FAO celebrates Women’s International Day 2021

As every year, International Women’s Day provides an opportunity to celebrate the progress achieved in promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment, reflect on setbacks and emerging challenges, and call for change about the inequalities that persist.

This year’s theme, dedicated to “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world”, celebrates the tremendous efforts being made by women and girls in facing the pandemic. In all countries, women have stood at the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis, as health care workers, caregivers, innovators, community organizers, and as some of the most exemplary and effective leaders in responding to the crisis.

The pandemic has highlighted the centrality of women’s contributions and the society’s reliance on their work - particularly their unpaid care and domestic work. At the same time, it has also exposed the disproportionate burdens that women and girls carry in times of crisis, and the structural inequalities that still exist across every sphere.

Persisting and emerging challenges to rural women’s empowerment in the Near East and North Africa

In addition to the pre-existing systemic barriers to rural women’s and girls’ participation and leadership, new barriers have emerged as a result of the pandemic.  

Their agricultural activities have been affected to a greater extent than those of men – which is particularly worrying, given that they were already at a disadvantage in accessing productive assets and resources. Across the region, women represent less than 5 per cent of all agricultural land holders (FAO, 2018) and a very small portion of real estate owners: 6.4 per cent in Tunisia, 4.4 percent in Morocco, 4.1 percent in Algeria, 4 percent in Egypt and 3 percent in Jordan. In 75 percent of the cases, this real estate consists of small-scale farms (IEMED, 2017).

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