Submission by the Private Sector Mechanism - Working Group on Women's Empowerment
Question 1: What are the main challenges rural women and girls are facing today?
In rural areas, women and girls lack especially legal equality, including rights to land and other productive resources; access to financial services, business registration and operation, and employment opportunities. Furthermore, especially in developing countries rural women lack also access to education programs, aimed at providing literacy, basic math skills, and general education. National governments are certainly the primary actors involved in addressing these challenges by setting adequate legal frameworks but other stakeholders can help to spread knowledge and incentives that can be useful for rural women trapped in a condition of food insecurity and poverty.
Indeed, the private sector has engaged in many initiatives, in particular to connect female farmers to market and to finance learning programmes about innovative technologies in agriculture.
With respect to the first, we want to bring to the attention initiatives like the SheTrades Initiative by the International Trade Centre in collaboration with Google and CI&T, a Brazilian technology company. Through the SheTrades app, women entrepreneurs were able to share information about their companies, increase visibility, expand networks, connect and internationalize. SheTrades, which aims to connect one million women entrepreneurs to market by 2020, also helps corporations to include more women entrepreneurs in their supply chains. More information about the initiative here: http://www.intracen.org/itc/women-and-trade/SheTrades/
With respect to the second instead, we can mention the joint initiative by Cargill, Kellogg and U.K. retailer ASDA to launch a female-only training which will benefit up to 1,000 women cocoa farmers in Côte d'Ivoire. The training focuses on teaching better agricultural practices, supporting cocoa tree nursery development as an income-generating activity, as well as providing business skills training and improving literacy. More information can be found here: https://www.cargill.com/story/empowering-women-cocoa-farmers
Question 2: Are we using the right approaches and policies to close the gender gap?
Investors, donors, and governments must focus on supporting women smallholder farmers, including their access to resources such as inputs, agricultural extension services, grain storage, and information. Gender sensitive approaches to increase access to agricultural extension services must be spread. Long term gender inequities are often perpetuating because specific training with mechanisms to manage gender-based biases on access to land, banking, and marketing opportunities are lacking. Initiatives to train entrepreneurs to run their businesses by adopting a more gender sensitive approach are now needed more than ever to incentivize the private sector to engage with rural women as economic actors, generating proved profitable outcomes.
One example is Nestlé’s work to empower women in the cocoa supply chain in Côte d’Ivoire, which has helped to train four cocoa cooperatives on gender issues in order to open more roles, such as lead farmers and nursery managers, to women. The cooperatives have also now produced their own action plans for improving the positions of women in the cocoa supply chain. More information here: http://www.nestle.com/media/news/nestle-empowers-women-in-cocoa-supply-chain-update
To help women to access to financing more easily, companies should give their support to initiatives such as the Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLA) initiative sponsored by Cargill in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. Thanks to this project, managed and governed by local communities, women in those countries have started to access affordable finance at very competitive interest rates. More information here: https://www.cargill.com/story/village-savings-and-loan-associations
Question 3: How can we best achieve gender transformative impacts?
It is fundamental to encourage women’s capacity to organize themselves as well as to foster women leaders. Rural women workers’ wages and labour conditions must be protected and their roles as small scale entrepreneurs must be promoted. All stakeholders must ensure that women’s leadership and expertise, particularly for women smallholder farmers, be recognized in national legal settings as well as the legal equality for women, including rights to land and other productive resources; access to financial services, business registration and operation, and employment opportunities. Companies should favour women’s employment by providing access to proper maternal health services and ensuring particularly proper nutrition for the first 1000 days of mother and child. Governments should create supportive mechanisms for co-operatives and other enterprises that allow smallholder women farmers to aggregate their harvests, negotiate better prices, and introduce value-added processing.
A successful example of a co-operative gathering smallholder women farmers is the PurProjet in Morocco. The cooperative has been the result of a rural development project of feminine entrepreneurship, which brought some associations of women to gather and share their annual harvests in order to be able to make economies of scale and ensure a higher quality of olive oil thanks to technical and trade support. More information can be found here: http://www.purprojet.com/project/femmes-du-rif/
At national level, Rwanda has been implementing a communications campaign across four national districts, in order to raise public awareness of a key element of land reform: equal rights between men and women. The USAID LAND project partnered with Radio Ishingiro, a community radio station, to broaden citizens’ understanding of land governance and promote values of gender equality. Through the campaign’s innovative and media-savvy outreach strategies, Rwandan citizens learned how gender-equal land rights can benefit them, their families, and their communities. More information about the project can be found here: http://chemonics.com/OurImpact/SharingImpact/ImpactStories/Pages/From-Policy-to-Practice-Exercising-Gender-Equal-Land-Rights-in-Rwanda.aspx
Ms. Morgane Danielou