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As we kept returning to villages across Karnataka, something became starkly clear — the water was vanishing.

On one such visit to Malur in Kolar district, our co-founder Uthara, met Ajji ( grandmother in Kannada). She spoke with the quiet urgency of someone who had witnessed her environment change before her eyes. Her concerns were layered: women in her village had to walk increasingly long distances to fetch water. Many were now paying for water that had once been freely available. Around the lake — once a source of life — garbage had accumulated, and the water was no longer safe.

Ajji wasn’t just mourning a past. She was imagining a future. She told me: “We know this is happening because of human action. But why wait for someone else to fix it? We want to take charge.”

That conversation stayed with us. It wasn’t just about water. It was about dignity, agency, survival, and how deeply climate change is lived — especially by women.

In rural India, climate change is not an abstract idea. It is a daily reality that shows up as parched lands, failing crops, food scarcity, unpaid labour, and rising costs. For women like Ajji, climate change is not just an environmental issue — it’s an economic, social, and gendered crisis.

Women are disproportionately affected by climate change. They typically have less access to information and resources, limited decision-making powers, and fewer opportunities for wage work. During food scarcity, they eat last and least. They bear the burden of unpaid caregiving and face economic risks because of poverty and limited financial autonomy. Their lives are intimately tied to land, water, and waste — the very systems that are under stress.

Buzz Women’s 2023–24 Impact Assessment highlights this starkly:

• 47% of women identified themselves as homemakers — often underestimating their economic contributions.

• 94% of households have Below Poverty Line (BPL) ration cards, with an average household income of just approx. $203 (₹17,447) per month .

• Only 14% of women reported making household decisions independently, while 37% were not involved at all.

• 62% of menstruating women trained by Buzz use sanitary napkins, but 43% of menstrual waste is still disposed of by burning — further entangling health, environment, and gender injustice.

These statistics are not just numbers. They are insights into the everyday burdens that climate change places on women, often hidden in plain sight.

Ajji’s voice, and many others like hers, led us to ask: “How do we enable women to lead the creation of sustainable livelihoods and become climate resilient?”

This question gave birth to Buzz Green — our climate action program designed not as a top-down intervention, but as a grassroots movement led by rural women themselves.

We began with conversations — what some might call focus group discussions, but for us, they were deep listening sessions rooted in trust. Women shared that their soil was less fertile than ever before, their crops failing, their livelihoods threatened. These weren’t isolated concerns — they were shared struggles, and they demanded collective responses.

From these community-led insights, we built our Level 1 curriculum with a participatory, Freirean approach. At the heart of Buzz Green are women leaders we call Green Motivators — climate action agents from within the community.

Green Motivators are local women trained by Buzz Women to lead climate action within their communities. They undergo a six-month training program to understand the causes and effects of climate change and learn practical adaptation and mitigation strategies tailored to their local contexts. As trusted community members, they lead by example—adopting eco-friendly practices in their own homes and farms, and inspiring others through visible change. Many begin with small, manageable steps like setting up backyard kitchen gardens using recycled wastewater. These low-cost, high-impact initiatives not only supplement family nutrition but also build confidence and demonstrate the tangible benefits of sustainable practices. As they see success, Green Motivators expand their efforts and encourage others to follow suit—fostering a ripple effect of climate awareness and action across villages. Their role is voluntary and deeply rooted in lived experience, making them powerful agents of grassroots change. .

Green Motivators bring together women, men, elders, and children to conduct Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs) — open gatherings where communities name the climate issues they face and collectively set “green goals” that are locally meaningful and achievable. They might start kitchen gardens irrigated with recycled water, shift to eco-friendly farming, or adopt sustainable waste disposal methods.

A Buzz Field Associate supports these efforts, but the knowledge and leadership come from the community itself. Because climate change looks different in every geography, it must be tackled by those who live and know it best.

Buzz Green is a response to the lived experiences of rural women. It’s about recognising that climate action isn’t only about big policy shifts or global negotiations. It begins in homes, farms, kitchens, and lakes — with women like Ajji who refuse to wait.

In 2012, we gave ourselves the goal of reaching 20,000 women by 2020. It seemed like a big goal at that time and sounded rhythmic. We ended up reaching 20,000 women in 2017, because we found the support we required from all the stakeholders involved. Then the outreach target went from 100,000 to 1 million to 10 million over the years. We set these goals for ourselves as women gave us confidence to reach out more and dream bigger. 

At Buzz Women, our journey of growth, scale and depth has been both organic and intentional, driven by the knowledge that we are too small and the need is too large and by the courage showcased by the women to change the systems around them. It isn’t just about expanding Buzz Women; it’s about amplifying our vision of enabling women to use their voice to craft their lives and lead change in their communities.

We believe that for scale to be adapted by others and for the depth of impact to be taken seriously, the growth has to be at a certain critical mass. We decided to use the saturation approach of going to every village in the geography, so that there is scaffolding from a faction to prevent the suppression of the emerging new system. Rather than one woman being enabled to be a leader, we enabled her to support and catalyse other women like her so that they unite to shape the emergent system collectively. In the initial days the approach to growth was only through the growth of the organisation until we made our projections and realised we cannot do it as an organisation. So the additional approach to what was already being done by reaching 10%-20% of women in a village was to nurture the community anchor woman to enable other women and bring them in as part of the scaffolding. This is the only way the growth of the Buzz movement can and will be sustainable.

Like our last article which busted the myth about village women volunteering,here, another myth got busted – the quality of intervention and impact will go down if not delivered by the organisations trainers. How do we know this? In the last 2 years, 20,000 women have been trained by the community anchors and our impact assessment report shows that the changes in knowledge, skills and attitudes of women towards financial literacy is at par or even better than when the women are trained by the Buzz trainers. 

It is not about the growth of the INSTITUTION, but the growth of the IDEA that women can craft their own lives using their inner power. This implies that Buzz is transforming from an NGO into a movement, owned and operated by thousands of women around the world. And that we are mere catalysts in that.We will reach 10 million women, maybe globally or maybe just in Karnataka. We are keeping it open for the women to decide how fast and far the growth should be. We will reach less than 20% of that number directly and the rest will be reached by the community anchor women – they’ll create a powerful ripple of change!

Scaling an organization’s impact doesn’t necessarily mean growing its infrastructure, staff, or geographical reach. Instead, for us it meant scaling or rather replicating the idea—ensuring flexibility, adaptability, and sustainability while fostering a community-driven path to growth. We see replication as expanding impact through community ownership. What does this look like for us?

A Community-Led Model – Our approach is rooted in the principle of community ownership. We realized that women trust and learn best from their peers. This insight led to the creation of the Gelathi model, where trained women deliver Self-Shakti training programs to others in their villages. This peer-led, trust-based approach ensures that knowledge reaches the remaining 90% of women in a community. 

By nurturing local women to become trainers and mentors, we not only expand our reach but also strengthen the fabric of the community. These Gelathis become role models, demonstrating what’s possible when women are given the tools for change. As they deliver training programs, they create a ripple effect, ensuring that the impact of our work extends far beyond the initial participants

Communities full of opportunities

Our long term goal is that every community is full of opportunities for women and girls. This is why we structurally embed women’s education, leadership and entrepreneurship in communities. The combination of educating a critical mass of women in a community, training & coaching the democratically chosen local women leaders, fostering large scale female entrepreneurship and enabling women to take climate action transforms  the ‘social soil’ in each community. In this way it becomes the ‘new normal’ in the community (for women, men and children) to see women as leaders, entrepreneurs and changemakers in their communities.

Beyond Karnataka: Buzz Academy Fellowship

While our roots are in Karnataka, the demand for our model has grown across India and beyond. The Buzz Academy Fellowship was developed to train grassroots leaders from other states, enabling them to replicate Buzz Women’s model in their local contexts. The Fellowship emphasizes adaptation, allowing each leader to tailor the program to the unique needs and cultural nuances of their community.

The Buzz approach to facilitate sustainable communities has proven highly effective in other countries through our franchise models. By decentralizing leadership and fostering local ownership, we’ve created a scalable model that maintains its core principles while being adaptable to diverse settings. We want to build on this through the Fellowship to ensure that our vision is not confined by geographical boundaries but becomes a movement that transcends them.

A significant challenge for many social initiatives is financial sustainability. To address this, we’ve embraced a peer-led model supported by the Shakti Fund. This fund, fueled by contributions from communities, reduces reliance on external resources. It embodies the spirit of ownership and accountability, with women investing in their own journeys and that of their peers.

This financial model not only sustains our scaling efforts but also reinforces the core message of a self-sustaining movement. Women are active contributors to a larger mission and not just recipients.

Buzz Women’s mission is about more than individuals; it’s about creating a movement, enabling transnational solidarity. Our journey has shown us that scaling impact doesn’t require building a larger organization. It requires building stronger communities. Creating an ecosystem where every woman has the opportunity to thrive should be the practice.