While I confess that I have no personal experience with care farms in developing countries, I would like to share some ideas and experiences from permaculture projects in Africa and suggest that women are best placed to learn permaculture practices that will reconstitute degraded land and pass these practices on in combination with care farming.
There are many permaculture projects in Anglophone Africa, many started by Bill Mollison 30 years ago in places where changes in lifestyle/agricultural practices (e.g. the settling of nomadic herders, sustained conflicts or rural depopulation) have damaged ecosystems, or where drought and deforestation have lead to dessertification.
Teaching permaculture practices to women and children is an effective way of ensuring that these practices are passed on to future generations and also spread within the region. Permaculture can be adapted for any (micro) climate and soil, it can even reconstitute topsoil over a period of time, because it aims to mimick the most natural of ecosystems, the natural forest. The FAO has already published a report on the potential for forests in feeding rural populations: http://www.fao.org/docrep/014/i2011e/i2011e00.pdf
Naturally, forest gardening is only one aspect of permaculture. Another important aspect in this context is the traditional knowledge of plants, their nutritional and medicial properties, as well as agricultural practices that are often the domain of women in developing countries. This knowledge must be respected and practices revived.
Permaculture, being a simple, but flexible design concept based on whole-systems thinking, also embraces more than farming. Sanitation and water (harvesting and retention) are key elements as are the use of fuels.
My personal experience and intuition tells me that promoting women's economic empowerment by creating or supporting combined permaculture and care farming projects would be a highly efficient means to achieve multiple objectives and to do this effectively at a reduced cost. Moreover, the projects belong to the women from the outset even though they might be operating initially with an NGO as an interactive learning experience.
Naturally, they need the security of (cooperative) ownership of the land, or firmly binding contracts over their long-term use of the land. It is essential to continuity and transmission of knowledge that they should have security in an age of 'land grabs'.
These should be small-scale projects -- sow the seeds, continue to water them and they will grow and spread: metaphor.
But as Olivier de Schutter, UN Advisor on The Right to Food, has emphasized, the transition from large scale industrial agriculture to small-scale organic farming practices adapted for the locality are our only option. We must ensure the imperatives are maintained in Africa through women's involvement.
ReScope is one of the organisations working in Permaculture Africa at this moment. See for example http://www.seedingschools.org/
I don't have other info at my fingertips at present but I do think this combination would be a highly effective use of resources and also of economic empowerment for women.
This type of approach might also be very effective ultimately in countries that have been ravaged by natural disasters, such as Haiti.
Dr. Jacqueline Fletcher