Dryland peoples face significant challenges from environmental, demographic and socio-economic trends, and the added threat of climate change. These challenges are exacerbated by the generic and multi-faceted marginalization of drylands areas resulting from persistent myths and misconceptions and a history of highly inappropriate policies, under-investment, poverty, social exclusion and environmental degradation. In this context, women face particular kinds of discrimination and experience worse outcomes on core development indicators than national averages. Resilience is a key concept, adopted by research communities and by many international agencies and donors, that encourages thinking on how drylands and the people who live there can, in the short term, be more able to recover from shocks, and in the long term be transformed for the better. There are major opportunities to strengthen the resilience of dryland environments, but also, critically to achieve more change in the social sphere to transform gender relations and empower women.
The growing recognition of the value of dryland livelihood systems, particularly those that are pastoralist and highly adapted to the structural variability of rangeland ecologies, and of pastoralist knowledge, underpins the chance to strengthen the environmental resilience of the drylands. The objective of the study is to propose strategic actions in the policy, institutional and capacity spheres to advance the gender equality and women’s empowerment agenda in the drylands, in three thematic areas: land rights, resilience and governance. These reports are targeted at policy-makers, but it is also of relevance to other dryland stakeholders including civil society, political leaders, traditional authorities and dryland communities and women.