Reduce Rural Poverty

Gender and Rural Advisory Services Assessment Tool (GRAST)

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Women farmers, who make up on average 43 percent of the agricultural labour force, face gender-specific barriers which limit their agricultural productivity compared with that of men. These constraints include lack of access to rural advisory services (RAS) and producers’ organizations. Improving women’s access to RAS can help close the gender gap in agriculture by making information, new technologies, skills, knowledge, and other productive resources more accessible to female farmers. The GRAST provides: amethodology for assessing the gender-sensitiveness of RAS and organizations; feedback on areas of the RAS provision that need improvement or that are working well. The tool focuses on three areas of inquiry (the enabling environment, the institutional level, and the individual level) and is expected to help systematize good practices and lessons learned to provide targeted policy advice and capacity development to member countries working towards gender-equitable rural advisory services.