Food systems: targeted interventions needed to prevent widening gender gap

By Sharon Atieno Onyango

Without action, persistent inequalities in food, land and water systems (FLWS) would worsen exacerbated by multiple interconnected global challenges, limiting the productivity, adaptive capacity and resilience of women, youth and other socially excluded groups. It would also affect their ability to benefit from structural and digital transformation processes.

This is according to a new report titled Advancing equality, transforming futures: a path to resilient and productive food, land and water systems in 2050, by the CGIAR GENDER Accelerator released on the International Day of the Rural Women celebrated on 15^th October.

The report notes that the compounding challenges facing FLWS include climate change, strains on natural resources and profound demographic shifts,including a growing population marked by shifts toward both younger and older population structures, rapid urbanization and accelerating, increasingly diverse, and often gendered patterns of internal and international migration.

It finds that despite women contributing significantly to these systems, they continue to face systemic barriers that hinder their progress.

For instance, across low and middle income countries (LMICs), particularly in the global South, women make up 38% of the global agricultural labor force and 41% of the off-farm agrifood workforce, and even higher shares in many countries. However, they continue to face systemic barriers that limit their productivity, earnings, decision-making power, food security and resilience to climate shocks and other stressors compared to men.

Among the finding of the report is that young women particularly face a double burden of exclusion in current and future FLWS. Thus, strengthening on and off-farm opportunities for them means focusing on decent working conditions, reduced start-up costs, improved access to financial services and bundling of technical innovations with gender-transformative approaches, to position young women as drivers of change in these systems.

It also finds that digital technologies hold significant potential to bridge gender inequities across food systems, despite the current digital divide between men and women. It cites research showing that in Kenya, for example, women are up to 25% less likely than men to access digital climate advisory services due to structural gender barriers.

The report calls on technology developers to involve women in the development of breakthrough technologies like AI, before scaling their use. It also recommends complementary training and support for women, so they can make these technologies work for them.

The CGIAR report notes that if gender-responsive development interventions focused on supporting women’s empowerment reached half of small-scale agricultural producers, they could increase the incomes of an additional 58 million people and enhance the resilience of 235 million people.

Notably, increasing women’s participation in natural resource management would improve resource governance and conservation outcomes while expanding inclusive digital systems could lift 30 million women out of extreme poverty, improve food security for millions, and add up to US$1.5 trillion to the global economy by 2050.

“When not constrained by social institutions, environmental stressors or lack of resources, information and technology, women’s individual and collective agency — and that of other socially excluded groups — can play a critical role in crisis, climate adaptation and disaster response,” the report says.

This report proposes solutions that, with sustained ambition to apply them at scale and with consistency, can help realize a future by 2050 where FLWS are inclusive and just by design; where social norms foster equal opportunities to benefit from and meaningfully participate in FLWS; and where women, youth and socially excluded groups are empowered and have a voice not merely as participants, but as decision makers, innovators and drivers of change.

This report highlights five interlocking pathways toward lasting transformative change in FLWS that require simultaneous, coordinated efforts across multiple scales, actors and sectors.

First, taking steps to make diverse women, including those across all life stages, visible, collect the necessary data — disaggregated by gender and intersectional identities — and ensure programs and policies are gender-aware and responsive to intersectionality.

Second, tailoring programs and policies to intersectional gendered realities and needs — especially to the reality of unequal unpaid care work burdens — employing genuine co-design processes that position women, youth and socially excluded groups as active partners.

Third, going beyond technical fixes to address the multiple interdependent constraints to intersectional gender equality that operate across scales through bundled, integrated approaches that simultaneously target social norms, agency, resources, formal institutions and governance considerations.

Fourth, transforming FLWS into systems that foster equality and inclusion requires actively confronting power asymmetries by changing discriminatory norms, engaging men, boys and leaders, and advancing reforms to formal institutions and governance that promote inclusion and enhance the influence of women and socially excluded groups.

It also recommends that there should be adequate and sustained investment in intersectional and gendertransformative change through consistent funding, longer project cycles, and coordinated action across actors and sectors that treats gender equality as a systems-level objective.

“The choices we make over the coming years will determine whether food, land, and water systems become more equitable or more unequal, more resilient or more fragile,” said Ismahane Elouafi, Executive Managing Director of CGIAR.

“We cannot feed our future without including women in our food systems – this report is a manual on how to do just that by 2050.”

According to Elouafi, the pathways focus on strengthening equitable resilience in the face of the polycrisis, advancing inclusive access to and governance of natural resources, accelerating digital inclusion, and empowering young women and future generations to lead transformation across food, land and water systems.

“This report moves beyond recommending piecemeal interventions to outlining systemic structural changes that can decisively close the gender gap across food systems by 2050,“ said Nicoline de Haan, Director of the CGIAR GENDER Accelerator.

“Investing in women, not as laborers, but as leaders, is the path towards unlocking the full potential of our food, land and water systems.”