Women are integral to food systems, playing multiple roles in the task of feeding the world. But even today, women are often excluded from agricultural development as their realities, preferences, and ambitions are overlooked. Their limited access to assets, opportunities, and decisions holds back entire societies.

Over the past 50 years, CGIAR has developed a number of breakthrough innovations that have contributed to progress toward gender equality, by bringing into the limelight the realities, preferences, and potential of women farmers, while breaking down the barriers that stand in the way of gender equality, now and for future generations.

This International Women’s Day, CGIAR chooses to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality. Together, we can create a more inclusive world.

Women comprise, on average 43 % of the agricultural labor force in low- and middle-income countries.
In least developed countries, around 2 in 3 women are employed in farming

Source: Ceres 2030: Ending Hunger Sustainably: The role of gender
Achieving gender equality and longevity of food systems is a matter of fixing the system, not the women. Interventions implemented ‘gender blind’ – with no consideration for underlying gender norms and relationships – are bound to maintain the status quo.

What’s needed for more equitable as well as more effective development outcomes is changing the unwritten rules – in society and in research – that have put men in charge of technologies, incomes and decisions. That’s why we need to invest in and widely apply gender-transformative approaches that can address the roots of gender-based inequalities.

Since 2012, CGIAR scientists at WorldFish and their partners have spearheaded the conceptualization, testing, and scaling of gender transformative approaches within CGIAR and in aquaculture, fisheries, agriculture, and broader development sectors. This has included a focus on gender-equitable control over assets and resources including microcredit and processing technologies.

Instead of burdening women with the responsibility for equality, gender transformative approaches engage men and women together as agents of change. As such, the aim is for women and men, from the household scale to the community and beyond, to shift constrictive gender norms and other structural barriers that underpin the persistence of inequalities in aquatic and land-based food systems.
Read the whole story