The roundtable brought together Ms. Daniela Melgarejo (Mexico’s CBD Gender Focal Point), Ms. Bonu Sharifzoda (Tajikistan’s Gender Focal Point) and Ms. Novia Widyaningtyas (Indonesia’s CBD Gender Focal Point) for a direct conversation about moving from commitment to practice.

Ms. Widyaningtyas pointed to formally anchoring gender mainstreaming in Indonesia’s biodiversity strategy (IBSAP 2025–2045), building on constitutional guarantees of women’s environmental rights dating back to 1945 and reflected in the IBSAP’s Strategy 3.2 on mainstreaming gender equity and inclusive participation. Ms. Melgarejo described Mexico’s harder-won lesson: women’s participation is indispensable but not sufficient on its own; it has to come with real decision-making capacity, land access, and the removal of the structural barriers that keep participation from translating into influence. Ms. Sharifzoda credited Tajikistan’s progress to listening first: consultations with women, local communities, youth, scientists, and local authorities surfaced practical barriers that national-level analysis alone had missed women already active in gathering medicinal plants or wild fruit, for instance, but lacking equipment, technical knowledge, or access to finance and markets.

Their advice to countries earlier in the journey converged on the same point: participation without influence isn’t enough. Ms. Melgarejo urged building a gender perspective into policy design from the outset and working across sectors agriculture, rural development, Indigenous affairs, finance, since gender-responsive biodiversity action is not the environmental sector’s job alone. Ms. Sharifzoda’s advice was blunt: listen first, co-create solutions, then write the policy, not the other way around. Ms. Widyaningtyas stressed binding commitments paired with genuine coordination across Indonesia’s many sectors and regions, recommending that bottom-up learning documenting the country’s many local women’s champions be combined with top-down direction rather than relied on alone.

On financing and monitoring, Ms. Sharifzoda pointed to the need for predictable resources to turn Tajikistan’s national roadmap and updated NBSAP (to 2040) into local action, citing new projects linking women’s economic empowerment to conservation, from beekeeping and pollinator conservation to native-fruit-tree nurseries and sustainable harvesting. Ms. Melgarejo agreed that Mexico’s challenge isn’t a lack of policy; the country has made real progress there, but converting existing policy into financed, monitored, institutionally accountable action, with indicators able to show whether inequality is actually shrinking rather than simply reaching more women. Ms. Widyaningtyas named capacity building as Indonesia’s single biggest lever, one that has to reach government, civil society, academia and communities equally and sustainably rather than all at once alongside financing and locally suited monitoring indicators, so that top-down commitments and ground-level knowledge can finally speak the same language.