FAO.org

Women play key roles in rural economies, where the fight against hunger and poverty is most pressing. They are also central to family food security and nutrition. However, compared to their male counterparts, rural women typically face multiple gender-based constraints – particularly in their access to productive resources (e.g. land, technologies, training and services) and economic opportunities (e.g. access to markets and decent employment) – which prevent them from becoming equally competitive economic players. Gender equality can be foster through practical policy measures. The Gender in Agricultural Policies Assessment Tool (GAPo) is a toolkit that FAO developed to support national [...]

Mobile phones have been shown (though not uniformly) to positively contribute in various ways to rural development, from reducing information asymmetry, improving functional networks, to increasing access to services and finance. Yet a digital gender divide exists. When contrasted with the fact that women compromise 43% of the worlds’ agricultural labor force, this digital gender divide can inhibit rural development. There is substantial exploration of the digital gender divide in the literature. Yet the answers to questions regarding differential access and use of information and communication technologies are mostly inconclusive. This study tries identify the information needs of the rural [...]

Agriculture and social protection are fundamentally linked in the context of rural livelihoods in Africa. Poor and food-insecure families depend primarily on agriculture and partly on non-farm income and private transfers for their livelihoods, and are the main target of social protection interventions (FAO, 2015). When embedded within a broader rural development framework, stronger coherence between agriculture and social protection interventions can assist in improving the welfare of poor smal l family farms by facilitating productive inclusion, improving risk-management capacities, and increasing agricultural productivity – all of which enable rural-based families to gradually move out of poverty and hunger (Tirivayi [...]

During the review period (2007-2015), the government continued to support small and medium scale producers through several schemes, including distributing seeds, expanding agricultural credit, providing direct payments and marketing programmes. Since 2005, the National Pledge Programme has been targeting rice producers and financing storage in periods of low prices or oversupply.

Rwanda has made remarkable progress since the 1994 genocide, which severely impoverished the population, particularly in delivering education and health services to the poor. The proportion of people suffering from hunger has been halved and the progress toward reducing under-nourishment has been commendable. However, 44 percent of Rwandans still live under the national poverty line.

Poverty is one of the biggest obstacles to human development and economic growth. About 2.1 billion people still live in poverty and 900 million are extreme poor. Most of them live in rural areas and depend on agriculture and rural livelihoods for their income and food security.

There are still 2.1 billion poor people and other 900 million living in extreme poverty, most of which live in rural areas. Most of the poor live in rural areas and 95% per cent of the rural poor live in East Asia, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the rural poor are smallholders and family farmers, who depend on agriculture for their food and income. FAO works through a multi-dimensional approach to address the challenges that poor family farmers face in their daily lives and increase their income generating capacity. At the policy level, FAO helps countries shape poverty [...]

The SSF Guidelines are based on internationally accepted human rights standards and are to be interpreted and implemented in accordance with those standards. Their objectives are to be met through the promotion of a human rights-based approach (HRBA). This approach seeks to ensure the participation of small-scale fishing communities in nondiscriminatory, transparent and accountable decision-making processes by putting particular emphasis on the needs of vulnerable and marginalized groups and developing countries. While the HRBA has been recognized by FAO as a principle that informs the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of programmes and projects, there is still limited experience in its practical application in the context of small-scale [...]

Households living in rural areas of developing countries rely on rain-fed agriculture for their livelihoods and, as such, are highly dependent on climatic conditions. This paper aims at presenting empirical evidence from Zambia to better understand the linkages between climatic shocks, livelihood diversification and welfare outcomes with the goal of highlighting potential policy entry points to incentivize the types of diversification aimed at improving food security and resilience to climate shocks. We also investigate the role of different institutions in shaping diversification decisions to shed some light into potential policy levers at institutional level. We analyze diversification of crops, livestock and income using nationally representative household data from [...]

Since 1950s, Sudan has been intermittently devastated by civil wars and, in 2011, has split into two different nations, the Republic of Sudan (subject of the analysis) and the Republic of the South Sudan. Nowadays, almost half of the population of the Republic of Sudan is at or below the poverty line. The FAO RAP (Resilience Analysis and Policies) team carried out a household resilience analysis examining differences between female- and male-headed households and between regions. This brief presents the results and, based on them, the policy indications.