As we celebrate International Women’s Day on 8 March 2025, we reflect on what FAO evaluations and the Reach, Benefit, Empower framework have taught us about working towards gender equality.

Imagine working hard each day to grow food or provide for your family, yet having little or no say in the resources used, the way your household land is managed, or how your earned income is spent. That remains the reality for many women in agriculture. While some gender gaps in agrifood systems have narrowed, women in agriculture still face more obstacles than men. They have less access to markets, land, and other productive assets and inputs, credit, agricultural training and technical advice. Women in smallholder farms often have limited decision-making power over agricultural production and output within the household. At the community level, they may be excluded from water users' association and decisions about community irrigation systems. Addressing these gaps doesn’t just improve women’s lives — it benefits their children, their households and entire communities.

At FAO, every project we design has the potential to either close or widen these gaps.

International Women’s Day is the perfect moment to look at what FAO’s evaluations can teach us about working towards gender equality.

Here is what the Reach, Benefit, Empower framework  – along with recent FAO evaluations – have shown us about how to truly reach, benefit and empower women in our projects.

Reaching women in FAO projects

A first step to well-designed and implemented projects and programmes is understanding where and how these overlapping factors intersect to create barriers to participation. Projects and programmes can then be designed with the right strategies to reduce these barriers and better reach women and other disadvantaged groups by ensuring project components are accessible. 

To measure reach, it is essential to track the share of those who participated in the programme activities by gender and other identifying factors. 

Going beyond reach to real benefits

Some projects and programmes go beyond simply reaching women and other disadvantaged groups – they also aim to benefit. This requires incorporating needs, preferences and constraints of those marginalized in the target community into design and implementation. While a review of the literature and discussions with key informants in the community provide valuable insights, well-designed projects and programmes also include direct consultations with and participation of marginalized community members themselves. This participatory approach can ensure interventions address actual rather than perceived needs of the target community and create opportunities for co-designed solutions.

To measure who benefited and how, it is important to track the share of people who improved their circumstances, disaggregated by gender and other identifying factors. Ideally, the extent of impact should also be assessed through robust evaluation methodologies. 

Empowering women 

Projects and programmes that go beyond reach and benefit aim to economically empower women and other disadvantaged groups. The goal is to enhance their decision-making power in households and communities. It often goes-hand-in-hand with the aim to transform, which seeks to reform the surrounding social and political environment to achieve equality. An example of this is addressing engrained norms and forms of discrimination that limit women’s ability to fully participate as leaders in the community, or in certain productive activities. These different approaches are most effective when implemented holistically, involving both men and women in the target community.

Considering intrahousehold dynamics

Any well-designed project or programme, regardless of its aim, who is targeted, and how it is implemented, should consider the ways in which household members are socially and economically interlinked and how intrahousehold dynamics may shape outcomes. These intrahousehold dynamics include:

• who has the most influence over decisions on how the household’s needs are met;
• the way key decisions are made in the household;
• who controls and decides how income is earned and spent;
• who has access to the household’s productive assets and controls how they are used;
• who engages in the different market and non-market labour activities; and
• whether information is shared with others in the household and how.

These dynamics can shape the way different household members are reached and benefit from the project, and who within the household bears any monetary and non-monetary costs, including additional labour and time burdens.

Several studies have highlighted how projects failed or have resulted in unintended consequences because they did not consider intrahousehold dynamics and the intertwined roles of women and men in the household.

Well-designed projects and programmes consider the socially differentiated impacts of the project and how these interact with the dynamics within households. They also recognize the need for data collected not just to track and monitor household dimensions, but also dimensions that track women and men’s welfare separately. 

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