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Many social protection programmes, including cash transfers, public works programmes and asset transfers, target women as main beneficiaries or recipients of benefits. Extending social protection to rural populations has great potential for fostering rural women’s economic empowerment. However, to tap into this potential, more needs to be done. There is much scope for making social protection policies and programmes more gender sensitive and for better aligning them with agricultural and rural development policies to help address gender inequalities. Recognizing this potential and capitalizing on existing evidence, FAO seeks to enhance the contribution of social protection to gender equality and women’s empowerment [...]

The new FAO project Rural youth migration, social protection and sustainable value chains in Kenya, funded by the Italian Development Cooperation, aims to boost employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for Kenyan rural youth along selected value chains. The final objective is to provide alternatives to migration, while also strengthening links with existing social protection programmes.

Exploring the links between migration, agricultural and rural transformation processes is an area where FAO has a comparative advantage thanks to its strong technical expertise and close relationship with governments and relevant stakeholders. The project "Reducing distress migration through local value chain development", funded by the Italian Development Cooperation, aims to address the root causes of distress rural out-migration of youth, by creating employment and entrepreneurship opportunities along food value chains and strengthening linkages with existing social protection programmes.

The Boko Haram insurgency in Cameroon’s Far North region has led to a large influx of refugees from neighbouring Nigeria and of internally displaced people. Local communities, already disproportionately affected by years of low socio-economic development, have suffered from the impact upon the environment, food security, nutrition and basic social services. In an attempt to prevent radicalization of youths and women, the project aimed to build the capacity of local, traditional and religious auth orities to better understand the vulnerabilities, plan the response, tackle the crisis, contribute to the dialogue for peace and constitute a solid basis for peaceful coexistence [...]

The brochure describes the six pilots of the project "Developing capacity for strengthening food security and nutrition in selected countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia". Following an explanation of making operational the linkages between social protection, nutrition and agricultural interventions across the food systems, the brochure describes in detail the “School food and nutrition programmes linked to the agricultural sector”, “Strengthening food systems for nutrition sensitive social protection” and “Promoting inclusive economic growth through matching grants” pilots in Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Also available in Russian. 

This brochure presents the results of an impact evaluation carried out on the Child Grants Programme in Lesotho.  The evaluation investigated the impact of the programme on three key areas, namely income and economic security, financial inclusion and dietary practices, and nutrition for adults and children.  Adopting a mixed-method approach that combines quantitative and qualitative analysis, the study aims at informing policy makers about the importance of combining social protection and rural livelihood interventions as opposed to the implementation of standalone programmes.  

Increase the use of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure among CSOs and Grassroots Organizations – Senegal is a country factsheet that provides information on the project “Increase the use of the VGGT among CSOs and Grassroots Organizations”, a general overview of governance of natural resources in the country, and information on activities undertaken in the country in collaboration with local CSOs and grassroots organizations. Only available in French.

The Karamoja region, in North East Uganda, is one of the least developed regions of the country, and is highly vulnerable to resource-based conflict and climate change variability. Addressing food insecurity of vulnerable people is a major challenge in the region. Measuring resilience provides more informed policies for withstanding shocks. For this reason, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Food Programme (WFP) developed a Joint Resilience Strategy (JRS) launched in January 2016. The JRS is based on four main pillars: strengthening the productive sector to increase household income [...]

FAO promotes the use and scale up of Cash+ as a tool for emergency response, strengthening resilience and reducing rural poverty. The Cash+ model supports the enhancement of vibrant and diversified livelihoods, providing an important safety net against shocks and stresses for poor and vulnerable rural households. As such, the model has great transformative potential. Cash+ is a tool for quick-impact humanitarian response and recovery as well as serving as a component of long-term social protection and resilience programmes. FAO’s work on Cash+ is based on field experience and research, which show the potential of this tool to sustainably enhance the [...]

This discussion aims to gather the approaches and strategies used in SIDS to adapt to climate change, while building resilience of the most poor and vulnerable. Particularly, its purpose is:   to learn how SIDS are reducing the exposure of the poor and most vulnerable people to climate change and climate related events; to learn about pathways, tools and challenges, including recommendations for effectively building adaptive capacity to eradicate poverty and achieving food security and nutrition within the context of climate change.  The discussion focuses on the following questions: Can you share examples of actions that are being undertaken to reduce poverty, food insecurity and nutrition [...]