Food security is a primary goal of sustainable agricultural development and a cornerstone for economic and social development. The food price crisis is a current reminder of the crucial importance of focusing on food security as the central theme in agricultural development. Food security can be a reality only when the agriculture sector is vibrant.

Women are crucial in the translation of the products of a vibrant agriculture sector into food and nutritional security. However, they remain having less access to productive resources and economic opportunities compared to men. Gender-based inequalities all along the food production chain must be removed and the active engagement of women at all levels of decision making is absolutely necessary to attain food and nutritional security.

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Good governance is perhaps the single most important factor in eradicating poverty and promoting development. Key elements of good governance in agriculture include quality of agricultural policies and regulations; efficiency and equity in the provision of agricultural services and infrastructure; reduction of corruption; and access to justice and enforcement of rights.

Despite recent reforms in the public sector and in many agricultural institutions, increasing voice and accountability in rural areas remains a challenge even in democratic systems, and rural women face particular obstacles in making their voices heard. Thus, reforms must explicitly pay attention to gender issues and be implemented in a gender-sensitive manner. Governance reforms are “gender-sensitive” if they are: sensitive to gender differential; gender specific; empowering to women; and transformative.

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Access to well-designed financial services can help poor households build assets, engage more effectively with markets, and reduce their vulnerability to crises. Beginning in the 1990s microfinance programs were increasingly directed at women—partly because of evidence that women’s repayment rates were higher than men’s but also because donors supported microfinance for women as an effective gender strategy to increase women’s role in production. However, rural women’s access to financial services remains heavily dependent on microfinance. Women generally receive smaller loans than men, even for the same activities and are vastly underrepresented in programs that finance larger loans. Lacking access to larger loans, their businesses often collapse because they are forced to purchase inferior equipment or materials. Women’s credit needs are more diverse than the initial focus on small group loans: women need longer-term and larger amount of credit to build assets and invest in viable and productive activities.

It is important to mainstreaming gender and women’s empowerment throughout the financial sector, including large-scale rural finance and leasing arrangements for agricultural development and value chain upgrading. This will not only to benefit women but in the process also improve the sustainability of financial services themselves and the dynamism of the rural economy in general.

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Land is a critical asset, especially for the urban and rural poor. Land rights act as a form of economic access to key markets as well as a form of social access to nonmarket institutions, such as the household relations and community-level governance structures, and confer rights to other local natural resources, such as trees, pasture, and water.

On average, men’s land holdings were almost three times the women’s landholdings. This compromised land access leads women to make suboptimal decisions with regard to crop choices and to obtain lower yields than would otherwise be possible if household resources were allocated efficiently. The basic gender policy within the context of land administration should promote secure access to land and other natural resources for women, independent of men relatives and independent of their civil status. Legal reforms need to take into account multiple-use rights to land, particularly women’s rights, as well as the different means by which women gain access to land, including divorce and inheritance systems.

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Traditional gender divisions of labor often consign women farmers to subsistence production for her household’s own consumption. Policies and interventions that accept this as a given and assume that commercial production is the province of men will miss many opportunities to tap into the tremendous productive potential of women, which has further implications in terms of household’s food security and welfare. Studies indicate that increases in women’s resources and income have the strongest effects on education, health, and nutrition and increases investment in the family’s welfare.

Women will require access to infrastructure services, information, credit, and other business development services in order to capitalize on the new market opportunities along changing or emerging value chains. The formation of women’s groups to improve rights and access to services is a well-established means of social and economic empowerment in which members increase productivity and incomes collectively. Capacity building is required to ensure that women remain active members and assume important positions in leadership and decision making in economic organizations. Special policies and provisions are often required to ensure that women retain control over important income generating assets.

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Agriculture water management (AWM) includes irrigation and drainage, water management in rain-fed agriculture, recycled water reuse, water and land conservation, and watershed management. AWM is essential to food security, but also plays a fundamental role in building human capital in rural areas.

Water rights are directly related to land rights in many countries. Because a few women formally own land, their participation and representation in water user associations (WUA) is normally low; and this scenario has negative implications to their productivity and income as producers. It is important to ensure that women enjoy de jure and de facto equality in access to land and other property. Women farmers need to be actively involved in the planning and implementation of land and water management programs.

Unregulated groundwater use is another important AWM consideration for it has led to overexploitation of the aquifers, reduction of the available freshwater for use, and negative effects to the health of people. Water quality also requires particular attention in AWM. Planning projects for multipurpose uses requires a thorough investigation of the nonagriculture uses and in particular of women’s needs. By taking women’s and men’s multiple water needs as the starting point and accessing multiple sources of water in an integrated way, multiple-use water services meet a broad range of dimensions of well-being, enhance project sustainability and willingness and ability to pay, and foster more equitable water management.

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Women, relative to men, remain underrepresented in higher education and as scientists, researchers, and extensionists, and policymakers although some strides have been made in recent years. Women continue to face greater difficulties in accessing information, extension, advisory services, and education as well as in owning or acquiring land and technology compared to men. Most women still struggle through their day using traditional technologies that are labor intensive and time and energy consuming. Improved technologies have mostly been adopted in relation to men’s tasks, often with negative consequences for women.

Research, extension, and education systems need to engage women, who comprise more than half of resource-limited farmers, small-scale food processors, and many local traders, if agricultural science hopes to lead to agricultural development. Agricultural policies need to support women’s involvement in innovations systems and to revitalize women’s groups and networks to be competitive, visible, and recognized. In addition to new and revitalized technology and management practices, social and organizational innovations are required to explicit engage women and unleash their potential as critical actors shaping innovation systems.

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Women provide more employment in agriculture than men in many regions. However, women and men work in distinct activities that offer different rewards and career opportunities, even when they have similar education and labor market skills. Women pay for the inflexibility by being consigned to the informal sector or to jobs with lower wages. Parental care for children also consumes a significant proportion of women’s time and lack of adequate child care represents one of the principal barriers to women’s employment. In a few countries, women are still consider legal minors and do not allow them standing in court.

The most significant positive impact on agricultural labor, for both men and women, will come through creating a dynamic rural economy in both the agriculture and the nonfarm sectors, focusing primarily on creating a good investment climate. But, there is a need for explicit attention to gender bias in the labor market, including wage inequalities; occupational segregation; women’s time burden; and violence, health and safety in the workplace. Reducing labor market segmentation and wage inequalities improves the mobility of labor, increases employment, and contributes to economic growth. Empirical evidence also shows that women invest more than men in the development of children; thus higher levels of employment and earnings for women not only contribute to but also have intergenerational implications.

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Rural infrastructure covers a wide range of physical infrastructure and derived infrastructure services, including energy, transport, ICT, irrigation, sanitation and hygiene services, potable water, market infrastructure, and social and administrative infrastructure. Various studies have increasingly documented four major differences between men and women with respect to rural infrastructure: (1) differences of needs for the type and location of physical infrastructure, (2) differences in priorities for infrastructure services, (3) unequal opportunities to participate in decision making on the choice of infrastructure services, both within the households and within the communities, or to participate in the implementation of the infrastructure programs and the delivery of services, and (4) significant disparities in access to infrastructure services. The disparity in time poverty between men and women is the single most important economic factor that justifies integrating gender equity into rural infrastructure policies, program, and projects.

Given the wide range of women’s and men’s needs for infrastructure and infrastructure services, it is critical to ensure gender equity in planning, decisionmaking, and management processes lest the development of the infrastructure and services cause or aggravate gender disparities.

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The rural poor in developing countries remain the most directly dependent on natural resources for their food and livelihood security.
Environmental degradation increases women’s time for labor-intensive household tasks, such as having to walk longer distances for the collection of fuelwood and water. Recognizing women’s needs for environmental resources, not only for crop production but also for fuel and water, and building these into good environmental management, can release more time for women to use on income generation, child care, and personal development.

Women often have unique perspectives on as well as understanding of local biodiversity and can be key partners for plant breeders as they work to develop adapted and improved varieties. Studies have shown that women farmers have shown they can be more effective at selecting improved varieties for local cultivation than the men plant breeders. However, in most societies, women continue to have fewer ownership rights than men. Without secure land rights, women and men farmers have little or no access to credit to make investments in improved natural resource management and conservation practices.

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Women, men, boys, and girls can have profoundly different experiences and face different risks in conflict situations and natural disasters. These experiences are shaped by and have a direct effect on their capacity to sustain livelihoods, ensure food security, and engage in the agricultural sector. Given that women represent 70 percent of the world’s poor and their unequal social status in most societies, they are often at greater risk than men. However, women are not passive actors. They are often proactive in their efforts to minimize risks and adapt to evolving conditions. In designing interventions, organizations must understand the social capital (gained and lost) as a result of crisis and must recognize the gender differences in skills, knowledge, access, and participation in agricultural activities.

Crises present the opportunity to initiate new practices and systems. Despite the difficulties that arise, major crises also create new opportunities for tackling gender-based disparities regarding land ownership, tenure, and use. The challenge is to balance the drive toward returning to a status quo and recognized past practices with the need to address the practices that contributed to the vulnerability.

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Crop production is the primary employer of women in most countries. Women tend to manage complex production systems with multiple functions, purposes, and species. These systems are not designed to maximize the productivity of any single crop but to ensure overall stability and resilience among the crops that are produced, which is often overlooked when yields of a single crop are taken as a criterion for evaluating the performance of crop production but increasingly becoming important in the context of climate change.

Women farmers must have access to information, credit, other inputs, as well as the organizations through which markets are accessed and policies are influenced. Recognizing women’s involvement in commercial crop production and ensuring that they benefit from research, extension, credit, land tenure rights, and market access still requires a significant organizational shift in many agricultural services. Without such a shift, it will be difficult to broaden the base of women farmers who can adopt crop technologies, and thus it will be difficult for agriculture to contribute to poverty reduction, environmental sustainability, and economic growth.

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The fisheries and aquaculture sector is undergoing rapid changes in production systems, marketing, and technology; and it is vital to address livelihood problems arising from these changes and examine entry points and investments to address gender inequities that exist in many fishing communities and poor societies. These gender inequities include the comparatively low value attached to work done by women, women’s limited access to essential resources such as ponds, new technology, education, and information and skills.

Strategic entry points include (1) formation of gender-responsive resource management bodies and small groups for accessing resources needed for aquaculture development; (2) provision of gender-responsive advisory services that address systematic bias in the generation and delivery of these services; (3) action to enable marginalized groups of fishers, processors, and traders to access markets and to obtain improvements in work conditions in labor markets; and (4) support to marginalized groups, including poor women, in identifying and sustaining alternative livelihoods to reduce reliance on their fishing activities, which put pressure on the fragile and constricted marine resources and coastal ecosystems.

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The livestock sector continues to grow globally. In some countries, livestock now accounts for up to 80 percent of the agricultural gross domestic product. A number of challenges face the livestock sector, including ensuring food, resource, and livelihood security for poor smallholder producers and processors. Furthermore, current concerns around the social, economic, and health-related impacts of transboundary animal diseases, such as avian influenza, highlight a number of other issues facing the livestock sector. These challenges demand innovative and sustainable approaches, particularly given that more than 200 million smallholder farmers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America rely on livestock as the main source of income.

In general, women and men provide labor for different livestock-related tasks: they contribute to the enhancement of gene flow and domestic animal diversity and hold knowledge useful in the prevention and treatment of livestock illness. However, women face disproportionate challenges compared to men in accessing livestock services and information. Gendered asymmetries in access to and delivery of livestock and veterinary services not only do a great disservice to women and men livestock producers and processors, but they also stifle the potential for more sustainable and effective actions along a given livestock value chain.

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More than 1.6 billion people depend to varying degrees on forests for their livelihoods. In developing countries, about 1.2 billion people rely on agroforestry farming systems that help to sustain agricultural productivity and generate income. Concern about climate change has already focused increased attention to the role of forests in carbon sequestration, reducing carbon emissions and substituting for fossil fuels. Climate change may also affect forests themselves, altering forest ecosystems and increasing the incidence and severity of forest fires as well as pest and disease infestation.

An understanding of how society-forest relationships are likely to evolve is important in preparing the sector to address emerging challenges and opportunities. The full potential of forests may never be grasped without an understanding of how women and men use forest resources differently. If decision making in forestry programs and policies follow a “gender-neutral” pathway, the implementation of those programs will not garner the knowledge and skills, nor address the needs, of half of the rural population. Gender- and wealth-disaggregated data on the resource management practices of forest- and agroforestry-dependent communities need to be consistently and regularly gathered.

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Given the enormous amounts of money invested in agricultural and rural development by national governments and international donors, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are accepted as important steps for assessing progress toward specific outcomes and for measuring impact. Gender issues must be addressed in monitoring and in evaluations so that we know what has been accomplished and what can be learned and fed back into further efforts. If gender impacts are not evaluated, they are unlikely to be given any attention.

This module aims to address gender concerns in designing agricultural and rural development projects and to provide ideas – indicators, principles, approaches, and practical options - for improving the M&E of outcomes and impacts.

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