CSW62 High-level interactive dialogue Accelerating implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and achieving concrete results by 2020

Can you share some good practices of FAO’s work for women and girls? How can these be scaled up to make a difference in the lives of women and girls, especially in the context of SDGs?”

Since the Beijing Conference in 1995, significant progress has been made to address in the development and humanitarian agendas the needs and priorities of women and girls, particularly from rural areas. Many women have gained more access to markets, information, financial services, greater engagement with the private sector, skills development, energy, labour-saving technologies and remittances, and many became successful entrepreneurs, leaders in the community and are more respected in their homes. Women fulfil important roles throughout agrifood value chains, and play essential roles in food security and nutrition, and in the management of natural resources.

To achieve the SDGs “leaving no one behind”, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development calls for transformational change at all levels. FAO supports member countries in achieving gender equality and empowering women for attaining food security and nutrition and eliminating rural poverty. Our Organization supports governments with the implementation of the Article 14 of CEDAW related to the rights of rural women, and the General Recommendation 34 that provides practical suggestions for policy and programmatic measures. For example, in Guatemala we have supported the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food in the development of the Policy for Gender Equality and related Strategic Framework.

Gender mainstreaming initiatives focus on women’s economic empowerment, ensuring they have access to inputs, technical advice and markets, and have a voice in decision-making bodies and rural institutions and how the income they generate is spent. To further improve the quality of life of rural women, more efforts are needed to reduce their work burden and protect them from gender-based violence.

A major area of FAO’s work is to support policy-makers in designing gender-equitable agricultural policies and creating a gender-inclusive legal system, to close the gender gap in rural societies. FAO’s activities include to:

• sensitize agricultural policy-makers to the needs and capacities of rural women as important economic actors and resilience building agents;
• collect up-to-date data on the realities faced by rural women and men to inform policy development, including labour- and time-use data to make women’s contributions visible;
• enhance the participation of rural women in policy-planning processes through an active policy dialogue and multi-stakeholders platforms;
• develop legal frameworks for protecting women’s rights (for example, land tenure and inheritance), and raise awareness on their rights and entitlements;
• design good governance mechanisms for proper policy implementation;
• strengthen women’s organizations.

Specific tools and approaches were developed to support policy-makers, including the Gender in Agricultural Policies Analysis Tool (GAPo) that can be used to assess the gender equality gaps in national policies; and the Practical Guide for Improving gender equality in territorial issues (known as IGETI) to address existing inequalities between men and women within a given territory/landscape.

We promote the adoption of gender-sensitive and climate-smart approaches, by adapting agro-ecological practices to the socio-economic context and addressing the specific constraints women face. For example conservation agriculture, improved home gardens and small scale irrigation have a high potential to benefit women farmers.

Another important area of work is related to facilitating women’s access to labour-saving technologies and practices to overcome production constraints.  A methodology to assess labour and time use in different production systems was developed, and we support the introduction of labour-saving technologies and practices for women in all agriculture subsectors. For example, kitchen gardens were introduced in many countries to facilitate women’s access to fresh vegetables and herbs, reducing water-fetching time.

FAO is also assisting many countries in Africa, Asia and the Near East in increasing the productive and entrepreneurial capacity of rural women in the development of sustainable value chains that can offer pathways out of food insecurity for millions of people. A specific conceptual framework was developed to support practitioners and decision-makers in planning and implementing value chain interventions from which women can equally benefit. This approach aims at improving women’s access to services, knowledge and technology by strengthening their participation and decision-making capacity in organizations and cooperatives in selected agrifood value chains. In Rwanda for example we supported women farmers and entrepreneurs by working with dairy cooperatives and increasing business opportunities for women, by providing training on dairy herd management, enhancing their leadership skills and developing a specific business development services targeting both women and men. Past experience has shown the importance of also engaging men in addressing gender inequalities as women, they can use their more influential position to help speed up the process of closing the gender gap.