This post is written by Wei Zhang, Senior Research Fellow, Environment and Production Technology Division, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

While healthy soils play a critical role in supporting agricultural productivity, climate change mitigation and resilience, and a range of other ecosystem services and are thus an integral part of sustainable food systems, large parts of African agricultural soils remain highly degraded. While there are hundreds of technical options for improving soil health, there are a myriad of sociocultural, institutional, economic, and policy barriers preventing their adoption at scale.

At the same time, there is an emerging consensus within the international development community that gender equality and women’s empowerment are both an end in themselves and an important means for achieving a range of economic and social development objectives such as improved food security, child nutrition and education, and women’s health.

However, the role of women’s empowerment for soil health is not yet well understood and also seldom recognized in interventions that aim to improve soil health and land management outcomes. A recent study" Gendered opportunities for improving soil health: A conceptual framework to help set the research agenda " supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems reviewed relevant gender literature and developed a conceptual framework (Figure 1) to help illuminate important gender considerations for soil health and land management that could be key in supporting adoption of sustainable soil health management practices.
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