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The number of Dimitra Clubs in sub-Saharan Africa has reached 3 000, marking a milestone. This gender-transformative approach aimed at rural people’s empowerment through community mobilization has proved increasingly successful.Through this flexible approach developed by FAO, the rural communities themselves, through their decisions and actions, determine the changes that need to be made to their environment, and how to improve their livelihoods.The Dimitra Clubs’ areas of impact are many and varied. Several themes shape this special edition of the newsletter: community mobilization, gender and women’s leadership, food security and nutrition, social cohesion and peace, adaptation to climate change, rural organizations, [...]

In recent years, along with the growing recognition of the rural gender gap in financial access as a key constraint to rural development, research has focused increasingly more towards analysing in depth the financial habits and patterns followed by women in rural areas, in order to produce observations and insights that could foster a more gender-sensitive policy approach towards financial inclusion.In line with this trend, this paper sets to explore the financial habits and constraints of rural women in two Sub-Saharan African countries (Mozambique, Tanzania), both at country and village level, with the objective of answering how, and why, they [...]

Risings, conflicts and disasters around the world, and the negative impacts on lives and properties, are drawing attention to the need to increase the resilience of vulnerable rural communities and their livelihood sources from agriculture and rural areas. Protection from sexual and gender-based violence is also an area of work that merits special attention particularly in areas of protracted crises.This report documents some good practices and lessons learned from around the world with a specific focus on emergency and humanitarian situations. It highlights a few successful FAO’s interventions on resilience building and gender mainstreaming.The information in this report can be [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all parts of society and livelihoods around the globe. It is though worth recognizing that disadvantaged segments of populations like rural young women and men will be impacted harder, nevertheless, when proactively engaged, they have demonstrated to be innovators in their own sectors to surmount the pandemic impact. As governments and development partners take steps to address the economic and social effects of COVID-19, they should not allow a reversal of the rural youth progress achieved in recent years in terms of inclusion in food systems, access to education, vocational education and training, and access to [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all parts of society and livelihoods around the globe. It is though worth recognizing that disadvantaged segments of populations like rural young women and men will be impacted harder, nevertheless, when proactively engaged, they have demonstrated to be innovators in their own sectors to surmount the pandemic impact. As governments and development partners take steps to address the economic and social effects of COVID-19, they should not allow a reversal of the rural youth progress achieved in recent years in terms of inclusion in food systems, access to education, vocational education and training, and access [...]

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will vary for different groups of rural population, with the highest impact expected to be on farmers and other vulnerable groups, especially women and youth. Targeted support is feasible only by activating a network of actors or organizations within agricultural innovation systems (AIS) and promoting customized technologies and practices suitable for location specific contexts. This brief illustrates the extensive repository of good practices and technologies provided by FAO as part of its online knowledge portals. These practices and technologies can be easily adopted to respond to the needs of the smallholders, rural youth and [...]

This fact sheet describes the course that explains the importance to take into account gender and social issues when dealing with land tenure, and what actions must be adopted so that women and men from different social groups can equally participate in and benefit from land tenure governance processes.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, many countries are adopting measures to control the spread of the virus. While the health aspects of the pandemic have not affected rural areas as much as urban centres, containment measures pose new challenges to rural women with regards to their roles in household food security, as agricultural producers, farm managers, processors, traders, wage workers and entrepreneurs. Past experience shows that rural women are disproportionally affected by health and economic crises in a number of ways, including but not limited to food security and nutrition, time poverty, access to health facilities, services and economic opportunities, [...]

Measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 include strong restrictions of movement which dramatically change daily lives and impact agricultural livelihoods. These measures are particularly difficult for the rural poorest and most vulnerable, who tend to hold jobs and occupations which cannot be performed remotely. Many of the world’s poor depend on public spaces and movement for their livelihoods, including seasonal agricultural work and traveling to markets to sell or buy produce and/or inputs, etc. This briefs explains how social protection measures could shield the rural poor from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, while providing a series of social protection [...]

In the 2017 and 2018 editions of the Africa Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition, FAO reported that the prevalence of undernourishment was rising in the region. The latest data shows that the deterioration has slowed, but there remain 256 million hungry people in Africa today. The report further documents that although many African countries are making progress towards reducing malnutrition, progress is too slow to meet six key nutrition targets, which form part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) monitoring framework and the World Health Assembly global nutrition targets. Food insecurity has been rising in Africa in recent [...]