Foro Global sobre Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutrición (Foro FSN)

There are many notable legislative and administrative actions taken for gender transformation into decent, self respectable, self income earning and respected members of the society and community in India and more particularly in Kerala. Women are now occupying important positions in all the branches of professions and administration. There are reserved legislative positions-member in panchayat, president of panchayat, mayor in corporations and in judiciary. At farming level all women labour army render cultivation of crops a proud and decent job. A lady Inspector General Of Police leads the team to investigate a serious crime and brining culprits to book. The ration card enabling food items etc. is in the name of elderly women member. There are times when an Indian Lady officer leads the armed battalion in functions like Republic Day. Being under subjugation for years it may take time when men and women have equal opportunity to grow. The role of women as a mother is to be understood and praised.

Coming in from the communication and research uptake perspective, I would like to share my personal experience both as a writer-documenter-photographer of rural women in India, and from trying to understand the research-policy landscape where pertinent to rural women while strategising uptake approaches.

I found women from rural communities far more inspiring than most educated ones. The clarity with which they see their problems and come up with brilliant solutions has stayed with me. So, to answer your question: How do some rural women manage to move forward and become successful entrepreneurs, whereas others are trapped in a life of food insecurity and poverty?- a fitting example to share is: the monograph called ‘Trail Blazers: Stories of Women Champions from IFAD Projects’. Downloadable PDF is here: https://www.ifad.org/documents/10180/6566a2a2-0b9f-41cd-9fe4-6f43c22ffd…

This coffee table books presents 23 snapshots of the lives and achievements of simple rural women from IFAD project areas whose immense courage and dynamic leadership helped improve their own lives as well as the lives of their families and communities. These are real life stories of extraordinary achievements of ordinary women - of women who dared to take a stand against all odds to break the mould and of women who were not afraid of being ambitious while continuing to play their traditional roles in the family and society. The book captures the narrative along simple lines of Women Champions who have emerged in the process of institutional building, livelihood development, enterprise development and governance in 5 Indian states – Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Uttrakhand and Odisha.

These are just 23 women – I won’t event dare to declare a percentage of could be out there for us to discover, document and communicate within our country and across the world. My impression is that there so much we are doing to communicate on behalf of rural women, and so much more we can do to get the word out to the right people – that brings me to the Research Uptake part of my contribution to this useful discussion topic.

In a bid to begin to tackle Question 3 - Are we using the right approaches and policies to close the gender gap? – I feel that the dilemma with ‘right approaches’ and ‘policies to close gender gap’ are many and it has always been a complicated and sensitive area for research communication and uptake strategies because we are dealing with customs and people, patriarchy and rights, etc. Policies are intertwined with too much cultural sensitivity, and this makes articulating research findings for policy uptake a much-needed skill. There is great need for gender specialists, social scientists, communication specialists and research uptake / knowledge brokers to work more closely together - understand from the other’s perspectives and together develop a strategic approach to communicate to policymakers. This would hopefully be more sustainable and promise transformative action to close the gender gap.

Poor education or lack of education is one of the barriers which has resulted in women missing out opportunities and this is a direct consequence of poverty in most africa countries. A girl/woman with little or no education will have a little understanding on what gender transformative impact really means.

Another barrier is lack of self esteem: A girl/woman that doesn't feel good about herself or believe in her abilities will not strive to be an agent of transformative impact.

To overcome some of these barriers, there should be a redefining of parental orientation as regards sponsoring the girl child education and also organising programmes that will broaden the knowledge of the girl child on gender roles and also build her confidence.

Dear Colleagues,

Several contributors to this forum have highlighted that one of the critical constraint that rural women face is the huge burden of unpaid care work.

A significant part of that burden results from women’s role as mothers – or, to put it demographically, their fertility. As societies modernize, they typically undergo a profound demographic transformation in the form of significant declines in fertility (as well as mortality) from the high rates characteristic of pre-modern and low-income societies to the low rates characteristic of advanced, industrialized societies. Demographers call this process the demographic transition (and there is a huge amount of literature available about it). What drives the demographic transition is typically a combination of factors, including: an overall improvement in the standards of living, better nutrition and sanitation, progress in health care and medical service provision, the emancipation of women, a declining role of the family as the unit of production, diminishing economic and social advantages of larger families, and (in some countries) explicit family planning programmes.

One of the key effects of demographic transition is that in post-transitional regimes, childbearing and childcare occupy a much smaller portion of women’s lives than in transitional settings. In addition to direct health benefits for women (e.g. reduced rates of maternal mortality and other pregnancy-related health risks), declining fertility tends to lessen the conflict between domestic and non-domestic responsibilities, with the consequence that women are becoming better able to access educational and employment opportunities outside the domestic sphere. Having fewer children also allows women to maintain continuity of employment, which may have significant positive implications for their earnings and occupational choices, as well as employers’ willingness to hire and train them. Furthermore, formal employment usually gives women some measure of control over self-earned income, thereby increasing their self-esteem. And by becoming contributors to a joint household income pool, women may gain a stronger intra-household bargaining power and a greater say in household decisions.

However, the demographic transition does not automatically lead to improvements in gender equality and women’s empowerment. While fertility declines make it generally easier for women to participate in non-domestic activities, they often continue to have primary responsibility for the domestic tasks. As the demographic transition progresses, women may become increasingly confronted with a growing “double burden”: they are not only expected to fulfil usual “female” roles – that is, bear and rear children, care for other dependents in the household, carry out day-to-day household tasks, and work in the informal context of smallholder agriculture – but also perform well in a formal occupation outside the household.

Moreover, in many settings, women have traditionally earned their social status through the children they have reared, and there may be a significant time lag between the fertility decline and a shift in societal perceptions towards greater acknowledgment of women’s occupational and income-earning roles. Thus, women may lose the basis of status that motherhood once gave them, without acquiring a standing equal to men in the labour force.

I would like to conclude by saying that policy-makers and rural development practitioners should pay close attention to population trends and be prepared to implement appropriate measures to maximize the potential gender equality benefits of the demographic transition. In general, the demographic transition can foster a reordering of gender relations and a more equal distribution of roles and responsibilities between women and men. But the degree to which this potential is actually realized depends greatly on the existing socio-economic, cultural and political context. Conditioning factors include such things as the economic health of the society; availability and nature of employment opportunities outside the domestic sphere; availability and quality of publicly provided social services; cultural norms and practices; and the distribution of power and resources within the household. Many of these contextual factors are open to policy intervention.

Libor Stloukal, member of the gender team in FAO

Rural women: striving for gender transformative impacts

The context of rural livelihoods has changed to a large extent during the paste 20 years. The farming women were uneducated twenty years before but in the current generation the women farmers are educated youth. The young educated women take more interest in farm based enterpreneurial activities. Different and innovative approaches will be needed to cater both the groups of women. Previously there was more emphasis on women's economic empowerment and less concentration on improvement of gender relations but with the passage of time there is much improvement with a slow pace. The educated women are more overburdened with productive, reproductive roles and household responsibilities. The introduction of labour saving devices in farming would be a solution to reduce the workload. 

Dear Colleagues,

When we contemplate about how to best achieve gender transformative impacts (Question 3 of this Forum), we should not forget about agricultural policies.

Agricultural policies are powerful instruments for directing rural development. As such, they have a strong comparative advantage to close the gender gap in rural societies. Specifically, they help to regulate – and therefore can improve – the conditions under which rural women access productive resources (such as land and water), rural services (such as rural finance, rural infrastructure, rural advisory services, etc.), economic opportunities (jobs, markets) and critical institutions (such as producer organizations, agricultural committees, etc.). Indirectly, agricultural policies can also affect the decision-making within rural household and communities, for instance by providing sector-wide incentives to register land in women’s names, let women and girls participate in farmers’ trainings, create cooperatives and start enterprises, etc.

It is a regrettable reality that agricultural policies often remain gender-blind. Let me use CAADP as an example. Numerous CAADP representatives and official documents have emphasized that gender should not just be a paragraph in the plans, but should be included in every stage of the CAADP process. And yet a 2011 review by ActionAid of CAADP country plans for Nigeria, Malawi, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana and Zambia found “a persistent failure to identify and prioritise the needs, constraints, and opportunities of women farmers” (see http://www.actionaid.org/sites/files/actionaid/making_caadp_work_for_wo…, page 11). I believe such a gap between policy rhetoric and policy reality can be found in many other countries around the world.

So what can we do to make agricultural policies work for women farmers? Several lines of action come to mind:

• Increase the availability of sex-disaggregated data on agriculture, to improve knowledge about the magnitude of gender gaps and provide firmer evidence-base for policy formulation and monitoring.
• Sensitize agricultural policy-makers to the needs and capacities of rural women, and build their confidence for the formulation and implementation of policies to address gender inequalities in agriculture. Policy-makers must understand also rural men's concerns, if policy change is to be effective.
• Analyze agricultural policies from the gender perspective, to identify gaps, inconsistencies and possible entry points for improvement.
• Collect and disseminate good practices in gender-sensitive policy-making, and learn from examples of agricultural policies that have measurably improved women’s well-being.
• Enhance the participation of rural women in agriculture-related policy processes, so that their voices can be heard and their preferences duly reflected in policy documents.
• Promote policy dialogues among various stakeholders (including CSOs, producer organizations, the private sector, among others), as well as south-south exchanges of policy experiences and ideas.
• Help to ensure that agricultural policy-makers are mandated to address rural gender inequalities, held to account for undertaking specific gender-related actions, and assessed on their achievements. Mandates and accountability give teeth to policy initiatives.

If I may, I would like to add that in FAO we are developing what we call the Gender in Agricultural Policies Assessment Tool (GAPo). The GAPo aims to provide policy makers with practical, evidence-based guidance for promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment in agricultural policies, with a view to achieving the new Sustainable Development Agenda 2030. It allows stakeholders involved in policy formulation processes to analyze and assess the gender equality gaps in national agricultural policies and identify concrete solutions to address those gaps. As a policy tool, the GAPo:

• promotes a participatory approach to policy analysis, with particular focus on facilitating an open dialogue among representatives of key government bodies, civil society organizations, producer associations, the private sector, and the academia;
• places special emphasis on those policy areas that have the strongest potential to influence rural women’s livelihoods, including: access to productive resources, employment, markets, financial services, research, rural advisory services, and rural organizations;
• recognizes that within each key policy area, gender equality should be considered at all stages of the policy cycle: policy formulation, definition of policy goals and impact indicators, budgeting, capacity development of relevant actors, monitoring and evaluation, and policy adaptation.

FAO has already piloted the GAPo in Ghana and Kyrgyzstan and our experiences indicate that the tool can be quite effective in helping national stakeholders to understand how agricultural policies affect rural women and what kind of policy action may be needed to make existing policies more gender sensitive. We hope to be able to make the GAPo publicly available very soon.

Libor Stloukal, member of the gender team in FAO

In response to Questions 2 and 3, I would like to add that achieving significant progress in closing the gender gap and transforming gender relations requires development actors to first come to terms with their own responsibility in relying on excessively broad (and often outdated) assumptions about gender in the planning and design of interventions aiming to empower rural women. There is no question that global data on the constraints faced by rural women is of paramount importance to furthering our understanding of the issues and enhancing advocacy efforts. The sharing of recommended actions and documented good practices to address constraints is also a valuable enterprise. The problem arises when these resources are adopted as cheap replacements for context-specific analysis and participatory approaches in the implementation of interventions.

Time and again, we have seen efforts to empower women “miss the mark” because of blanket assumptions about women’s needs that do not take into consideration the households and communities they are situated within, or their own agency and preferences. Not only is the desired effect not achieved in such cases, a detrimental impact is often felt instead (e.g. women’s work burden increases, discrimination and socioeconomic tensions in the community worsen, men appropriate profitable inputs and activities, etc.).

In this sense, I find myself in agreement with Dr Amanullah when he says: “I do not agree the approaches and policies are ok for every region in the world. I means different policies and approaches are required for different regions, different countries and different religions.“ In response to his comment as well as Ekaterine Gurgenidze’s question: “How can we help rural women to help with self respect and understand their significant role in community, family and society?”, I would like to reiterate an often-cited but rarely implemented solution: include rural women in the conversation.

The Dimitra Clubs approach cited by my colleague Andrea Sánchez Enciso provides a rare example of the radical potential benefits of putting communication at the centre of efforts to empower women. By putting women and men at the centre of the conversation, the approach has stimulated significant changes in gender roles and strengthened the organizational capacity, participation and bargaining power of the most vulnerable people in every country in which it has been implemented. As a result of the inclusiveness of this process, the benefits seen by women have been accompanied by strengthened social cohesion rather than increased tensions in the communities. (for more information: http://www.fao.org/dimitra/home/en/)

Finally, in order to be included in the conversation, rural women must also be included in the story. A 2015 report by the Global Media Monitoring Project found that women made up “only 24% of persons heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio news” and that representations of women as economic actors were scarce. In the rural context, these statistics become even more stark: a mere 6% of stories about rural economy, agriculture, farming, and land rights included women as a central focus or discussed issues of gender equality/inequality (http://whomakesthenews.org/gmmp/gmmp-reports/gmmp-2015-reports).   

Dear all, the FAO Dimitra team would like to share with you the experience of the Dimitra Clubs in relation to question 2 and 3.

Over the past ten years, the FAO-Dimitra project has implemented a successful participatory approach called the Dimitra Clubs based on gender equality and community mobilization in order to facilitate rural people’s empowerment, without leaving anyone behind.

The Dimitra Clubs are spaces for dialogue and action at community level. They are informal groups of women, men and youth– mixed or not – that meet regularly to discuss the problems they face in their daily lives, express their needs, identify their priorities and challenges, exchange their experiences with other clubs, make informed choices and take collective action to solve these problems using their own resources.

The clubs have achieved impact at various levels. They proved to be successful in improving women and men’s access to information, resources, markets, credit and extension services and helping informal groups to transform or join formal producers’ organizations. The approach has promoted rural people’s empowerment, community mobilization and social cohesion, community dialogue, as well as better nutrition and sanitation practices, education for the girl child, behavioral changes and collective action, including on resilience and social protection.

In particular, the clubs have boosted the self-esteem and leadership of rural women, encouraged more equitable relations between women and men, thus improving the quality of life of rural households and small farmers. They have also led many rural communities to put an end to harmful practices - such as gender-based violence - and contributed to improving rural women’s access to decision-making at local level (in rural organizations, for example).

Today there are more than 1 600 Dimitra Clubs in six sub-Saharan countries: Niger, DR Congo, Senegal, Ghana, Burundi and Mali.

Transformative change can be achieved if interventions that aim to empower women are not solely focused on empowering women economically. Interventions must also aim to trigger processes of change that gradually lead to changes in behaviours and social norms that continue to impede women to progress on an equal foot as men.

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to contribute to Question 1 by focusing on a particular "challenge": the feminization of agriculture.

“Feminization of agriculture” denotes a trend whereby women’s participation in the agricultural sector is increasing. In developing countries, the process has been observed since the 1960s and linked to fundamental changes in rural economies driven by factors such as failed liberalization policies, globalization of agri-food systems, and reduced male populations as a result of outmigration and excess male mortality (due to diseases, accidents or armed conflicts).

While signs that the agricultural sector is “feminizing” are evident in many countries, the process is in fact very hard to assess rigorously, because quantitative data available from censuses and sample surveys often fail to capture the full range of activities in which rural women and men engage, including secondary and seasonal work.

In December 2016, FAO and the World Bank published a research paper that assesses available evidence about the feminization of agriculture (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/25099). The paper finds that the share of women in agricultural employment is increasing in all developing regions except for East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

In sub-Saharan Africa, women have traditionally been heavily engaged in agriculture. Currently, the average share of women in agriculture in the region is 47 percent, but it reaches well over 50 percent in many sub-Saharan countries. While women’s employment rates in the agricultural sector have not changed significantly in the last few decades, their roles and responsibilities may be changing – e.g. from subsistence farming to wage employment, and from contributing household members to primary producers. However, these changes are hard to detect from the data currently available.

In the rest of the developing world, women’s employment in agriculture relative to that of men is on the rise. The change in women’s role appears to be most dramatic in Near East and North Africa. In the Near East, the share of women in agricultural employment has almost doubled since 1990. In North Africa, it has increased from 25 percent to more than 30 percent in the same period.

Women’s share in agriculture employment is rising also in South Asia and the Central and Eastern (non-EU) Europe and the Commonwealth of the Independent States. More remarkable than the regional averages are the trends in some countries. For example, the share of women in the agricultural workforce in Bangladesh has risen from 50 percent in 1990 to 66 percent; in Nepal, from slightly more than half in 1990 to 60 percent in recent years; and in Afghanistan and Pakistan from slightly more than 15 percent in 1990 to 21 percent and 36 percent, respectively.

Even in Latin America, where farming has traditionally been a male occupation, the share of women in agricultural employment is increasing. For example, in both Colombia and Panama, few women were employed in agriculture in 1990, but in both countries their share has increased to more than 20 percent in recent years. In Ecuador and Paraguay, the share has more than doubled – from slightly more than 15 percent in 1990 to 32 percent and 37 percent respectively in recent years. In Peru, the increase has been from about one-third to almost 40 percent.

As already mentioned, East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific are the only developing regions in which the share of women in agricultural employment is currently not increasing. This is not surprising, given that women already form near to, or even more than, 50 percent of the agricultural workforce in this part of the world.

What causes the feminization of agriculture? According to the FAO-World Bank paper, male outmigration from rural areas and the growth of commercial farming are among the key factors driving women’s increasing employment in agriculture, along with agro-technological change, conflicts, and climate change.

Is the feminization of agriculture contributing to rural women’s empowerment? Unfortunately, it seems that in many rural settings women’s growing labour force participation does not necessarily translate into an improvement in their employment status relative to men, or in their well-being. Further research is urgently needed to understand to what extent and under what conditions women’s expanding roles in agriculture actually lead to welfare improvements and a greater gender equality in access to resources and human capital. FAO is working to expand available knowledge on the linkages between feminization of agriculture and women's empowerment. In doing so, we hope to increase understanding of rural transformation processes in individual countries and strengthen the evidence base for agricultural policies and programmes.

Libor Stloukal, on behalf of the gender team in FAO

The lives of many rural women really remain unchanged. My comment is to focused on social behaviors change communication (SBCC) through community volunteers working in nutrition centers and home visitors, in additions to awareness raising through SBCC to the community leader and local authority.

Thank you.

Huda Abouh

Field Monitor

Sudan- West /Central Darfur

El Geneina