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

Dear colleagues,

Thank you for this wonderful discussion; I’ve been learning a lot by reading through your many insightful comments and am sure this will continue to be a very productive dialogue. Though I’m new in this space, I would like to contribute a few thoughts without (hopefully) echoing the contributions of others too much. These include 1) how one lens through which we might confront the root of gender inequality is by investigating our own assumptions that often get built into research questions and interventions; 2) the essential function of social policy in improving the quality of life for rural women; and 3) the intertwined role that conflict and climate change are playing and will play in the lives of many rural women.

Despite progress, there are clearly many challenges facing rural women and girls today. As highlighted throughout significant FAO publications, these challenges are evident through deficits in quality of life as well as productivity gaps caused by lack of access to productive assets and technology. Meanwhile, the skills and mindsets of women and girls in rural contexts are changing, as are those of the communities around them.

Whether our understanding of the needs and priorities of women in rural contexts is accurate depends very much on how we frame research questions, facilitate focus groups, and allow for the vast diversity of perspectives arising from the groups that comprise ‘women and girls’. As we seek to understand needs and priorities we should continuously interrogate the assumptions that might underpin our research or intervention design, because the questions we ask shape the answers we receive. Are our questions context appropriate? Do they rely on unfounded assumptions about the innateness of certain gender roles or stereotypes? Are we sufficiently accounting for intersectionality in our understanding of gender (whose voice is missing)? Most importantly, are we listening enough?

Tying this ‘at the root’ approach to interventions to ensure sustainability: FAO already brings the perspective of men and boys into interventions that seek to enhance women and girls’ access to technology and skills training; the support of an entire community is necessary for progress.  For example, in community in programs that seek to increase women’s access to Rural Advisory Services (RAS), women’s enhanced productivity through access to RAS is framed as a benefit to the entire family and wider community. To avoid the pitfalls of making women solely responsible for the unequal institutional context of patriarchal societies, capacity enhancing exercises must continue to be paired with ambitious interventions aimed at changing detrimental perspectives about women and work. If we continue to perpetuate a society in which women’s work is undervalued because they are women, regardless of what skills they employ and jobs they undertake, the mere act of women performing that work will lead to that work being undervalued.

To follow the thread of undervalued work- I would like to highlight the essential role of context-appropriate social policy and programs- particularly social protection, but also education and health systems- in enhancing quality of life for women and girls across the life course. It is essential that any intervention designed to enhance the lives of women and girls in rural settings be viewed within its existing policy ecosystem, particularly social policy, as this setting will determine whether and how women and girls can make use of enhanced access to resources or new skills.

Care burden was mentioned in this discussion as an example of an impediment to improvement in the quality of life for women and girls. Women and girls still provide the vast majority of care. Care is necessary work, but when it is undervalued it gets in the way of education, other types of productive work, and essential free time needed for physical and mental health.  Addressing care burden can take many forms depending on the needs and preferences of the community. It can mean the provision of childcare so that women can engage in economically productive activities, it should include interventions aimed at changing the undervaluation of care work, it can take the form of programs that allow people to be paid for the very difficult work of caring for loved ones, or can involve labor market regulation that is sensitive to the schedules and needs of those who provide care.

Other social protection systems can enhance quality of life for rural women and girls by reducing vulnerability to risk related to life contingencies, prevent engagement in activities that enhance short-term gain at the expense of more sustainable activities, enable women to leverage transfers as productive investments, or can intervene in labor markets to support the participation of marginalized groups. From a broader social policy perspective, universal health and education systems serve to decommodify- empowering women to access their rights to education and health regardless of employment or financial status, contributing to a supportive environment for women’s productive agricultural engagement, and an environment in which girls can prioritize education.

Social policies that are context appropriate are appropriate not just for the population but also for the policy environment. This means ensuring that the redistributive functions of social assistance and insurance programs are not undone by regressive taxation structures, or policies that disenfranchise or otherwise prevent women, girls and other marginalized groups from accessing their rights. Productive social policies complement agricultural polices to improve the quality of rural lives.

Finally, I would like to emphasize the intertwined role that climate change, conflict, and crises will play in the lives of rural women and girls. The uncertainty that climate change generates for rural livelihoods and the threat it poses in the form of increased intensity and frequency of natural hazards demands vigilance as well as adequate policy interventions that shape the way we engage in agriculture and our environment, and how we support those affected by disasters.

Changes in productive land and fears about resource allocation can lead to conflict. A primary concern will be to prevent conflict over land and resources from becoming violent conflict. However, many rural women and girls currently live in contexts of violence and insecurity. As many have pointed out, conflict and other forms of human insecurity affect men and women differently. For women, this often means targeted violence, a lack of legal protection systems related to violent crime, domestic violence/IPV, property rights, exclusion from labor and credit, burdens of labor from informality and fractured families, exclusion from education, and can weaken health and social services for women.  

Interventions in conflict or post-conflict settings can often fail to accurately understand the role of women and girls in conflict, and therefore fail to fully integrate them in the process of building a positive peace. Gender roles structure responsibilities, capabilities, access to rights and engagement with the post-conflict process, and failure to account for gender in this process can have implications for the rights and entitlements of women and girls in long-term development.  Post conflict contexts offer a brief window of time particularly receptive to transformative policy change. If leveraged, this can mean transformative policy gains for gender equality.

Thank you,

Liz

Good afternoon.

I am here by sending the article entitled the above subject to publish / post in FAO (FSN forum). This is for your kind information and further needful.

Thanking you

--

Regards

Mrs.N. Sudharani

Assistant professor (Food Science & Nutrition)

College of Horticulture

Mudigere, Chikkamagalur District

UAHS, Shivamogga

Karnataka, India

The most difficult part is obviously Question 3: how to have a gender impact? Success largely depends on finding the best entry point. In this respect women’s traditional roles can be an advantage rather than a hindrance. Looking at the experience of World Bank funded projects in Punjab/Haryana/Himachal Pradesh there seemed to be a notable success in formation of women’s groups created with the task of collecting money to maintain drinking water systems installed by the project as a component of a wider watershed rehabilitation and development programme. While these had started with this limited aim some at least had developed into rather wider informal savings and loans societies and clearly seemed to have resulted in significant women’s empowerment. Provision of safe water supply is always a high priority for all communities. A water supply component more or less guarantees community support for a project and is an important catalyst for it’s success. It is therefore important that such water supply projects be carefully targeted as part of a more general area development approach. Self-standing initiatives may be successful in solving the drinking water problem, but there is so much more that that catalyst could achieve – if only it was given the chance.

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.

Women need to begin with family support and encouragement, skilling/training followed by handholding and linking with markets to channel the products made by them, be it food stuffs/pickles, textiles or garments/ handicrafts. In India, sewing garments offers good potential to rural women, where they can work in groups and enjoy the work and earning. But this to happen successfully they need all kinds of support which must come to them by international, national or local agencies like Rural Banks. I was impressed to read this blog from The World Bank, Stitching Dreams: In Tamil Nadu, Rural Women Show the Way to Start Up India (http://blogs.worldbank.org/endpovertyinsouthasia/stitching-dreams-tamil…). The collective actions by agricultural and rural development agenices including the banks may help bring the gender transformative impact. Also,  It is worth to mention the role of microcredit for rural women, considering the transformative impact of Yunus's Grammen Bank on women  in Bangladesh. Apart from economics or financial gains, Socially, small loans from Yunus’s Grameen Bank have also proven transformative. women Borrowers from poorer segments are required to go to a weekly meeting where they meet with 30 to 40 other women. At these meetings, they not only make repayments on their loans but also make new friends, get support for their small businesses and learn how to speak up for themselves. They agree to abide by Grameen’s “Sixteen Decisions” that include making dramatic lifestyle changes such as building a latrine, growing more vegetables, keeping their families small and sending their children to school. While these are impossible goals for many women to accomplish completely, they provide a vision of a better life and a pathway (https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/the-impact-of-microcredit-on-w… ).

 The programmes which offer opportunities of more development oriented interactions among women like the cases mentioned above may have grater transformative impact on women, while showing them the way of independent thinking and entrepreneurship.

The questions asked are all encompassing, and I would like to just focus on one aspect and its relation with mechanisation - Why is it so challenging to convince the private sector to engage with rural women as economic actors, despite the evidence demonstrating that this generates profitable outcomes? I have some limited experience that I would like to share.

In India, we do find large companies engaged in developing farm equipments that are used across India in larger and larger numbers. Indeed - India is the largest market for tractors. Additionally to promote such mechanisation, the government has been very helpful in providing subsidies to the farmers so that equipment usage increases. The issue is that such equipments have in majority of cases, led to removal of employment opportunities for women from the farms. Additionally, as manufacturing large equipments require large capital and buying them also requires high capital, this tends to be a network managed by men.

Since the margins are higher - for the large private sector, it becomes easy to set up distribution chains comprising of distributors and retailers. This margin also helps them engage with Agriculture University experts, make and test several prototypes before finalising a design, getting it passed through accrediting institutions and then manufacturing. The holy gravy trail is to get the equipment passed through the government subsidy providing system, which although takes a lot of engagement - ensures that the equipment are bought in hundreds and thousands. Advertisements of moustache wielding strong men promoting such equipment acts as marketing cues and does the rest!

The large private sector does not engage with women because they feel that women have poor purchasing capacity. They feel women need small sized and user-friendly machines, and these do not have much margins attached to them for the private sector to feel that they can invest in their design, manufacturing, accreditation and distribution and make a tidy profit. Local small time fabricators (such as welders and mechanics) who can play a stellar role here, are not trained enough nor receive training to design and fabricate such machines.

However in instances (one in which I was involved) where the technique has been transferred to local fabricators who are not far from where the potential impact population resides, and have invested a small amount of capital - the results have been good. The machines are sold at a cheaper cost, women Self Help Groups have purchased them, used them, and gone back to demand repairs. In such cases, women have been very vocal of the benefits of the machine and the news has spread, creating its own demand.

This is a work of labour and love, and I feel that only a women focus can make it successful. It needs patience and commitment and months of convincing the fabricators and the women that they can create a local ecosystem of demand and supply. I am not sure if private sector, with their focus on the bottom line is interested to work in this, and take peanuts as profits.

Women’s work burden and time poverty

Flavia Grassi and Johanna Schmidt, FAO

Thank you very much for interesting and valuable contributions to this online discussion. As IFAD colleague, Hazel Bedford and Nitya Rao, School of International Development and LANSA, pointed out: one of the main challenges that rural women and girls are facing today, is women’s time burden, and that a large amount of women’s work remain unpaid and unrecognized. That is, at the production, household and community level. The competing demands linked to this triple role, affect not only women’s capacity to better engage in businesses and farming, but they also affect their health, decision-making, and the whole household, including children and youth.

So how can we address these challenges? A key is to encourage the collection of sex-disaggregated labour and time use data, to make women’s contributions visible and promote evidence-based policy formulation. An example of this is a recent case-study on aquaculture in Bangladesh and Indonesia, highlighting women’s contributions to the sector.

Another important step to reduce women’s work burden, is to promote labor-saving technologies and practices (LSTs). FAO has very successfully introduced several LSTs, for example Fish Drying Technologies and Kitchen Gardens. There are also many integrated agro-aquaculture-livestock practices which include labour-saving solutions (for example fish integrated in rice fields considerably reduce weeding requirements).

However, what might be even more effective is to address one of the main root causes: household dynamics and prevailing discriminatory gender norms. A successful example on gender transformative efforts is the project Engaging Men, carried out by CARE in Burundi. A recent FAO publication on time-use in Viet Nam, also explores how gender norms affect labour and access to productive inputs, technologies and services. Based on these findings and in response to Question 3, the following recommendations should be taken into account:

- Challenge gender norms by encouraging discussions and the promotion and redistribution of work-burden at the household level

- Support inclusive community dialogue to identify needs and strengthen technology development

- Support women’s needs of training, technology and services

Finally, supporting capacity development of implementing national partners and extension service providers, is crucial to raise awareness and to make a change. For additional information  on women’s time burden, please also see one of FAO’s flagship publication on the topic, Running out of time.

Flavia Grassi, Senior Gender and Development Expert, FAO

Johanna Schmidt, Gender Consultant, FAO

Question 1: What are the main challenges rural women and girls are facing today?

The recognition of women’s work has been a key concern of feminist politics and scholarship. Agriculture is one such sector where the blurred boundary between productive and reproductive work can lead to the extraction of unpaid and underpaid labour on a large scale. Flagship surveys continue to undercount women’s contribution to the economy and this is one of the great challenges faced by women these days.

Secondly, In addition to their roles as workers, women are more likely to be caregivers within their households. As a result, they have competing claims on their time which influences the choices they make with respect to time allocation, impacts their productivity as well as the quality of the care they provide, and overburdens them.

Women have unequal access to resources and opportunities in agriculture, especially in the developing world. Research and evidence show that women are disadvantaged in terms of asset possession, which includes the highly unequal access to land, and lack access to technologies, agricultural innovations, government services. They are also disadvantaged when using tools and equipment because even though they are meant to be gender neutral they are more suitable for men

Question 2: Are we using the right approaches and policies to close the gender gap?

Donor efforts to empower women often start with the reallocation of economic resources between men and women. It is undeniable that such programs have led to economic freedom for women, and to better economies. But does having more economic resources necessarily lead to empowerment of women? This gender gap cannot be closed unless women empowerment is achieved.

Secondly, there are many policy measures which aim to provide women with opportunities and conducive environments outside the home, such as work laws, and equal transport facilities, data shows that work must first be done to give back women their basic right to “choose.”

Question 3: How can we best achieve gender transformative impacts?

One of the policy recommendations given by the FAO State of Food and Agriculture Report 2011 to close this ‘gender gap’ is by improving the collection and quality of the data to allow for gender differences and implications to be highlighted for more gender-aware agricultural policy.

To tackle the issue at grass root level, policy making needs to focus on changing the mindsets of both men and women. This change can come only through working to change internalized mindsets of “appropriate” gender roles because these very people will go on to become the policy makers, the bosses and the vehicles to convene women’s empowerment. In societies where the power of religion is so strong that people use it to marginalize women, same religious teachings must be used by educated masses to give women their due rights and respect.

Agricultural policies and programs are often framed for the benefit of male farmers. Women agricultural workers, even when they are recognized as farmers, are peripheral to mainstream agricultural policies, despite the fact that they increasingly provide a large part of the low-paid labour, which sustains many agricultural activities. Agricultural and other policies must work for the benefit of women.

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

Rural Women Striving For Gender Transformative Impacts

India is a male dominated country. Where long standing traditions and customs has defined men and women's mind-set and the development of women is hindered due to the gender discrimination created on this basis. It is essential that both men and women should contribute equally towards the development of women. Also when both men and women develop equally in the economic and social sphere, a developed family, society and nation will be possible. Today, the problems of women in the rural areas are mainly due to the following problems:

1. Generally, the Labour class men spend most of their own and their wives’ earnings in the habit of smoking and drinking, and abuse them. While the children are looked after by wives.

Therefore, this habit of smoking and drinking has to be stopped in men. This will prevent domestic violence and men will be able to look after their family properly.

2. In rural areas, women and adolescent girls spend most of their time in cooking, picking firewoods from the forest, fetching water from outside, cleaning the animal shelter and agricultural work.

Hence, women will have to work through planning for drudgery reduction. They have to be provided with such resources which will make their daily activities easier, so that they can find time for studies and economic activities.

3. In the villages, the unemployed youths spend most of their time sitting at random places, playing cards and commenting on females passing by.

Therefore, in the village, the men and women will have to be provided with employment opportunities simultaneously. By which both men and women of each family can work together.

4. In villages, mother and father often go to the wages and leave their daughters to take care of house and her younger siblings. Therefore girls either do not go to school or leave school after primary.

Therefore education should be compulsory for every boy and girl till higher education and it is the government's responsibility to provide resources for this.

5. There are many schemes of Government for the development of women in villages. Which is operated by different departments.

Therefore, it is necessary that all these schemes should be operate under an umbrella by which all the eligible women can get the benefits accordingly.

6. In society percentage of men and women is 50-50.

Therefore, participation of 50-50% for women and men should be compulsory in the development plans and both male and female dominating fields should give equal importance to the other gender.

7. In the villages mostly family has more than 3 children. So they can’t look after them properly.

Hence, family planning is also necessary.

Jyoti Shrivastava

Deputy Director

Women & Child Development

Madhya Pradesh Govt.

INDIA