Climate change challenges continue to intensify agricultural vulnerabilities across Sub-Saharan African countries (SSA), however, the extent to which gender inclusive governance strengthens agricultural climate resilience remains poorly understood in the region. This macro-panel econometric study explores the relationships between gender inclusive governance, women’s economic empowerment and climate-resilient agricultural outcomes among ten SSA countries from 2005 to 2024 using World Bank data. Climate-resilient agriculture is proxied by irrigated share of agricultural land. Explanatory variables are women's legal rights (Women, Business and the Law index), female secondary enrolment, undernourishment prevalence and female economic participation.

Results indicate that, in the short run women's legal rights significantly raise resilience (a 1% improvement is associated with a 1.19% rise), while in the long run female education becomes significantly positive and women's legal rights, food security and female economic participation turn negative which the authors read as evidence that legal reform without enforcement, and food-security gains achieved through climate-unsustainable means or low-productivity female labour, do not translate into resilience. Country-level short-run results diverge sharply (legal rights positive in Angola, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Zimbabwe; negative in Ethiopia and Senegal), attributed to differing institutional and enforcement capacity. The authors caution the results are associative rather than causal.

The policy implications of the results include prioritising operational rather than symbolic legal reform (women's land tenure security, enforceable inheritance rights, gender-sensitive property rights), treating women's education, climate-smart agriculture training and extension as core national adaptation strategy, embeding food-security programmes within within adaptive production systems, linking social protection, nutrition programs, and climate-resilient farming technologies.