New virtual resource hub and website on gender in food systems
The CGIAR GENDER Platform’s new virtual resource hub offers evidence-based methods, tools and insights that enable ourselves and others to put gender equality at the heart of food systems research and development. Explore now.
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Gender research rightfully takes center stage in new One CGIAR strategy
Gender equality is rightfully elevated to a top priority in a new research and innovation strategy launched by CGIAR. The strategy will guide CGIAR over the next decade in its efforts to produce science and innovations that transform food, land and water systems during the climate crisis. Read more.
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Save the date: Gender conference on October 12—15, 2021
The CGIAR GENDER Platform and Wageningen University & Research will co-host a virtual conference for researchers committed to advancing gender research and equality in agriculture and food systems.
More news to follow soon.
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Video: Reach, benefit, empower or transform?
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The Reach-Benefit-Empower-Transform framework can help you understand whether your research-for-development project is on track to achieve gender equality goals. Read more.
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Gender research news from across CGIAR
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Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world
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This year, International Women’s Day celebrates the important leadership roles of women and girls in shaping a more equal future and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Women farmers have, as always, made great contributions to feeding the world during the past year. In Zimbabwe, Emelda Ngwarati, who grows vitamin A-biofortified orange maize and iron-biofortified beans, won top prize for her harvest at the Zimbabwe Agricultural Show.
In Uganda, Nabirye Scovia, also growing biofortified iron beans, managed to get a super harvest, while Annet Draleru’s life changed when she started training other women and youth on how to grow nutritious crops. Just like growing orange-fleshed sweet potato enabled Chebit Morunyaga, in northern Uganda, to buy her first phone.
During the pandemic, women’s income became the lifeline for slum households in major Indian cities. But, challenges abound: In India and Nepal, women’s already low access to formal agricultural extension was further reduced, and in the Upper West Region of Ghana, COVID-19 disrupted information flows, threatening rural women’s climate resilience.
Researchers have worked to increase women’s resilience by providing direct access to improved seed, financing, information and more. Building networks and increasing access to markets have also helped. In Myanmar, scientists recommend that efforts to build back from the pandemic pay explicit attention to gender discrepancies to avoid unintentional harm.
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Strengthening health and nutrition
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Stark gender inequalities are both a cause and an outcome of unsustainable food systems with unjust food access, consumption and production. For example, aquatic foods are increasingly recognized as important, but fisheries and aquaculture do not equally benefit women and men.
In Bangladesh, training mothers on nutrition and hygiene, combined with giving them planting materials of nutritionally beneficial crops, helped ensure nutritious diets for young children. Elsewhere in the country, a hit children’s TV series is promoting fish-based nutrition and gender equality.
Meanwhile, in India, communities have leveraged locally available nutritious dryland crops to support the economic independence of tribal women. Evidence from Rwanda and elsewhere indicate that iron-biofortified beans can help shield women of childbearing age from high risks of iron deficiency and anemia.
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Boosting climate resilience
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Climate change is expected to exacerbate pre-existing gender inequalities, and that’s why innovative and equitable climate adaptation and mitigation strategies will be needed.
For example, a new study in Tanzania shows that men work less during periods of heat stress, while women work more. Likewise, seasonal forecasting has been demonstrated as a good option to reduce the effects of climate variability, but its use and benefits may be different for women and men.
In India, a climate-smart village program in 1,000 villages tests and validates technologies and practices to achieve climate-resilient communities. At the same time, in Bangladesh, vulnerable to floods and sea-level rise, women’s empowerment can expand crop diversification and be used as a climate adaptation strategy.
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Creating opportunities in markets and value chains
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As communities transition from sustenance to commercial farming, there is a need to better understand the gender dynamics underlying women’s market participation to avoid worsening gender inequalities. For example, introducing new technologies often increases the number of tasks on farms, and the new tasks usually fall to women.
A new study from Zambia observed significant differences in women and men’s ability to purchase maize. In Nepal, it is the male-dominated outmigration that impacts the work and responsibilities of women and men in rural communities. In drylands, migration-related agricultural feminization is influenced by gendered, generational, socioeconomic and sociocultural factors.
Looking to Papua New Guinea, research indicates that families feeling relatively poor increase their support for women in the workplace—but men still don’t want them making household decisions. Along the same lines, a recent study shows that some aspects of gender attitudes may change as poor communities’ economic conditions fluctuate. Elsewhere in the Pacific, policy analysis finds that gender equality commitments are diluted in the small-scale fisheries sector. However, women leaders in African aquatic food value chains are joining forces to understand and overcome COVID-19 challenges.
Scientists work with women in Myanmar to enhance their technical and entrepreneurial skills and secure their livelihoods. Progress is also being made in Tanzania, where a new fresh bean grain is rising in popularity, creating new business opportunities for youth and women. Likewise, in Peru, inclusive dialogues inspire young people and women to pursue careers cultivating high-quality varieties of cacao.
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Governing land and landscapes
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Given their different roles, responsibilities and access to and control of resources, the costs and benefits of land restoration are likely to differ for men and women.
In Indonesia, national forest tenure reform policies and programs still give little consideration to gender equality and women’s empowerment. There is no one single approach to reforming forest tenure practices to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment, but a recently published practitioner’s guide offers insights on how to promote gender-responsive forest tenure reform in community-based forest regimes.
Although forestry is widely considered a masculine domain, most literature on gender and development focuses on the role of women, not men; a new book addresses the gap. Trade in non-timber forest products in the Congo Basin is a source of cash income for women and men, but gender-disaggregated data on the benefits remains poorly captured. Overall, forest-dependent women are particularly vulnerable to the socio-economic effects of COVID-19, but are playing key roles in their households’ and communities’ responses to the pandemic.
In Mali, forest reforms and rural woodfuel markets managed by cooperatives created opportunities for women and young men to increase their economic autonomy, while a seedbank run by Maasai women in Kenya provides livelihoods opportunities and helps restore degraded rangelands.
Finally, the Ramsar Convention, on the wise use of wetlands, has been updated to recognize the need for balanced participation of both women and men.
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Designing crops and technologies
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Collecting and understanding gender-differentiated trait preferences is critical to inform demand-led breeding priorities and investment decisions.
Ensuring that innovations in roots, tubers and bananas, for example, improve food security and nutrition requires understanding women and men’s different expectations. It is, overall, very important to consider gender dynamics when developing and releasing new crop varieties. Women have a very specific knowledge, which is often different than that of men, just as women and men might be growing the same crop but with different goals.
In Uganda, households’ uptake of new orange-fleshed sweet potato is more likely on jointly owned plots where a woman is the primary decision-maker. Based on research in the Togo Hills borderland, scientists contend that in this time of crises, plant breeding must be participatory. At the same time, a new study explores whether modern maize storage structures, aimed to reduce post-harvest losses, offer equal benefits to women and men farmers in Kenya, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Also in seed sector development, gender considerations must be incorporated to enable women and vulnerable groups to benefit. Of note, for example, is that integrating gender in the potato seed system in Georgia is hampered by women’s limited say in decisions and limited access to finance.
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Driving science forward and building capacity
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To continue research on gender and water systems despite COVID-19-related travel restrictions, researchers in Nepal engaged with local stakeholders through radio dialogues, phone interviews and online calls, even though reaching women over the phone comes with its own challenges. Relatedly, recent studies highlight the importance of interviewing both spouses (as opposed to either a wife or a husband), since their responses to the same questions often differ.
Virtual training resources are becoming increasingly valuable: A new engagement module aims to show young people how an international research organization can narrow gender inequalities in rice farming, despite the pandemic. Another training video highlights how gender equality hinges on women and men farmers’ awareness of their own gender norms and their willingness to change, while a third set of videos aims to increase gender awareness among potato farmers.
A new report provides recommendations on how to enhance gender insights in future research, including by renewing focus on gender analysis and gender components in nutrition.
Also in science, women—and men—leaders have shown the way toward recovery. A few highlights include new Director General at ICRISAT, Dr. Jacqueline d’Arros Hughes, who has urged researchers to look at projects with a gender lens to understand how they affect women and men, and IWMI’s Dr. Soumya Balasubramanya, who has been appointed Chair of the International Committee for Women in Agricultural Economics (ICWAE). Gender-inclusive participation in the sciences allows both women and men to fully benefit from advancements in science and technology.
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CGIAR at 50: Innovations for gender equality
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For 50 years, CGIAR and partners have delivered critical science and innovation to feed the world and end inequality. This month, we highlight CGIAR innovations that have broken down barriers to gender equality and built stronger food systems for all.
Explore innovations
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Follow the conversation on @CGIARgender and #GenderInAg.
Sign up for our online discussion group to participate in exchanges about GENDER and related resources and opportunities.
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Thank you
Thank you to CGIAR research centers, programs and platforms that contributed to this newsletter: AfricaRice, Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), International Potato Center (CIP), International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), International Water Management Institute (IWMI), WorldFish. Also to the CGIAR Research Programs on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS); Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA); Livestock; Maize; Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM); Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB); Wheat as well as HarvestPlus.
Photo credits from the top: Sara Fajardo/CIP; Prashanth Vishwanathan/CCAFS; Sara Fajardo/CIP; C. Schubert/CCAFS; Neil Palmer; Neil Palmer/CCAFS; Neil Palmer/CIAT; WorldFish; Md Masudur Rahaman/WorldFish; Cecilia Schubert/CCAFS; Swathi Sridharan/ICRISAT; Cooke Vieira/CIFOR; IRRI; Floriane Clement/IWMI.
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