COVID-19 continues to sweep across the world, and has now spread from the developed world to the global South. With rural populations making up three-quarters of the world’s poor, the impact of the pandemic will inevitably be most devastating in developing nations.

Emerging evidence from this pandemic and experience from previous disease outbreaks and other crises show that it’s rural women who will disproportionately bear the resulting socio-economic hardships. As critical contributors to their households and communities, rural women must play a key role in any response and recovery agenda.
Rural Women Bear the Brunt of the Impacts of COVID-19
Rural women are the backbone of agriculture and guardians of household food security in their communities. They make essential contributions as smallholder farmers, as unpaid labor on family farms, and as wage laborers, including as seasonal and informal workers on commercial farms. Especially as men become more involved in off-farm labor or move to urban centers for work, women are assuming a bigger share of agricultural production beyond their roles as principal household food producers and fuelwood and water collectors. They are also almost exclusively responsible for children’s nutrition.

Restrictions on the movement of people and goods — including border closures, lockdowns and other measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 — are disrupting agricultural value chains and food systems. While this affects rural farmers generally, women face barriers and disadvantages that make them less able to recover than men.
Women have weaker land tenure security and less access to productive resources than men, such as draught animals and mechanical tools. This lack of assets, coupled with their lower literacy rates and mobility and time constraints, often hinder women’s participation in agricultural extension programs and their access to credit and financial services. As markets close and cross-border trade declines, they suffer the double-whammy of not being able to sell their produce (or selling at very low prices), and lacking access to seeds, tools and other inputs needed for the next planting season.
Additionally, female agricultural workers — who make up about 43% of the agricultural labor force in developing countries — are over-represented in unpaid and low-paid seasonal or part-time jobs. They are less likely to be entitled to unemployment benefits when they lose their livelihoods due to lockdowns. Those who are informal workers because of their social status may be left out of social protection measures, such as cash transfers enacted in response to the pandemic.

When governments enforcing lockdowns shift to digital platforms to disseminate information about the pandemic or available support, rural women may be left out. Poor rural women, particularly in South Asia and Africa, make up majority of the 393 million women who lack access to mobile phones and internet connections and rely mainly on person-to-person networks for information.

Meanwhile, when food becomes scarce, coping strategies such as buying less food, reducing the number of meals, or switching to less nutritious food are not gender neutral. Women often buffer the impact by reducing their own food intake or by eating last so that the rest of the family has enough to eat. In rural communities where tradition dictates that men eat first and receive the best food, women and girls must further cut back their food intake. This, of course, will compromise the health and immunity of women and girls at a time when they’re needed most.

Lockdowns also result in increased unpaid domestic and care work for women, which in normal times already average 3 times as much as men. Aside from being charged with caregiving, food preparation, and maintaining the house, women are primarily responsible for nursing back to health family members who fall ill. Paid or formal work will be tougher with round-the-clock household tasks.

5 Ways to Ensure Gender-sensitive Policies in the Wake of COVID-19
A gender analysis conducted by CARE International and the International Rescue Committee showed that countries’ COVID-19 responses generally fail to adequately account for the gender dimensions of risk, vulnerability, resources and coping capabilities. The pandemic response must avoid exacerbating the inequalities faced by rural women while addressing the negative impacts disproportionately borne by them.

Five important tactics include:
1. Ensure women’s access to information and participation in data collection.
Women’s roles as primary caregivers necessitate that they receive up-to-date public health and support information, such as symptoms to watch for, hygiene and disease prevention, contact tracing, and details on social assistance programs. It’s also important that government agencies obtain from rural women information on gender-differentiated impacts of the pandemic.
Governments and organizations should disseminate information in formats that are accessible and understandable to rural women. Given their lower levels of literacy and lower access to communication technologies, this may require translating written communications into the local dialect, using pictures, and accounting for local norms and practices in the interpretation. Media communications should prioritize local radio, with targeted messaging for women. Governments using digital platforms to disseminate information should consider distributing mobile phones to women.
Data collection efforts should apply sex-disaggregation. Rather than limiting household surveys to the household head, typically deemed to be the husband, survey organizers should ask women specific questions about their needs and the impacts they experience, and tailor policy measures accordingly.

Women’s groups — including savings, farmer and social groups, and community-based organizations — can be powerful partners in information dissemination and gathering. For example, in India, women’s self-help groups (SHGs) are bringing pandemic prevention efforts to hard-to-reach communities. In the state of Kerala, a women’s SHG helped the government by using social media, posters and weekly meetings to communicate proper handwashing and social distancing procedures. In Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, a women’s SHG spread similar information through leaflets, songs, videos and text messages. Read further from the source