Achieving gender equality in agrifood systems: FAO's role in advancing SDG 5

In March, the UN highlighted Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5: Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls.

FAO is committed to addressing gender disparities in agrifood systems and promoting gender equality and women's empowerment as a catalyst for resilient and inclusive rural economies and the eradication of hunger and poverty.

Women perform key functions in agrifood systems, contributing significantly to agricultural production, processing and retail, off-farm agrifood system employment and natural resources management. They also shoulder a disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic and care work. Their knowledge and activities contribute significantly to food security, nutrition, rural development and safeguarding biodiversity in general. 

Women play a key role in agrifood systems, representing 37 percent of rural agricultural employees at a global level and 48 percent in low-income countries (FAO, 2024). Yet, the full potential of women in agrifood systems remains unrealized due to persistent structural barriers, including limited access to and control over land, finance, technology, education, and economic opportunities. Their employment also tends to be more informal, insecure, and hazardous, with adverse effects on income, well-being and food security. Tackling these inequalities is essential not only to uphold women’s rights but also to unlock their capacity to drive inclusive growth, resilience, and sustainable development across agrifood systems. FAO’s pivotal 2023 flagship report on The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems provided a number of findings in this regard: It estimates that closing the gender gap in farm productivity and the wage gap in agrifood system employment could boost global GDP by nearly USD 1 trillion and reduce food insecurity for 45 million people.

FAO has also produced a groundbreaking report, The unjust climate. Measuring the impacts of climate change on rural poor, women, and youth, which highlights the disproportionate impact of climate change on women and the barrier it poses towards achieving SDG 5. For example, female-headed households experience annual average income losses of 8 percent due to heat stress and 3 percent due to floods, relative to male-headed households.  A 1 °C increase in long-term average temperatures is associated with a 23.6 percent reduction in farm income and a 34 percent reduction in the total incomes of female headed households, relative to male-headed households. 

Among the many actions FAO undertakes to advance SDG 5, the following are illustrative examples:

Supporting countries to enhance women’s access to resources and services

FAO provided technical support to the Cambodian Fisheries Administration through the  European Union-funded “Cambodia Programme for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth in the Fisheries Sector (CAPFISH).” The programme facilitated gender and child labour assessments, the development of a gender action plan and the creation of awareness-raising materials. Additionally, it enhanced fisheries data collection and information management while providing capacity-building to the relevant government counterparts.

© FAO/TANG CHHIN Sothy

FAO advocates for women’s equal access to and control over productive resources and services such as land, technology, finance and education. To achieve this, it provides technical support to governments and parliaments to develop gender-responsive public policies and programmes, establish sex-disaggregated statistics and implement projects that address the gender gaps in food security, nutrition, poverty and climate resilience. 

The FAO Policy on Gender Equality (2020-2030) provides a framework to guide FAO in addressing gender disparities in agriculture and food systems.

One of FAO’s key tools, Gender-Lex, is a cross-cutting thematic database on national and international legal and policy instruments on gender equality in areas under FAO’s mandate. It helps to facilitate access to relevant policy and legal instruments and highlights national approaches to proactively address gender inequalities through sectoral legislation.

Utilizing this data, FAO produces Country Gender Assessment (CGA) reports, which provide insights into gender roles and disparities in agriculture and rural economies. These reports highlight inequalities in access to resources, financial and advisory services and decent employment and their implications for the sustainable management of natural resources, food security and nutrition. They additionally offer concrete recommendations for gender-responsive policies, strategies and programmes.

Gender transformative approaches

FAO is tackling economic violence and early marriage in rural Syria through Dimitra Clubs, which engage farmers, couples, and community leaders in discussions to dissect and challenge harmful social norms with community-based solutions. 

©FAO Syria

For gender equality and women’s empowerment to become a reality, innovative, transformative approaches for gender equality are needed to tackle the underlying social, behavioural and institutional causes of gender inequalities. These transformative approaches examine, challenge and change the structural causes of gender inequalities rooted in imbalanced power dynamics and relations between people based on their gender, inequitable social institutions and structures, as well as discriminatory legislative and policy frameworks. 

Through the Joint Programme on Gender Transformative Approaches for Food Security and Nutrition, FAO, IFAD and WFP worked together to embed gender transformative approaches in policy dialogues, programmes, working modalities and institutional culture. 

FAO Dimitra Clubs exemplify effective gender transformative interventions. They serve as safe platforms for discussion, problem-solving and collective action at community level, enabling women to become key agents of change in the development of their communities. Men, community leaders and local authorities are also engaged as crucial allies in advancing gender equality, fostering collaboration and mutual understanding within communities. The clubs typically address issues related to improving rural livelihoods and driving social change, including tackling gender-discriminatory norms and gender-based violence. Achievements include women’s recognized participation in local decision-making, shifts in gender roles, and improved household relationships. 

Between 2018 and 2023, FAO successfully integrated this community-led, gender-transformative approach into more than 100 initiatives across 18 countries. Over 10,000 Dimitra Clubs, involving 300,000 members, have indirectly benefited 12 million rural people. The clubs’ initiatives have contributed to improve food security and nutrition, enhanced climate resilience, strengthened social cohesion, and the empowerment of women and girls – while also challenging harmful social norms that perpetuate gender inequality. 

Strengthening women’s role in agricultural value chains

Jacqueline Ruby Sackitey and Sylvia Frimpomaa Okoampa-Agyemang, participants of the FAO-ITC Programme on Empowering women and boosting livelihoods through agricultural trade: Leveraging the AfCFTA.

© FAO/Kleio Studios

FAO facilitates inclusive agrifood systems by connecting women farmers with markets and financial institutions. A notable example is FAO’s partnership with the International Trade Centre (ITC) on the programme: “Empowering women and boosting livelihoods through agricultural trade: Leveraging the AfCFTA (the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement).”

This initiative supports women-led micro, small and medium sized enterprises in the agrifood sector by providing trade facilitation training to enhance business readiness and competitiveness through an enabling and inclusive business and policy environment within the AfCFTA. It also pilots access-to-finance initiatives, providing them with essential business and financial skills, as well as promoting an inclusive financial landscape by working closely with financial institutions to facilitate the development of financial tools and credit schemes that reflect the assets profile, cash flow and business placement of women agripreneurs.

The programme also generates evidence on the important nexus between gender equality and trade systems, as well as data on women’s trade potential along major value chains in the Africa region, including fisheries and aquaculture in Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal, and soybean to poultry in Malawi, South Africa and the Republic of Tanzania. With strong support from regional and national institutions, the programme has trained over 600 women in person and online, conducted investment-readiness bootcamps for female entrepreneurs and strategic business to business meetings connecting them with financial institutions and generated important policy advice and programmatic entry points to facilitate and support women’s agrifood trade operations in the context of the AfCFTA. 

The road ahead for achieving SDG 5

While actions to enhance gender equality and women’s empowerment have increasingly been mainstreamed into development programmes and financing mechanisms that focus on agriculture and rural development, only a small fraction of programming treats gender as a fundamental issue. FAO’s 2023 report on The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems provided comprehensive evidence of the need to prioritize gender equality and women’s empowerment in agrifood systems. In response, FAO launched “Commit to Grow Equality” in 2024 - the first multistakeholder initiative that shifts the spotlight directly onto the role of women in agrifood systems. The initiative calls for partners to make gender equality and women’s empowerment the key objective of agrifood system interventions.

The initiative aims to enhance gender equality and women’s empowerment in agrifood systems through financing and partnerships and thereby accelerate efforts to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment in the remaining five years of the 2030 Agenda. Bringing together governments, philanthropy, the private sector, the United Nations and other multilateral agencies, civil society organizations and others, the process aims to unite key stakeholders to commit investments and partnerships to make agrifood systems work better for women.

As part of its commitments under this initiative, FAO has pledged to track gender-transformative actions in all of its projects and ensure they feature in 10 percent of them by 2030. Additionally, FAO will promote the dissemination and uptake of the Committee on World Food Security’s Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment in 10 countries by 2026- a key tool for strengthening policy frameworks. 

Furthermore, by 2026, FAO will launch a dedicated gender domain in its statistical database, FAOSTAT. This platform will provide open access to all available data on critical dimensions of gender equality in agrifood systems, such as women’s work, training and asset ownership, as well as data on women’s food security and nutrition. Improved data availability and accessibility will increase visibility of the existing gaps and support evidence-based actions to close them.