Opinion: Wanted - Women’s empowerment guidelines to fight food crisis
Voluntary women’s empowerment guidelines can offer best practices, lessons learned and recommendations for national policies. Read more.
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Explainer: Increasing women’s involvement in the workforce can improve dietary diversity
When women are more involved in the workforce, the dietary diversity of their households improves. Read more.
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Explainer: Governing bodies of global food organizations are lacking in gender and geographic diversity
Only 2 percent of board seats are occupied by women from low-income countries, revealing huge disparities. Read more.
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EnGendering Data: Testing tools to measure women’s empowerment in fisheries and aquaculture
Measuring the impact of fisheries and aquaculture projects on women's empowerment and nutrition requires a reliable data collection tool. Read more.
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EnGendering Data: Gender research tools help design CGIAR projects for nutrition outcomes
Using these tools fosters better understanding of gender dynamics, fills research gaps and helps measure impacts. Read more.
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New GENDER working paper
A Review of Measures and Indicators for Assessing the Relationship Between Women’s Empowerment and Nutrition. Read more.
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Gender research news from across CGIAR
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How to ensure climate justice for all
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The severity of the climate challenge, CGIAR researchers argue, requires a change in the climate response, from an incremental to a more far-reaching and radical transformative one. Experts speaking at COP27 called for a major paradigm shift, underscoring that Global North countries’ pledges to offset emissions by planting trees “definitely aren’t going to work for the Indigenous Peoples and local communities and farmers living on rural lands.” This speaks to the risks that new investments in REDD+ pose to forest-dependent communities, including Indigenous Peoples. Finally, despite progress made during COP27, the newly established fund for Loss and Damage was called “an empty glass waiting to be filled”.
Promising climate solutions, however, could include investing in future-proofing our landscapes, communities and economies from natural disasters. Also, securing land tenure for women and girls can promote climate change resilience and advance sustainable economic justice and rights. Women are especially vulnerable to climate change, which is why research on the resilience of aquatic food systems must take gender and intersectional dimensions into account. In fact, improving gender-inclusive climate-risk management innovations is essential for the transformation of equitable aquatic food systems at scale. Overall, the adoption of climate-resilient practices is unlikely to reach scale if gender is not explicitly considered.
A recent event in Uganda highlighted the potential of targeted video-based extension to boost women’s adoption of key climate-smart technologies. In Malawi, a study found differences in the adoption and use of climate-smart agriculture technologies between women and men. Lastly, a study on how extreme weather affects African farmers’ work found that droughts and heat waves reduce the number of hours worked by both women and men, but the reduction of hours worked is lessened by 40 percent if farmers are women.
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Designing crops and technologies
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Effectively countering threats to plant health requires implementation of gender-responsive and socially inclusive integrated disease and pest management. Interventions to encourage plant health practices need to consider gender, such as by holding trainings at times when women can attend.
When it comes to gendered trait preferences, a review of cases from across Asia and Africa has revealed that the differences in preferences between women and men are more complex than previously thought. In Ethiopia, for example, an increase in the role of the woman spouse in a farming household's decisions is positively associated with the uptake of rust-resistant wheat varieties. A new special issue highlights influential gender research on maize cropping systems, including differences in women and men farmers’ preferences for maize traits and varieties.
Turning to aquatic systems, Mola, a nutrient-dense fish species, has the potential to play a significant role in food-based strategies to address malnutrition among pregnant women. The inclusion of small fish-based nutrition in the diets of women, especially pregnant and lactating women, will lead to an increase in aquatic foods consumption and a reduction in loss and waste. Off the coast of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, 200 women farmers were trained to cultivate seaweed, a low-carbon source of aquatic foods, resulting in them being the largest contributor to the nation's seaweed production.
Finally, accelerating the use of digital innovations can support inclusive, equitable and sustainable transformation of food, land and water systems. In Mali, for example, 120 women service providers were trained in the effective use of the RiceAdvice app, resulting in early 20,440 women and youth farmers adopting recommended technologies. BREEDBASE is a new database that has been instrumental in achieving cassava breeding goals and supporting innovative gender-responsive approaches and initiatives to identify users and their preferences.
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Changing norms and institutions
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Social norms and gender-based labor division mean women are often confined to set roles in agriculture, leading to exclusion and a lack of control – but CGIAR researchers are addressing multiple aspects of gender inequality, including through training. For example, training women leaders to be extension agents can encourage other women to adopt agricultural innovations. This is happening in Guyana, where a conservation trainer and role model is working to inspire, empower and build the leadership capacity of young Indigenous women to become environmental leaders.
In India, a study of non-timber forest products investigated how social and gender norms may affect solutions for more sustainable collection of fruit, nuts and other forest products. Meanwhile, in Mozambique, women and men both noted a subtle change in norms as a result of the commercialization of sweetpotato. In Northern Uganda, rural youth’s participation in sweetpotato production and agribusiness is a product of the intersection of broader contexts, including individual circumstances as well as individual and collective agency.
Norms can be powered by myths, and simplified understandings of the 'feminization of agriculture' persist as myths in the literature – a new paper unravels them and digs out kernels of truth. Along the same lines, a better understanding of 'youth' as a transitional condition can reveal meaningful, youth-inclusive ways to engage youth in sustainable agricultural intensification.
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Understanding gender in landscapes
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Gender relations shape women’s and men’s access to, use and management of land and other natural resources, including ownership, tenure and user rights to land and forests. For example, a field experiment in rural Kenya, using public good and extraction games, indicated that gender composition affects group decision-making and is therefore important for community-based natural resource management.
Also in Kenya, research indicates that participatory rangeland management has increased women’s voice and agency in governance of rangeland resources and reinforced women's agency in pastoral rangeland institutions. A new conservation approach that follows Indigenous Peoples’ lead, known as Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs), offers an opportunity to turn ‘coercive conservation’ upside down.
In the Eastern Gangetic Plains, a landscape with potential to improve food security in South Asia, CGIAR researchers are supporting smallholder farmers to make agriculture more profitable, productive and sustainable, while also encouraging women’s participation.
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Boosting capacity for research on gender, youth and social inclusion
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A recently published assessment answers question such as, what is quality gender research and what is the current capacity of CGIAR to undertake such research? To boost capacities, 27 researchers from South Asia recently participated in the first part of a course on gender-responsive plant breeding and seed systems. Another recent course, a Pro-WEAI training for trainers course, introduced researchers to gendered research approaches and methods to measuring women’s empowerment using qualitative and quantitative methods.
A new manual provides gender concepts and tools for practitioners in Africa and offers a deep dive into analyses that can inform gender mainstreaming and gender-transformative action plans. A recent paper explains how intersectionality allows us to look beyond homogenous, binary categories of women and men to examine differences and nuances in gender analysis.
GenderUp is a newly developed tool that can support gender-responsive and responsible scaling of agricultural innovations, while a new guide provides decision-makers with data collection tools to assess gender and youth inequities associated with changes during sustainable agricultural intensification. When it comes to building capacity in policy contexts, experience shows that co-learning and co-development of knowledge products cultivate interest and commitment among stakeholders to address gender in climate change policy processes.
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CGIAR GENDER Science Exchange 2022
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The GENDER Science Exchange provided spaces for discussing cutting-edge gender and social science research, building capacity and getting creative – such as by imagining the gender community as a farm.
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The Science Exchange featured a GenderVision! contest for early-career researchers to pitch their ideas; a discussion on how communities of practice can accelerate gender research; and ideas for how to engage rural youth in food systems.
This event also saw the (re)launch of GENDER as a CGIAR Impact Platform, which CGIAR leadership has tasked with working as a global, intellectual hub for gender and social science research, building capacity, advising CGIAR management and amplifying CGIAR’s external profile and voice on gender equality, youth and social inclusion. In pursuit of these goals, the event brought together CGIAR researchers for a CGIAR-internal event to learn from existing research, capitalize on the significant legacy of former CGIAR research and enhance capacities for quality and impactful research that will advance CGIAR’s 2030 development targets.
Find all abstracts, presentations, recordings and more on the GENDER resource hub.
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More CGIAR GENDER conversations
Join GENDER's virtual discussion group or chime into the conversation on Facebook and via @CGIARgender and #GenderInAg.
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Thank you
Thank you to CGIAR centers, initiatives and platforms as well as CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform partners who contributed to this newsletter: AfricaRice, Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, 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), WorldFish. Also thank you to the CGIAR research initiatives Livestock and Climate; Climate Resilience and Low-Emission Food Systems. CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform partners Accelerating the Impact of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA); Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR); Gender-responsive Researchers Equipped for Agricultural Transformation (GREAT); and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) also kindly contributed.
Photo credits from the top: Abdul Majeed/European Union; ENB/CGIAR GENDER; Vivian Atakos/GENDER (video); Nithi Anand/Flickr; Wasim Iftikar/CSISA; Joe Nkadaani/CIFOR; USAID; Joshua Masinde/CIMMYT; C de Bode/CGIAR; Tim Cronin/CIFOR; Apollo Habtamu/ILRI; Wasim Iftikar/CSISA; ILRI; GREAT; Harriet Matsaert (video); Nathan Ronoh/GENDER.
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