Strengthening women’s roles in producer organizations to combat rural poverty

@FAO/Sophie Grouwels16 April 2018, Stockholm — Stronger women’s leadership roles and improved gender equality in forest and farm producer organizations can make a critical contribution to overcoming rural poverty and building community resilience.

Participants at an international panel discussion on gender equality, organized by the Forest Farm Facility (FFF), based at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome, and Swedish-based development organization We Effect, said that greater equity within forest and farm communities and their producer organizations could lead to better rural livelihoods. That is partly because women invest almost all their income in their families’ well-being, the session heard.

The discussion was held as part of the Stockholm Forum on Gender Equality, which opened on Sunday and has drawn almost 800 people from around 100 countries, representing civil society organizations, governments, industry and academia.

Worldwide, as many as 150 million people could be lifted out of poverty if women were provided with the same access as men to productive resources, according to research cited by FFF and We Effect. Rural women make up almost half of the global agricultural workforce, but suffer disproportionately high levels of poverty.

There is an urgent need to scale up the advantages created by women’s leadership, so that these can be used more widely to advance gender equality, promote communities’ resilience and fight climate change, said speakers representing the two organizations.  The conclusions of the recent UN meeting, Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) are clear: the rights of rural women need to be recognized, fulfilled and affirmed.

Also on the agenda were potential solutions for some of the special challenges faced by women. These include a heavy workload, due to responsibility for childcare, household tasks and rural labour, as well as minimal access to education and financial resources, and discrimination in legal terms, which can exclude women from equitable land tenure.

Outcomes from the discussion are expected to feed into the programmes of relevant organizations, including FFF, We Effect, the African Women's Network for Community Management of Forests and the Asian Farmers Association for Sustainable Rural Development. The session is also likely to inform the European Union’s European Development Days forum, to be held in Brussels on 5-6 June, with the theme: Women and girls at the Forefront of Sustainable Development: protect, empower and invest.

FFF, a partnership between AgriCord, FAO, the International Institute for Environment and Development and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, is active in 10 countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. It also works with a further 24 countries through regional and global federations of forest and farm producer organizations, training events, conferences and exchange visits. We Effect, founded within the cooperative movement in Sweden, has more than 200 partner organizations in 24 countries.