Opinion: Forget ChatGPT – the greatest tech breakthrough would be getting cell phones to rural women
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Six agricultural technologies CGIAR researchers have designed to work for women
Increasing women’s use of agricultural technologies starts with listening to what they want. Read more. |
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How to pick the best tools to make value chains inclusive and equitable
Which research and implementation tools can overturn the barriers that hamper women from engaging in value chains? Read more via NFP Connects. |
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Shared lands demand shared leadership
How to strengthen women's voices in governance of collective resources, such as land and water? Read more. |
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A community of practice to accelerate the use of gender-transformative research methodologies
This community offers a safe space for researchers looking to exchange views and expand their work. Read more. |
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EnGendering Data: Measuring women’s time use in Malawi
While women benefitted, they also carried the bulk of the time burden from nutrition-sensitive agriculture programs. Read more. |
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EnGendering Data: How to understand intra-household decision-making
Understanding who makes decisions in farming households requires asking more than just who made the final choice. Read more. |
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TODAY: CGIAR GENDER Twitter Chat
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Today, on International Women’s Day, the CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform is hosting a Twitter chat to explore, with our partners and other stakeholders, how agricultural technologies and digital innovations can contribute to an inclusive, equitable food system. You are invited to participate!
When: 15:00-16:00 EAT, March 8
Where: Twitter – find us via @CGIARgender #GenderinAg
Learn more about how to join.
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Gender research news from across CGIAR
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Digital innovations for greater equality and inclusion
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A ‘digital gender divide’ prevents women from benefitting from digital innovations—but it might be overcome through human-centered design, capacity building and diversity within digital services and technical roles. Indeed, digital technologies could revolutionize agriculture, but it is critical to design interventions that consider the target populations’ needs.
Providing women with crucial access to agricultural information requires providing them with mobile phones as well as offering financial support and educational initiatives. For example, research from Tanzania indicates that women, who are often marginalized in decision-making in agri-food businesses, stand to gain significantly from the equalizing capabilities of mobile platforms. In Kenya, 'edutainment' TV programming, with positive gender equality messages, has helped reduce gender biases and increased joint decision making. Along the same lines, technologies such as an SMS messaging service could increase women farmers’ access to information and allow them to fetch higher prices for their products at the market.
In the same way, gender-responsive digital extension can narrow the persistent information gap between women and men. When women in Tunisia were given mobile phones, SIM cards and time charge cards during the COVID-19 pandemic, 75 percent said they benefitted either through better connectivity to agricultural information or greater levels of communication.
Turning to capacity building, recent training in Indonesia has enabled local community members, including women, to use digital tools and techniques to support data collection for sustainable development projects. In India, Rice Crop Manager, a digital tool to increase productivity and incomes of rice farmers through balanced fertilizer management, is being embraced by women and youth.
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Designing crops and technologies
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Gender-responsive crop breeding starts from the premise that adoption and social impact will be enhanced if gender needs are addressed at early stages of variety design.
To ensure better adoption of vitamin-A rich sweetpotato in Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda, it is paramount to develop varieties that satisfy the needs and desires of both men and women, researchers say. Likewise, research in Ethiopia has revealed different preferences for maize varieties between men and women, which may occur due to their different roles in maize value chains. Gender-responsive research is also needed to successfully manage crop pests and diseases in Southeast Asia.
In Tanzania, gender-responsive cassava seed systems are benefitting women farmers, including through higher earnings that can be used to pay children's school fees or purchase livestock. The introduction of new technology for storing groundnuts and peanuts is helping women in Togo reduce their workloads and levels of physical labor, while increasing their profits—a win-win for smallholders.
However, dissemination of technologies alone cannot address current income inequalities between men and women rice farmers in rural Ghana; access to land and labor must also be addressed.
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Boosting climate resilience
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Quick fixes are not enough to increase rural women’s resilience to climate change impacts—that requires big changes to food systems, from technologies to governance. For example, in India, Kenya and Uganda, researchers have reached close to 40,000 women with short videos showcasing women farmers applying climate-smart agriculture practices in an attempt to overcome smallholder women’s barriers to accessing climate resilience strategies.
Women are especially vulnerable to climate change due to their dependence on natural resources, and research on the resilience of aquatic food systems must take gender and intersectional dimensions into account. Aquaculture is key to improving livelihoods, particularly when women are involved, underscoring the importance of women's participation in aquatic food systems.
A new digital tool, called Sensemaker, has helped reveal that climate change impacts exacerbate already challenging economic and social disparities in India. However, the energy transition in the country could help achieve gender-equitable growth.
Lastly, evaluation of how group participatory processes can enable women's and men's demand for weather and climate information can help close knowledge gaps on gender equity in access to climate services. A new framework proposes how to incorporate gender equality and social inclusion considerations into such climate information services.
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Fostering opportunities in markets and value chains
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Women’s participation in value chains is limited because their vital roles are not fully recognized, but voluntary sustainability standards might help. In fact, researchers are exploring whether such standards could contribute to women’s empowerment and gender equality.
Turning to irrigation, women and young farmers face labor and market-related constraints in Mali's irrigated vegetable value chain. In northern Ghana, interventions that distribute irrigation pumps must be paired with investments in infrastructure that increase access to water for irrigation to ensure women can reap the benefits. In Nepal, women are largely responsible for the day-to-day running of irrigation systems, but they are often excluded from planning and management decisions. Likewise, in Ethiopia, irrigation markets and interventions insufficiently cater to women, and developers must pay special attention to the gendered differences in access to information to realize the potential benefits of solar-powered irrigation. Private sector solar-powered irrigation companies that assess customers’ creditworthiness in gender-sensitive ways are better able to target a range of farmers, including women.
When it comes to crop-focused value chains, many women in Mozambique have planted orange-fleshed sweet potato, but efforts to commercialize the crop have brought mixed results for them. In value chains for coffee and cocoa, achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment is increasingly being recognized as a central tenet to sustainable development.
Finally, there are vast gendered disparities in urban food systems, which have been largely neglected by city officials, economic planners and development practitioners. For example, a study of gendered barriers and opportunities in the dairy sector in peri-urban Nairobi showed that informal milk trading is more lucrative for older men than for women and younger men.
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Understanding gender in landscapes
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Women are the primary consumers of forest products in developing countries, but they continue to be side-lined in forest management. Researchers looking at what drives behavior change in agroecological transformation processes point out that some behavioral drivers are more important to for example women than men, underscoring the need to address gender, equity and social inclusion in all landscape management.
In western Kenya, community members are working together for gender equity after adopting an asset-based community-driven development approach to achieve their desired future change for their lives and communities. Also in the Solomon Islands, community-based resource management initiatives are prompting women and young girls to venture outside of their comfort zones. Elsewhere in rural Kenya, women’s burden of collecting firewood could be lifted by bringing firewood closer through use of residues from trees on farms and burning it in more efficient cookstoves.
Meanwhile, in Togo, women-to-women communication improved women farmers’ access to information and knowledge about smart-valleys technology—a low-cost, participatory and sustainable approach to develop the bottoms of inland valleys for rice-based systems.
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Building capacity on gender, youth and social inclusion
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In Nigeria, 15 extension agents, food processors and food entrepreneurs were trained on agri-preneurship within the cassava value chain, including on understanding gender balance in leadership. A recent brief specifies how a theory of gender integration and transformation can be applied to specific programs in refugee contexts in Africa. For example, more than 1,360 beneficiaries have received training on home gardens, agroforestry and energy technologies in refugee and host communities in East Africa, resulting in more than 700 home gardens being established.
A new handbook for practitioners in East and Southern Africa includes a chapter with tips on how gender concepts can be integrated into sustainable intensification interventions. Along the same lines, a recent paper advances intersectionality in agricultural research for development by providing a conceptual framework and a methodological approach that illustrates how practical, applied intersectional research design can be used to improve agricultural interventions.
A toolkit details how women shellfishers in coastal West African countries can effectively lead sustainable natural resource management when they are given appropriate support, and a new learning module focuses on how to integrate gender equality and social inclusion considerations into water-energy-food-ecosystems nexus management, which has so far paid insufficient attention to social impacts. A list of principles provides a starting point for assessing whether research is really gender transformative.
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CGIAR gender researchers explain how gender-responsive agricultural innovations can help women and men, communities and countries, get ahead in the race against time on food security.
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Gender-responsive agricultural innovations: Getting rural women ahead
March 9, 2023
18:15-19:45 EST
New York: Salvation Army
The CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform, with African Women in Agricultural Research for Development (AWARD), is hosting an in-person parallel event on the sidelines of the 67th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67). We will discuss the need for gender-responsive agricultural innovations for rural women, showcasing promising examples and proposing how to support women’s use of such innovations. We will further deliberate on information and communication technology agricultural extension, narrowing down on the promotion of productivity-enhancing agricultural technologies and practices and impacts on women’s empowerment and their influence on household decisions. Learn more.
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Closing the gender gap: Investing in gender-responsive innovations and digitization of land to protect women's land rights and promote food security
March 13, 2023
15:00-16:15 EST
New York: UN premises, Conference Building
The CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform is contributing to an official Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67) side event organized by Kenya's Ministry of Public Service, Gender and Affirmative Action. The objectives of this in-person event include showcasing best practices and opportunities that women have in promoting food security ventures through innovation and demonstrating how innovation in agricultural value chains can influence quality of life for women and their households. Learn more.
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CGIAR GENDER communities and conversations
Join GENDER's virtual discussion group or explore one of our communities of practice.
We also always encourage you to 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 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 Potato Center (CIP), International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), International Water Management Institute (IWMI), WorldFish. Also thank you to the CGIAR initiatives Aquatic Foods, Digital Innovations, Diversification in East and Southern Africa, Gender Equality, NEXUS Gains. CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform partners Accelerating the Impact of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA); Africa Rising; Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR); and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) also kindly contributed.
Photo credits from the top: Haley Ahlers/Kansas State University; C. Schubert/CCAFS; Foto Agencies/WorldFish; Ollivier Girard/CIFOR; Mohammad Jobayer Hossain/REACH; N. Ronoh&J.Makere/GENDER; Mitchell Maher/IFPRI; Innocensia John; Twitter chat banner by Tony Klu/Care Intl Ghana, P. Vishwanathan/CCAFS, David Brazier/IWMI, Heifer for DAI; Munira Morshed Munni/IRRI; Nabin Baral/IWMI; Shadrack Isingoma/ILRI; Axel Fassio/CIFOR; IITA; CSW67 video by Nathan Ronoh/CGIAR GENDER.
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