Forum global sur la sécurité alimentaire et la nutrition (Forum FSN)

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    • Dear organizers,

      thanks for this excellent discussion and in-depth inputs on this topic. I would like to share some insights from the work of the four UN agencies, UN Women, FAO, IFAD and WFP on the Rural Women Economic Empowerment in Kyrgyzstan. It is a unique joint programme of the four agencies, which aims to address the multiple challenges faced by rural women in an integrated manner. The programme brings together expertise of the four UN agencies, and has proven to be effective in providing an integrated response to the various aspects of rural women's empowerment. Specifically, an external evaluation has found the programme to be a flagship joint programme due to a single entry point, through which the UN agencies have provided a single integrated development assistance to the same group of beneficiaries. This has accelerated internal empowerment process, allowed the rural women to build on the increased economic agency to internalize leadership skills, practice them at the level of their households and communities. Evaluation has also confirmed transformative changes taking place in rural women's lives due to the multidimensional approach taken in the joint programme, which included access to productive assets, business skills, access to revolving funds, institutionalization of women's groups through establishment of women's cooperatives, access to processing technologies for moving women's groups up along the value chains for increased value added and higher negotiation powers, capacity building for women's better leadership, participation and influence on local gender-responsive development planning, service provision and decision-making processes. Finally,the programme has allowed to bring the voice of rural women to the national level policy debates, policy formulation and legislative processes. 

      The evaluation also called for continued collaboration focusing on the rural women in the country. The programme in Kyrgyzstan has established effective coordination mechanism, whereby it not only benefitted rural women but also allowed cross fertilization of approaches used by UN agencies, shared knowledge production in the interventions with the highest transformative effect on the rural women. While the focus so far has been on mobilizing the most vulnerable groups of rural women, there is a need to continue institutional support to women entrepreneurs supported through the programme, and women's cooperatives. Short term and funding challenges of the programme created challenges for upscaling of these approaches on a wider scope and to engage in longer-term policy discussions. It is great to see that many inputs recognize the importance of addressing sexual and reproductive rights of rural women. Unfortunately, due to funding limitations, these issues have not been a priority for the joint programme, and have only be partly covered through partnership with other UN agencies. However, upon reflection we see that empowering rural women to exercise reproductive rights is important for transformation of their lives. In addition there is a need to engage in policy discussions at both local and national levels to recognize, redistribute and reduce the care burden on young rural women. There is an urgent need to engage in macroeconomic policy discussions, which go beyond mere support to women's enterpreneurship, but integrate and focus macroeconomic policies on creating environment for the empowerment of rural women. Rural women tend to concentrate in informal employment sector without social security and pension support. Fiscal, monetary and trade policies should be formulated with a focus on creating better opportunities for rural women. Discussions around government spending should be informed by the exsiting research on the huge potential of investing in the care economy and early childhood development. This is unfortunately not possible within a short timeframe and limited funding of the joint programme. It also requires building of local research and expertise in policy formulation from gender perspective.

      Finally, in line with the 'leaving noone behind' principle it is important to understand that rural women are not a homogenous group, and contains groups with multiple forms of discrimination, including single mothers, female-headed households, women with disabilities, women with children with disabilities, women from ethnic and religious minority groups, young women, women of non-traditional sexual orientation, etc. It is important to ensure that these groups have equal opportunity to benefit from the government policies and development assistance.

    • Greetings to the organizers for starting a very topical discussion in the forum.

      I would like to share experience of implementing a Joint Programme on Rural Women Economic Empowerment in Kyrgyzstan. It is implemented jointly by UN Women, FAO, IFAD and WFP, and has actually been launched as a result of the CSW 58 on Rural Women. 

      JP has been designed to address the breadth of challenges faced by rural women, however, practical implementation had to be tailored to the priority needs. Hence, while impressive results were achieved on accessing productive assets, improving nutrition and food security, increasing income, such issues as reproductive rights and violence against women have been sidelined. Practical focus has proven effective in preparing ground for rural women to become politically active, engaging in local decision-making processes, and standing for local elections. It also gave them better voice in families, and household methodologies have been useful in starting re-negotiation of power, distribution of unpaid work, etc. Household methodologies are excellent way of engaging men without directy investing funds and providing resources to men. The results and transformational changes in rural women's lives have been recognized by an external evaluation and mosty attributed to the good coordination mechanism, which allowed UN agencies to deliver as one, going with an intergated development package to the same group of beneficiaries with their specific expertise, and addressing multiple dimensions of poverty, food insecurity and gender inequality. 

      Some reflections on the challenges relate to JP not explicitely addressing issues of reproductive rights and violence. JP did not aim to work on such root causes of inequalities, as education and social norms. These were partly addresses by JP, also through building partnerships with other UN agencies, but due to limited funding could not be addressed at the required level. Lack of funds also prevented JP from upscaling results at the policy level. While a good progress is made in Kyrgyzstan's legislation, policy discussions on gender issues remain within the boudaries of social policies, and are de-prioritized in sectoral policies. Especially, this concerns macro-economic policies, which have important gender implications, but are often seen as gender-nuetral by policy-makers. Engagement in macro-economic discussions, including fiscal policies, priorities for government spending, monetary and trade policies is necessary to bring gender dimension into these discussions. Reduction, redistribution and recognition of unpaid work requires government spending on provision of these services to rural areas. Cases exist demonstrating economic effects of investing in care economy on the growth in the number of jobs and poverty reduction. These policy discussions are not possible yet due to lack of expertise in the civil society and national government, and sectoral experts.