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Evidence platform for agrifood systems and nutrition

This FAO evidence platform provides evidence and tools to support governments and stakeholders in the implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines on Food Systems and Nutrition (VGFSyN) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS).

To find relevant documents for a VGFSyN recommendation, select a focus area from the left menu and the sub-focus area of your interest. You will be redirected to a page listing all relevant VGFSyN recommendations. Select a recommendation to access the links to the relevant online documents

Focus Area VI
Gender equality and women's empowerment across food systems

This focus area highlights the importance of improving women’s wellbeing, ensuring direct access to financial, technical and biophysical resources, improving and enabling agency and participation in decision-making, and balancing the power relationships and overcoming legal impediments that limit equality and choices. It provides guidance on: empowering women and recognizing and addressing women’s nutritional status and deprivation.

3.6.2 Promoting and acknowledging women as entrepreneurs and key actors in food systems

The four digit numbering of each recommendation follows the numbering in the VGFSyN, whereby the first digit represents the chapter 3 of the document that includes the 105 recommendations, the second digit the focus area, the third digit the sub-focus area and the letter the specific recommendation.

  • Recommendation 3.6.2.a

    Governments and other stakeholders should attach a great importance and are encouraged to promote gender equality and create the necessary conditions for women to fully realize their potential, in line with national legislation and universally agreed human rights instruments. Measures to achieve this should support the optimal combination and reconciliation of family and work life, including through economic empowerment of women, social protection programmes, including among others child and family support payments, and parental leave, establishment of minimum wages, reduction of the gender pay gap, and quality job and pensions as well as redistribution of unpaid care work.

  • Recommendation 3.6.2.b

    Governments, in accordance with national legislations, should ensure women’s equal tenure rights and promote their equal access to and control over productive land, natural resources, inputs, productive tools, and access to education, training, markets, and information in line with the [Committee on World Food Security Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security] CFS VGGT.

  • Recommendation 3.6.2.c

    Governments, private sector, intergovernmental organizations and other relevant stakeholders should enhance women’s roles in agriculture by promoting their participation and decision-making over what and how they choose to produce crops/food. Women should be offered equal access to extension and advisory services for crops and animal products that they produce or process, capacity-building to engage with traders, financial services (e.g. credit and savings mechanisms), and entrepreneurial opportunities across food systems.

  • Recommendation 3.6.2.d

    Governments, non-governmental organizations, private sector and other relevant stakeholders should promote and increase access of women to time saving technologies(*1) that could help improve their livelihoods.

  • Recommendation 3.6.2.e

    Governments should promote the design of context-specific policies to reduce digital gaps among rural women and promote cooperation schemes to facilitate rural women’s access to the application of digital tools, digital infrastructure, and technological solutions to improve their productive activities.

  • Recommendation 3.6.2.f

    Governments, private sector, civil society and other relevant stakeholders should facilitate women’s equal access to entrepreneurship and employment opportunities across food systems and related activities, leveraging existing business platforms to generate adequate income, as well as increase women’s participation in decision-making on the use of household income and opportunities to build and manage savings. This could include business management training, decision-making skill development, scaling of financial services and products both accessible and relevant to women’s needs, and tools to help men and women strengthen their intra-household communication.