See, understand and hear the women who deal with climate (in)security
“We need to ensure that women’s roles in climate change mitigation and adaptation become more visible,” said Dr Nicoline de Haan in a recent webinar. Read more.
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Gender-sensitive responses needed to COVID-19 in Africa
Governments and development agencies face the challenge of implementing gender-sensitive policies that respond to women’s disproportionate burden of shocks, such as climate events and COVID-19. Read more.
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Gender-based violence threatens food security but can be tackled
A new toolkit gives ideas and guidance on how to mitigate gender-based violence and spring into action. Read more.
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GENDER Platform working paper: Gendered patterns of work and time use
This review paper presents a collection of tools and methodologies for understanding and studying gendered work patterns and time use, with a focus on agriculture and allied activities. Read more.
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Spotlight: Cultivating Equality 2021
During the 2021 conference Cultivating Equality: Advancing Gender Research in Agriculture and Food Systems, researchers and practitioners from across the globe came together in a virtual dialogue to discuss how to advance the gender research agenda. Key discussions are summarized in the posts below.
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The politics of knowledge: Reclaiming the gender narrative across agri-food systems
Unequal power relations between researchers and farmers can be changed through sharing knowledge and creating space for better contextualized and inclusive research. Read more.
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Five ways researchers can better support women: Messages from rural women
Rural women's perspectives provide lessons that researchers can lean on when developing inclusive research designs. Read more.
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Gender equality, women’s empowerment and food systems
Food system drivers—whether biophysical, environmental, political, economic or other—are all built on gender inequalities. Read more.
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Gender research news from across CGIAR
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Gender equality for climate resilience
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Gender equality matters for climate change adaptation and mitigation, in aquatic food systems and beyond, but achieving gender equality requires addressing both symptoms and underlying causes.
Increasing women farmers’ access to climate resilience strategies has big payoffs, as indicated by recent studies in Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda. However, elsewhere, in Tunisia, women’s contributions to rangelands and the effects of climate change on women’s livelihoods are both policy blind spots (also in French). Likewise, approaches that generate desirable feedback loops between gender equality, climate change, land and biodiversity remain poorly understood and applied.
Experiences from Ethiopia, Bangladesh, The Gambia and Uganda illustrate the challenges that need to be addressed to enhance women’s adaptive capacities. In the same vein, results from a study in Latin America indicate that researchers and policymakers need to anticipate potential intersectionalities when designing climate-smart agricultural research.
In Nepal, a short-term project has built technical and managerial skills among women and youth for more resilient agriculture, while a recent video outlines how to mainstream gender and social inclusion when setting up a climate-smart village. Finally, a recent book chapter assesses how climate adaptation and mitigation approaches can reduce women’s and men’s vulnerabilities, promote their capacities for resilience and increase gender equality.
Turning to another major current crisis, a new report synthesizes the COVID-19 impacts on some of the two and a half million women across Africa who trade and process fish; it puts forward recommendations for national and regional policy and development actors.
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Designing crops and technologies
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G+ tools are being used to help plant breeders interpret gender research to create varieties that meet the needs of women. However, opportunities for improvement remain – research on maize breeding in southern Africa, for example, suggests that current researcher-led on-farm trials may not identify the gender-specific trait preferences that drive varietal choice.
Recent research in Nigeria suggests that food product quality traits are more important for members of food-insecure households and that gender differences between men and women increase among the food insecure. Meanwhile in rural Rajasthan, India, another study investigated how the adoption of agricultural innovations is influenced by farmers’ gender, age and class background. Along the same lines, a study in Myanmar indicated that women’s participation in decision-making is a crucial strategy for more efficient resource use and maximizing outputs in small-scale aquaculture.
In Bangladesh, a workshop strengthened women farmers’ knowledge of proper seed certification guidelines and seed quality control issues. Capacity building had similarly positive effects when, following a gender sensitivity training provided alongside forage introductions, Ethiopian men reported being involved in forage harvesting, chopping and feeding against prevailing norms, while Kenyan women took on greater decision-making roles. Investments in livestock for women farmers and herders have proved to benefit not just them, but benefit entire families, communities and nations.
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Measuring and advancing women’s empowerment
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A new book answers the question, How does agricultural and environmental research and development contribute to gender equality and women’s empowerment? In this way, the book marks a shift away from a typical, instrumentalist outlook focused on how gender analysis can contribute to research objectives, such as improved productivity.
CGIAR researchers are developing new measures of women's empowerment for agricultural value chain projects, while a new brief by another team of researchers identifies four pathways to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment in fish agri-food systems.
Findings from Bangladesh show that education, savings, assets, international remittance, non-farm employment, substantial safety net transfers and women’s empowerment are key factors in breaking chronic and transient poverty. Evidence from Kenya reveals that joining a producer organization, regardless of whether it is the woman or man in the household who is the member, increases women’s empowerment. Finally, using small-scale irrigation for fodder production has emerged as one way to increase the climate resilience of Ethiopian livestock keepers, but what does that mean for women’s empowerment?
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Changing norms and institutions
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Gender scientists from CGIAR and key partner institutions recently came together to create a supportive innovation space for researchers to integrate gender-transformative research and methodologies into the new CGIAR Initiatives. This year, one project tested such gender-transformative approaches for advancing gender equality in coral reef social-ecological systems.
Agricultural extension is a critical pathway from scientific discovery to durable impact at scale, but women often lack access to extension services and thus miss out on information that can lead to uptake of new technologies. Relatedly, in three of four Indian dairy cooperatives recently analyzed, researchers found that gender and caste norms restrict women’s inclusion and limit their control over income.
Bringing out potential implications for future data collection efforts, findings from two surveys in Ethiopia suggest that men and women can perceive male engagement in domestic work differently. Finally, a toolkit for looking at gender dynamics in rice-based agricultural systems in South Asia can help shed light on how such dynamics influence male migration.
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Understanding gender in landscapes and for nutrition
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Priorities for future gender research that can contribute to resilient, equitable, inclusive and sustainable forest, tree and agroforestry landscapes are proposed in a recently published brief.
This follows on a recent call by researchers, practitioners and community members for greater inclusion in ecosystem restoration because neglecting social and people-centered restoration models can result in land grabs, conflict and further marginalization of vulnerable groups. For example, there is strong evidence that tenure security plays a critical role in strategies for poverty reduction, improved livelihoods, women’s empowerment and strengthened gender equality.
Looking toward gender dynamics in matters of nutrition, researchers found that affordability represented a more significant barrier to fruit consumption for women than men in both Nigeria and Vietnam. An initiative in Rwanda has proved that milk and animal source foods can help turn the tide on malnutrition for children, while interviews conducted with farmers in three dairy development sites in western Kenya indicated that while income and productivity are valued by everyone, gender enables these broader goals to be viewed in more nuanced terms.
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Thank you for 2021!
The CGIAR GENDER Platform thanks all partners, collaborators, contributors and colleagues for a busy and fruitful year. We wish you a restful break over the holiday period, and look forward to picking up our shared mission to put gender equality at the forefront of global agricultural research for development in 2022!
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Follow the conversation on Facebook and via @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: Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), 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 Rice Research Institute (IRRI), WorldFish. Also to the CGIAR Research Programs on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS); Livestock; Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM); as well as Excellence in Breeding (EIB).
Photo credits from the top: C. Schubert/CCAFS; V. Meadu/CCAFS; Georgina Smith/CIAT; Barbara Minishi/European Union; Sushil Kumar; Georgina Smith/CIAT; UN Women/Second Chance Education Programme; Georgina Smith/CIAT; C. Schubert/CCAFS; ILRI; UN via PIM; Neil Palmer/CCAFS/CIAT; Livestock.
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