Dimitra Clubs: Leaving no one behind through community engagement and women’s empowerment

FAO

Dimitra Clubs: Leaving no one behind through community engagement and women’s empowerment

Year of publication 2023

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Pages 2p.

Author FAO

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet

Full item page

Synopsis (short abstract) The world is not on track in making the pledge of leaving no one behind a reality, particularly in rural areas where most of the extreme poor live. Rural people in low-income countries increasingly face structural constraints in seizing socio-economic and political opportunities. In addition, gender discriminatory social norms prevent rural women and girls from realizing their full potential as leaders and economic agents, constraining the livelihoods and well-being of entire rural societies. In this context, development and humanitarian actors tend to overlook the use of community engagement and gender-transformative approaches, despite the fact that these are cost effective and have high returns. Considering these pressing challenges, it is of paramount importance to promote collective action at community level – ensuring ownership and sustainability – to trigger transformative changes in terms of gender equality, women’s leadership and social inclusion.

Language English

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In Africa, women are critical agents of change in the fight against rural poverty, hunger and malnutrition. They are the backbone of their households, communities, and rural economies covering important roles in food production, processing and marketing, and also in the nutrition of the family. However, with food systems rapidly modernizing and dramatic effects of climate change and environmental degradation becoming the “new normal”, they continue to face multiple challenges due to persisting gender discriminations. Over the years, remarkable political commitments to improve women’s condition and status have been made, but substantial gender gaps still remain in the access and control over productive resources and assets, services and markets. Overcoming these challenges will require addressing the root causes of gender inequalities through innovative and gender-transformative approaches. According to FAO’s latest estimates (SOFI, 2019), the number of people suffering from hunger has been rising. Just this trend - and the awareness that we lost a decade of progress - is sufficient to underscore the immense challenge of achieving the Zero Hunger target by 2030. The situation is most alarming in sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of undernourished people has steadily increased since 2014, to 237 million in 2018. These findings are in line with the 2019 SDG report. It shows that we are still lagging behind in achieving the SDGs as the global response has not been ambitious enough.
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Most rural women and girls experience multiple disadvantages in their lives, because of systematic gender inequalities. Structural drivers, including discriminatory norms, create and maintain gender gaps in development outcomes. Gender transformative programmes seek to address the underlying structural causes of gender inequalities and transform unequal gender roles and relations. This paper aims to orient the future policy, research and programmatic work of national governments, practitioners and development partners on the adoption of a gender transformative approach (GTA) to social protection to improve results on rural poverty reduction, food security and nutrition. Social protection interventions rarely explicitly address social and gender norms and power dynamics at household level and beyond, but there is a growing demand to understand the potential of social protection policies and programmes to contribute to gender transformative outcomes. This paper critically examines the scope for social protection to be gender transformative and discusses the available evidence on gender transformative impacts of social protection. It also aims to identify how programmes can realistically become more transformative in their objectives, design features and outcomes.