lot of personal and health-related obstacles as a young woman. She comes from a working-class background, and she was told she was going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. And she overcame these barriers to become the youngest blue chip company CEO, and then she joined Severn Trent Water. She’s really inspirational. She's a go getter.

And then finally, Jo Harrison, who was my director at United Utilities Water about ten years ago. She's so passionate. She's an environmentalist at heart, but she balances the pragmatism of ‘we've got to deliver what's right for the environment,’ but also being accountable to the customers who pay the water bills.

So these are two of the inspirational women that work in the water sector that are almost the exception to the rule in the boardroom. And they do it with such strength of character and passion. They continue to be my mentors in terms of how they inspire me to do my job every day.

The theme of IWD this year is #AccelerateAction, underlining the need to increase the momentum in addressing the systemic barriers to gender equality. What (if anything) do you believe needs to be prioritised within your industry?

Water is a male-dominated environment because it relies largely on what traditionally has been a male career pathway, particularly around working the land and engineering, and looking after water assets. We get a lot of civil engineers, a lot of practitioners of nature-based solutions and farmers.

I think what we need is to level the playing field a lot more. I've just come out of a recent bid, looking at how we start to increase capacity and capability around the skill sets that we desperately need to transform our landscapes. How do we make water resilient to the future and emerging threats, not just human impact, but climate change and other things as well? Water has been presented as one of the key risks.

So it was around not just gender necessarily, but we weren't seeing equality and diversity from people from underrepresented groups. But lo and behold, women are part of that underrepresented group. I didn’t know what career pathway to follow, I didn't even know if there was a place for me as a woman and I just kind of bumbled along and eventually got to the job. It took drive and passion and a real deep interest to get into that. So how many women are missing the opportunity?

We found facts and figures around young people and their feelings about climate change too, paralysis, not knowing if they can they have a role to play. The problem is too big, ‘I'm not going to make much of a dent,’ really. And that is stopping young people from coming into this career pathway. Water doesn't qualify as the sort of career that's going to give you a good pension and certainty around wages and so on. So there's a lot of myth busting we need to do, but it was quite surprising to see that one of the big underrepresented groups is women, which shows how much are we missing out on the diversity of thought.

In the first instance, we're thinking about people from deprived backgrounds, young women in particular, making sure that there is something they can aspire to by finding the right role models as I did to inspire them, or because we've made the career pathway a lot easier for them to take. To help them understand that there isn't a one size fits all. That we want the industry to be inclusive and representative, and to make it easier for them to embrace this as a career knowing that their experiences and their ideas have a a role to play in how we're going to make our water environment much more resilient in the future. So that's something that's definitely a focus for us in the next few months.

There are parallels between the need to speed up the rate of progress on achieving gender parity, and the need to increase the urgency of our action on climate and biodiversity loss. Do you see any parallels in how these issues can be addressed? Can any lessons learned from one be applied to the other?

Definitely. They both require systemic change, don't they? They do require that paradigm shift. They need that transformative change and long-term commitment. Making that career pathway clear to different groups and different needs, and getting collaboration across all levels of society. That's what we're missing here. You've got so many hurdles of society from regulation policy to people's lack of trust to land fragmentation. and rivers don't care. They break boundaries.

So how do we follow that example and transpose that around gender equality? How do we make gender equality a lot more like rivers, much more inclusive? It doesn't care how rich you are or if this local authority is bound with that authority or landowner or community. A river will break all of those boundaries. So how do we make that the case for gender equality as well? They're both systemic challenges, and they require us to move away from status quo. There's no other way to do this.

A lot of the time, we try to function with what tools we are given within the constraints of the current system and the current structure. I think we need to break away from that in order to deal with this because you're not going to solve the problems of the future with the same tools that created the problems in the first place.

We need much more inclusive leadership. We need those role models that people can relate to on all kind of levels of society. We get a lot of inspirational First Nations women talking about how water has an identity for them, how it is fundamental and core to how they live as community. I think we can do the same with gender equality.

'Given their position on the frontlines of the climate crisis, women are uniquely situated to be agents of change’ – un.org  What do you see as the role that women leaders play in the fight against the climate and biodiversity emergencies?

That's a big question and it's an interesting question. When we talk about nature and the strength of nature, we talk about mother nature, we talk about feminine force, I think the feminine energy is quite quashed at the moment. So how do we how do empower women and the feminine energy to be part of climate change, the fight against climate change? To look at the problem in a more nurturing maternal way. To make sure that we are thinking of nature as something that is not a ‘nice to have’ but is absolutely essential to our survival, and the survival of our children and future generations.

Nature is not a ‘nice to have,’ it's a ‘must have’. It's absolutely essential to our survival in terms of the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the sustainability of future generations. So in order put this as a ‘must have’ and make sure that the environment and the climate crisis become a priority on anybody's and everybody's agenda, I think women have got a key role to play.

It sounds very holistic as an answer, but I've been thinking about this, and there is a compelling case for the struggle for women's rights and the struggle against the climate crisis being quite parallel to each other.

What are your priorities for climate and biodiversity action in your role as Director of Strategic Development & Stewardship at The Rivers Trust, and do you think your gender plays a role in your outlook?

We are looking at understanding the gap we've got currently around the underrepresented groups. It may be a reason why we're stuck in status quo and not seeing that paradigm shift because the ideas and the views are being recycled. We need to change the debate. We need to change the ideas. And in order to do that, we need diversity of ideas, we need representation from different parts of society. And we've identified women as the underrepresented group in this debate. So that's definitely become a priority in my role.

I'm really passionate about working with grassroot communities and making sure that action starts at that grassroots level. I'd like to make that a priority of my role in the next few months and years, empowering action from the ground up rather than people being passive actors in decisions that are made at levels way separated from their own perspective.

So how do we get away from that and start to get that locally powered action? That sits really well with our purposes at the Rivers Trust. We're an umbrella organization that represents the voices of more than 65 organizations on the ground who are very representative of their own communities, really inspirational organizations. We're here to represent them.

We lead by consent as my CEO likes to say. Making sure that their place-based perspectives are represented in the national debate is part of my role. Making sure they're well funded, well resourced, and that women and girls in particular are coming into this space and having much more of a voice and bringing their ideas and perspectives to how we can save our rivers. Zero percent of our rivers in the UK are achieving good ecological status at the moment. It's a big problem. So whatever we're doing at the moment isn't working. The systemic transformation starts at that local level, and I'd like to do more around that, particularly bringing women and girls on that journey. I’m really passionate about that.

The answer to the second question, does my gender play a role in that? Definitely.

Like I said, women's rights are sometimes the ‘nice to have’. Let's make sure that they're not ‘nice to have’ through leading by example. I'd love to lead by example and inspire women, young women in particular, to be inspired like I was by the women who inspired me to follow my career pathway. So yes, I'm very conscious of my gender all the time. I'm always conscious that I’m the only representative of an ethnic minority and only woman in some of the conversations I’m having. So all of this is very fresh in my head at all times, and I think it defines who I am.

I'm lucky enough to have a fantastic team with me, and the Rivers Trust is a really inspirational movement. I'd like to think that in the last four or five years that I've been here, I've changed things. I've been a bit of a disruptor as my senior likes to remind me in the organisation, and I've been part of that growth.

My perspectives are different because I come from a different background. I've had a different experience precisely because of my gender, I would say. So how can we do more of that? And perhaps I'm the proof that these things do happen when you enable girls and women to come into this sort of role. Because you can just look at a space and just think that's not for me, can't you? So it’s fantastic to see people that you can identify with there already. That's so brilliant.