Gender Integration: The Key to Success

Gender analysis reveals that while women play critical roles in agriculture, they face greater barriers than men to increasing their productivity and income. Furthermore, around the world, women are the primary agents in providing for the wellbeing of their families and communities. Barriers to access in agriculture, the sector that forms the foundation of the economy for the rural poor, have severely limited women’s ability to foster sustainable agricultural growth. The global economic crisis has exacerbated these inequities, diminishing many of the previous gains women farmers had experienced in this sector. It is crucial to address the needs of both women and men farmers through gender integration in all aspects of agricultural development and each link of the agricultural value chain. This will ensure the people who are tasked with growing food have the essential capabilities needed to improve nutritional status, food security and economic sustainability around the world.

Generating Agriculture and Food Security

In the US, the traditional image of a farmer is a man in a tractor, but around the globe, the typical farmer is a woman—most often barefoot and working with basic tools with a baby strapped to her back. In developing countries, agriculture is predominately women’s work. FAO found that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20-30 percent which could lead to 100-150 million fewer people living in hunger.

Global population will reach 7 billion in the next two years. Food prices and market volatility continue to push hundreds of millions into hunger. Investing in small-scale, subsistence farmers—the vast majority of whom are women—is the critical way to prevent future hunger crises and the political unrest that such crises spark.

Women Thrive Worldwide has identified and supports seven key pillars that will ensure our country’s investments in global agriculture get it right, from the start:

Collaborating and consulting with women farmers

Ensuring private property rights
Increasing access to “right-sized” credit, financial services, and risk mitigation
Providing women farmers with time and labor-saving tools
Enhancing transportation and technology infrastructure
Expanding skills training for farmers
Integrating natural resource conservation

Paying attention to these basic pillars ensures that projects are well designed and that we get the best return on our international aid dollars.

A First Step: Educate Congress

In 2009, The U.S. Government launched a new initiative to fight global hunger and food insecurity called Feed the Future.

Feed the Future aims to:

Invest in country-owned plans so that assistance meets the needs of individual countries’ agricultural development.
Focus on a comprehensive approach to ending hunger by accelerating agricultural growth and improving nutrition, while also meeting humanitarian relief needs.
Leverage funds from national governments, US private sector, the World Bank, and European partners.
Measure results and reports progress in decreasing hunger to Congress
Integrate gender as a cross-cutting priority and commits to working with partner countries to promote gender-sensitive consultation processes, strive for gender equality through planning and implementing programs, and recognize the gender impact of access to and control over social and economic assets (such as land, inputs, credit, etc.)

Tell Congress to help end hunger, ensure equitable access in agricultural and food industries, and fight poverty by supporting Feed the Future and other international development programs that tackle hunger and invest in food security. Click here to take action!

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