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FAO. 2020. Addressing gender inequalities to build resilience – Stocktaking of good practices in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ Strategic Objective 5. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/cb0433en

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Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

2. Why gender equality and resilience?

3. Methodology

4. Overview of results

5. Analysis and selected good practices

Pillar 1: Govern risks and crises

Pillar 2: Watch to safeguard

Pillar 3: Apply risk and vulnerability reduction measures

Pillar 4: Prepare and respond to crises

6. Conclusions and way forward

7. References

Annex 1: Useful definitions

Annex 2: Good practice template

Annex 3: Overview list of good practices

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank all those FAO colleagues in decentralized offices who supported the preparation of this report by submitting examples of good practices, the Regional Gender Officers Malika Abdelali-Martini, Tacko Ndiaye, Clara Park, Claudia Brito, and Karen Rodriguez for coordinating the collection in their respective regions, and all others who have given their time and insights to provide useful information to produce this report. The first version of the assessment that was produced in (2014), has been updated and entirely reviewed by Malika Abdelali-Martini in 2020.

This report is meant for internal FAO use and should not be disseminated without the consent of the responsible officers.

1. Introduction

The increasing occurrence of crises, conflicts and disasters around the world, and the resulting loss of life and property have drawn attention to the resilience of people and environments, especially in rural areas. Resilience in vulnerable rural communities offers some important lessons. It is becoming increasingly more important to document successful stories around the world to protect rural livelihoods within specific emergency and humanitarian situations.

Resilience is the capacity to adapt positively to change through coping with challenges. Usually such change has the potential to both strengthen and weaken communities. We have collected numerous success stories demonstrating a robust local capacity to adapt to change across diverse social and economic conditions in different communities. For these reasons, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has conducted a stocktaking at the country level to identify some lessons from different practices on the ground.

This report is an update of FAO’s regular stocktaking, which highlights the most successful examples of its interventions at the country level on integrating gender issues within FAO’s work related to resilience building. The previous stocktaking took place in 2014; since then many cases have been identified and the report was updated in 2020 to include additional cases. The aim was to identify good practices on integrating gender issues within FAO’s work related to resilience-building strategies and to mitigate the negative impacts.

Gender equality is a cross-cutting theme throughout FAO’s new Strategic Framework, including Strategic Objective 5 (SO5) to “Increase the resilience of livelihoods to threats and crises”. In addition to highlighting FAO’s commitment to this cross-cutting theme, the purpose of the exercise was to track ongoing efforts and lessons learned to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment in FAO Strategic Programme 5 (SP5[1]), in support of SO5, to encourage cross-fertilization and scaling-up of successful and/or innovative initiatives within FAO and with external partners. This report also presents an analysis of gaps and areas for improvement.

The outputs will contribute to communication and visibility efforts for advocacy and resource mobilization by disseminating results on the website, in newsletters and policy briefs. This compilation is the first step to disseminating the results.

2. Why gender equality and resilience?

For FAO, resilience to shocks refers to the ability to prevent and mitigate disasters and crises as well as to anticipate, absorb, accommodate or recover and adapt from them in a timely, efficient and sustainable manner. This includes protecting, restoring and improving livelihoods systems in the face of threats that impact agriculture, food and nutrition (and related public health).

FAO’s resilience agenda, encompassing strategic partnerships and direct action in four mutually reinforcing areas for agriculture, food and nutrition (including crops, livestock, fish, forests and other natural resources) at local, national, regional and global levels, includes

1. enable the environment;

2. watch to safeguard;

3. apply risk and vulnerability reduction measures; and

4. prepare and respond.

It has been widely acknowledged that reducing gender inequality is an important part of the solution to global hunger. FAO’s 2010–2011 State of Food and Agriculture, Women in Agriculture: Closing the gender gap for development report estimated that agricultural production could be increased by 2.5 to 4  percent by providing equal access to productive resources, services and opportunities to men and women producers. This translates into 12 to 17 percent fewer undernourished people in the world, which amounts to 100 to 150 million people (FAO, 2011). Closing the gender gap in agriculture would increase the income of women. This is a proven strategy for improving health, nutrition and education outcomes for children. Gender equality is central to FAO’s mandate to achieve food security for all by raising levels of nutrition, improving agricultural productivity and natural resource management, and improving the lives of rural populations. To address this, FAO adopted the FAO Policy on Gender Equality: Attaining food security goals in agriculture and rural development. The importance of gender equality was also acknowledged in the Hyogo Framework for Action (UNDRR, 2007), which explicitly affirms the importance of gender mainstreaming in disaster risk reduction, as well as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, which calls for a “gender, age, disability and cultural perspective in all policies and practices; and the promotion of women and youth leadership.” (UNDRR, 2015).

Women and men play specific and complementary roles in food security and agriculture, and they each have the potential to contribute to building resilience in different ways. On average, women comprise 43 percent of the agricultural labour force in developing countries. However, across regions, women have less access than men to productive resources and opportunities do. There is a gender gap when it comes to many assets, inputs and services, such as land, livestock, labour, education, information services, and technology, all of which affect the capacity of women to protect their families from crises. These gender inequalities are a big part of the reason why rural women and girls in developing countries are often the most affected by different types of disasters[2].

Furthermore, women’s exposure to sexual violence escalates during emergencies. Rape is used as a weapon of war. During natural disasters, the breakdown of social and security structures fuels the incidence of sexual and gender-based violence.

Yet, women also play a key role in building resilient livelihoods that protect their families and communities from shocks through their roles and capacities as farmers, innovators, and guarantors of household food security and nutrition, as well as through social networks. It is impossible to build livelihoods that are resilient to threats and crises without fully considering the specific needs and priorities of both women and men.

Recent evaluations of FAO’s contribution to crisis-related transitions and of FAO’s role and work in Disaster Risk Reduction in Asia and in Latin America and the Caribbean[3], stress the need for FAO to further scale-up gender analysis and gender-sensitive programming in order to generate long-term impacts on livelihoods and resilience.

A predecessor to this document, the TCE Gender in Emergencies Survey (2011)[4], identified the key challenges, needs and priorities of field-based staff related to addressing gender issues in their work. One of the main gaps the survey identified was the lack of shared updated information and good practices on gender mainstreaming. Respondents expressed a need for concrete examples of gender issues, lessons learned and good practice examples applicable to their work. This stock-taking exercise provides examples of gender-focused resilience good practices under each pillar of SO5, and it identifies specific strengths, constraints and gaps.

3. Methodology

The 30 priority focus countries[5] of SO5 (Increase the resilience of livelihoods to threats and crises) were requested to report on the gender-focused resilience good practices their offices have been implementing. The gender advisor from each region coordinated the collection of good practices in collaboration with the gender focal points at the country level. A good practice template was provided to facilitate the process (Annex 2).

It is important to note that the regional gender advisors were appointed in 2014, only a few months before the exercise took place, as were a number of the gender focal points involved, all of which made it a more challenging exercise in terms of institutional memory. In 2018/2019, this entire report was reviewed and updated with new stories from countries around the world.

In order to be considered a good practice, each submission had to be assessed against a set of criteria. Of the 48 submissions, six did not meet the minimum requirements. A submission had to show that it contributed to gender equality or empowerment of women, or that it employed an innovative or systematic methodology to do so, even if the results were not yet apparent. If both criteria were met, it was considered a good practice. Figure 1 presents the review process.

In addition, particular attention was paid to practices that took measures to address the causes of gender-based inequalities or harmful gender norms, and to empower women beyond meeting their immediate needs, for example by promoting women’s leadership and influence, improved access to information and knowledge, increased participation and decision-making by women in the communities, institutions or within the household, women’s control over income and spending, access to and control over land and assets, promoting labour-saving technologies and practices to reduce women’s work burden, participation of women beyond traditional gender roles, etc.

Why do good practices matter?

For an organization to progress and adapt to change, it must become a learning organization, which draws lessons from its experiences in order to identify and understand good practices. These good practices will improve the way the organization works. They can be applied to specific contexts, institutionalized, shared and replicated at different levels: from local to international.

(Good practices at FAO: Experience capitalization for continuous learning, September 2013.)

The submissions are grouped and analyzed according to the four pillars of SO5 for ease of reference. They are:

• govern crises and disaster risks;

• monitor crises and disaster risk with early warnings;

• prevention and mitigation measures; and

• prepare for and respond to crises and disasters.

After each good practice, some recommendations are highlighted for replication and scaling up. An analysis of the gaps across the four pillars of the SO5 result chain is also presented.

4. Overview of results

A total of 48 submissions from 18 different countries were received. Of the 30 focus countries, 16 provided 43 good practices. Five relevant practices were submitted by two decentralized offices not belonging to SO5 focus countries.

Table 1 presents the good practices according to countries and regions. About 41 percent came from RAF, followed closely by RAP with 31 percent. Pakistan and Zimbabwe were the champions of the exercise; these two countries together presented over one third (32 percent) of all the good practices submitted. Seven of the submissions did not show sufficient measures to promote gender equality or women’s empowerment and were dropped from the assessment.

The good practices are unevenly distributed across the four pillars, with the heaviest concentration (33) under Pillar 3 on risk and vulnerability reduction measures, followed by Pillar 4 on preparedness and response (5). The first two pillars on the enabling environment and early warning systems were weak, with only two submissions each. Even though this exercise was not exhaustive, it can be concluded that these areas will need further strengthening to better integrate a gender dimension in FAO’s work.[6]

5. Analysis and selected good practices

Pillar 1: Govern risks and crises

under Pillar 1 of the SO5 result chain, which includes the legal, policy and institutional systems and the regulatory frameworks for reducing risk and managing crises, FAO supports countries and regions to develop or strengthen appropriate legislation, policies, and institutional frameworks to manage the risk of disaster in agriculture, livestock, fisheries/aquaculture (FAO, 2020), forestry, and natural resources management, and to attain sufficient institutional capacity to implement them.

There were two practices submitted that would fit under Pillar 1, and they can both be considered as promising. They describe interesting steps in gender mainstreaming. The first one from Pakistan describes a participatory and gender-sensitive process of collecting information as part of disaster risk management (DRM) planning. This example is important, as it describes a required step for addressing the specific vulnerabilities and needs of women and men in resilience-related policy processes, namely disaggregating data by sex, to ultimately ensure a proper gender analysis and distribution of benefits and protection for a larger part of the population.

The other example relates to a gender screening process carried out by FAO Lebanon together with partners to ensure that gender issues are systematically addressed in projects.

PAKISTAN: Gender-sensitive disaster risk reduction

The 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and consecutive floods in recent years have shown that women and girls are the most affected in both the short and long term (Samiullah, Atta-Ur-Rahman and Rajib, 2015). FAO working in collaboration with Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority have reviewed the Government’s DRM system for mainstreaming DRM approaches into agriculture and rural development in Pakistan. An assessment was conducted to identify the various dimensions necessary for a DRM framework to build the resilience of vulnerable communities and institutions. Interviews were conducted mainly with sectoral department representatives, focal persons of the Provincial/ Regional Disaster Management, academia, training institutions, civil society and union councils of vulnerable communities.

Although women contribute significantly to agriculture in Pakistan (Samee et al., 2015), and are more affected by disasters, they are not often well represented in local institutions and their voices are not heard. The assessment reached out to women smallholders, through grassroots community dialogue, to include their perceptions and recommendations on disaster response and preparedness. This was done through joint and separate meetings at the community level. Women-only meetings gave them the chance to talk freely and express their views without pressure or domination by men.

What can we learn?

> It is import to take specific measures to reach out to women smallholders in disaster risk reduction policy and planning processes – women are a force for resilience who are still too often unheard in decision-making.

> Organizing separate meetings with women and men in conservative environments, to ensure their different needs and priorities are heard, and no group dominates the other, can have a positive effect. ⬤

LEBANON: A gender screening process for projects

The conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic has severely impacted the Lebanese economy. The agriculture sector is particularly affected by the unstable security situation. At least 78 percent of the Syrians registered as refugees with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees are women and children. FAO Lebanon contributed to the development of the Regional Resilience and Refugee plan (known as 3RP) and adopted a gender screening process together with partners to review the activity indicators of the proposed outputs of the food security sector group. The same approach was also adopted by FAO Lebanon. All the activity indicators in the log frames of existing projects and project proposals were reviewed to ensure that sex and age-disaggregated data on beneficiaries were included and that the gender marker was reported. The purpose is to commit the FAO country team to promoting gender-sensitive projects. A revision of all letters of agreement with implementing partners will ensure that this good practice on gender achieves some results on the ground.

What can we learn?

> Establishing a systematic screening process for reviewing project documents for planned projects and the respective log-frames to ensure sex- and age-disaggregated data is collected allows for proper gender analysis and tracking different impacts on men and women.

> Including gender-specific measures in letters of agreement ensures that the implementing partners are committed to gender equality during implementation. ⬤

IRAQ: Opportunities to participate in building livelihoods

The benefits of FAO’s interventions in Iraq have included resilience building among women affected by the conflict. Although in the past it was difficult to engage women in public spheres, this programme has assisted needy women to setup home gardens and to grow vegetable for their families, which allows them to save some money for their other needs such as medication.

The intervention had a very positive impact on whole families. It allowed them to meet their daily needs, and has encouraged them to further enlarge their production to sell the excess and improve their livelihoods.

The purpose of this intervention was to sensitize the FAO country team and their national counterparts to promote the importance of gender-sensitive interventions, and to show the potential they have to lift poor families from poverty.

What can we learn?

> It is important to include both women and men of different ages in the development interventions to allow different social groups to participate in developing their livelihoods and to develop their respective communities based on their different knowledge and capacities.

> The positive impact of including different social groups and different individuals (women and men) in closed societies allows for the possibility of improvement in livelihoods and resilience. ⬤

Pillar 2: Watch to safeguard

FAO seeks to strengthen and harmonize food and nutrition security information and early warning systems to better monitor multiple threats, and to inform decision-making in preparedness, response, policy, advocacy and programming.

It is particularly important to collect disaggregated data of women and men of different ages and social groups, as their access and control over resources, coping strategies and priorities differ. Gender issues should be included systematically in planning the early warning systems, and they should be explicitly about reaching women.

The Strategic Programme 5 team received submissions from Pakistan under Pillar 2 on early warning and vulnerability analysis. The use of hazard, vulnerability and/or resilience-related data is crucial to informing decisions on gender-sensitive programming and implementation. One of them is presented below as a good example of training women as enumerators for needs assessments to facilitate the collection of sex-disaggregated data. The other submission described the attempt to include gender sensitive indicators for the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis, as well as training women food security professionals as IPC analysts and trainers. Although this constitutes an interesting practice, more information would be needed before disseminating it.

PAKISTAN: Women enumerators in Food Security and Livelihood Assessments

The Food Security Cluster, led by FAO and the World Food Programme, conducted food security and livelihood assessments to evaluate the extent of recovery patterns of food security and livelihoods, provide insight on the impact and effectiveness of interventions, assess the resilience of households and communities, especially women, to deal with shocks and the measures required to further strengthen them. Appropriate recommendations are provided based on the findings.

The Food Security Cluster in Pakistan has made special efforts to increase the number of women as enumerators (an average of 34  percent of the total in five assessments conducted during the period 2010–2013 were women) to facilitate the inclusion of women’s views and priorities in the assessments. The involvement of women enumerators is seen as a key success factor in collecting sex-disaggregated data and including respective outcomes in the planning and programming.

What can we learn?

> Training and hiring both women and men as enumerators as part of the needs assessment staff can improve outreach and ensure the quality of data collected, and can be a first step in efforts made to collect, analyze and use sex and age disaggregated data in programming. ⬤

Pillar 3: Apply risk and vulnerability reduction measures

while hazards are unavoidable, they do not have to become disasters. FAO seeks to address the underlying risks to food and nutrition security and to apply prevention and impact mitigation measures by applying technologies, good practices and innovative approaches in farming, fisheries/aquaculture, forestry and natural resource management.

Most of the practices that the countries submitted relate to prevention and mitigation. They fall under three important categories: 1) reducing women’s work burden through labour-saving technologies; 2) increasing women’s access to skills and knowledge; and 3) increasing women’s access to and control over resources. Each is discussed below and illustrated with examples.

1) Labour-saving practices and technologies for rural women

Careful socio-economic and gender analysis is required when planning for prevention and mitigation. When promoting practices to increase the capacities of farmers to reduce the impact of shocks, those practices that do not add to the workload of women – or even reduce it – are more likely to be adopted and sustained in the communities. The best results are obtained by ensuring women and men, boys and girls participate in planning the labour-saving practices and in developing related technologies.

Rural women in developing countries have longer working days than men because of their multiple roles as farmers, food providers, caretakers of their families and cash-earners, in addition to their roles within the wider community. Disasters, whether violent conflicts or climate-related emergencies, have a large impact on the livelihoods and resilience of households and, particularly, of women. Women also bear a greater burden in the aftermath of disasters. For example, drought multiplies women’s work burden because it means they have to spend more time collecting firewood, water and fodder to be able to feed their families. Another factor increasing the workload of women is the outmigration of men[7], leaving women behind shouldering the responsibility of running the entire household, often with less mobility and less access to resources and services. Ensuring women’s access to labour-saving technologies for water, energy and farm-related activities is fundamental, and the need for such technologies is perhaps greater than it has ever been before (Grassi, Landberg and Huyer, 2015).

Four of the suggested practices either focused on fuel-efficient stoves or had them as a significant side component. Two of the practices were very similar: one from South Sudan, and another from Sudan, both of which are presented below. These were found to be useful for reducing both the work burden of women as well as their risk of experiencing gender-based violence. Seven practices – all from Zimbabwe – focused on labour-saving technologies in the productive sphere, such as motorized grain threshers, or light-weight banana crates. The practice selected here goes a step further by ensuring the participation of women and youth in decision-making as a precondition for lightening their load.

SUDAN: Fuel-efficient mud stoves

Fuel wood is the main source of energy for most people in the conflict-affected area of Darfur. The current practice of harvesting is unsustainable and leads to more conflict over an increasingly scarce resource. Traditional three-stone fireplaces are used all over the region, especially in rural areas. Women and girls are particularly burdened by the task of collecting fuel for cooking. They are sometimes exposed to the risk of violence during trips to remote and dangerous areas. Fuel efficient stoves are designed to reduce fuel consumption per meal (30 to 60 percent reduction in the use of firewood and charcoal, according to the users) and to curb smoke emissions from open fires inside dwellings.

FAO, as part of its livelihood support to internally displaced people, raises awareness and trains field staff, partners and local communities on the use, benefits, and manufacturing of the stoves. Women are involved in the selection of the participants from their villages, and they are trained as trainers on efficient fuel use skills. Several women have started to sell the stoves they manufactured as an income generating activity.

The participants are engaged in open discussions on the use of energy sources, alternatives and the environment, to build on their expertise on managing natural resources and household energy consumption. Local authorities and community leaders are involved when introducing the fuel efficient stoves to the communities, where the importance and benefits are discussed widely, including the impact on health and the workload of women to secure support from the elders and the men.

> An assessment carried out in 2014 confirmed that improved mud stoves are widely used in camps for internally displaced people and some partners are continuing the trainings. Abuse and violence against women have been reduced, as women have decreased their need to move to collect firewood. By using smaller quantities of fuel, women in the camps save money to cover other needs, and they save time that they can use for learning, resting or leisure. Decreased indoor air pollution and reduced safety risks by cooking fires are also reported.

What can we learn?

> A component on energy and fuel-efficient technologies and practices should be included in project and programmes taking place in conflict-prone contexts to reduce women’s work burden and protection risks. Alleviating women’s workload may also free up time for other activities.

> Assess opportunities for creating income-generating activities for men, women and youth in the energy value chains related to food preparation in, for example, manufacturing and selling stoves from local materials, or briquettes from alternative fuels. ⬤

ZIMBABWE: Women’s leadership to reduce work burden

Climate change has a significant impact on securing water, food, and fuel – activities that are usually the responsibility of women and girls – for household use. In times of drought and erratic rainfall, women and girls must walk farther and spend more of their time collecting water and fuel. Girls may have to drop out of school to help their mothers with these tasks, continuing the cycle of poverty and inequality among women. Changing weather conditions also affect the health of crops and livestock, and women, often responsible for producing the subsistence crops, must work harder for diminishing yields.

A drought prevention programme in selected districts of the semi-arid regions of Zimbabwe aimed to protect cattle through water point development, feed-lots, and by strengthening community leadership structures to increase preparedness for future droughts. When decision-making committees were set up, e.g. feedlot management committees, women and youth were encouraged to take part, in spite of the fact that cattle were considered a male asset.

Involving women and youth in the decision-making and planning to protect livestock during the drought resulted in accessible stock feed and water points in locations that were convenient for women, reducing the long distances they previously had to travel to secure the feed or fetch water. Their participation was crucial for addressing gender specific vulnerabilities and for responding effectively to household needs.

What can we learn?

> Establish measures to include women, men and youth in committees and other decision-making structures to benefit from their different knowledge and expertise.

> An in-depth assessment of the roles of women and men beyond initial stereotypes is essential. Even if cattle was initially considered a male asset, they found that women played a significant role in managing the animals, and that supplying feed and water is a time-consuming activity, and one that is usually the responsibility of women. ⬤

REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA: Increasing small-scale farmers’ resilience to drought by adopting best irrigation practices and modern irrigation technologies

In the Republic of Moldova, agriculture plays a significant role in the economy and welfare of the rural population. Drought is the principal perceived agriculture risk in the Republic of Moldova. However, irrigation is not widely practiced due to a combination of factors including dilapidated infrastructure and pumping stations, high energy prices and farm restructuring processes. The irrigated area has decreased by 95 percent since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Government of the Republic of Moldova, with the help of donors, has rehabilitated several centralized irrigation systems; however, farmers need support to access the water from the centralized systems. By adopting on-farm level irrigation, they are able to make the best use of these improved systems.

There is a FAO project aimed at increasing farmers’ resilience to drought by introducing and adopting best irrigation practices and modern irrigation technologies. Irrigation is a high priority in drought-prone areas, where high-value crops are grown that could pay for the investment required to rehabilitate the dilapidated systems and improve the efficiency of energy and water use. The project has given special attention to including women among the beneficiaries of irrigation equipment. At least 30 percent of the demonstration farms are led by women. Both the awareness and the capacity of farmers and local extension specialists were increased and strengthened through farmers field schools with women’s participation.

The main challenge was that there was little interest among the women living in rural areas in using new technologies for irrigation. Nonetheless, the project managed to get them actively involved in the implementation processes by raising their awareness and targeting efforts to rural women’s networks as well as to relevant women’s associations.

What can we learn?

> Smallholder farmers, whether women or men, can increase their resilience to drought by introducing and adopting best irrigation practices and modern irrigation technologies.

> Introducing and demonstrating relevant, modern on-farm irrigation technologies, and the trainings on properly operating and maintaining the equipment, enhanced the farmer’s capacities to prevent and mitigate the impact of drought and contributed toward increasing crop yields and quality.

> Widely disseminating and adopting best irrigation practices contributed to the sustainable management of land and water resources in the context of climate change. Rural livelihoods have improved, and the adaptation to climate change is ensured. ⬤

GUATEMALA: Sowing fertilizer to reduce the workload of women in the framework of sustainable agricultural production

The manual seeder-fertilizing machine is a simple, low-cost, easy-to-use technology that can very likely be produced locally. This machine works on a significant amount of stubble on the surface of the soil, which promotes the conservation agriculture practice of zero tillage to avoid soil deterioration. The quantity of seeds can be adjusted to need. The machine keeps the fertilizers and seeds in separate areas. It can also plant other types of seeds such as sorghum and peas, and can hold large amounts of fertilizer such as the bean cover manure called Mucuna. Farmers can use the stubble from previous crops.

Planting a variety of crops promotes diversification and food security. This technology allows rural women to decrease their workload, which gives them more time to develop income-generating and other activities.

Women in Guatemala are very much involved in agricultural production. There is need to create the conditions that will empower rural women in this sector. In rural areas, women are principally responsible for domestic activities, including food preparation, in addition to agricultural work.

This time saving technology has reduced the agricultural workload for women and freed up some of their time, allowing them to be more involved at other stages of the crop production chain. This creates allows them the freedom to consider other things they might want to do.

What can we learn?

> Conservation agriculture practices, implemented with very simple tools, will reduce the workload and the physical labour, allowing women more time and energy to diversify their activities. Such practices have little to no impact on natural resources and the environment, which helps with climate change adaptation measures.

> It is better to use animals, rather than women, to carry produce over long distances, given the physical toll such heavy work

> takes on women’s bodies. Using waste from previous crops can contribute to women’s health and to the economy. ⬤

2) Increasing women’s access to skills and knowledge

Ten of the suggested practices focused on strengthening resilience and addressing gender inequalities with group-based approaches. Women’s access to knowledge and skills can be facilitated with their participation in mixed or separated groups, for example, in farmer field schools, women open schools or women’s associations, community organizations, producer groups, etc. These groups can strengthen women’s technical skills while encouraging dialogue and debate. They can give a platform to rural women, enabling them to express their needs and concerns, to share their experiences and views, and to learn from other good practices. By fostering the exchange of knowledge and information, such communication can stimulate women’s awareness and motivation, allowing them to make informed decisions on the crucial issues affecting their lives. Group-based approaches allow gender roles and relations to transform when safe and equitable spaces are provided for men and women to talk as equals.

Five examples are presented in this report: the first describes a well-established group-based approach called Dimitra Clubs (FAO, 2018) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The example from Yemen shows how women’s access to information can be encouraged through extension services.[8]

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO: Radios for resilience

Improved access to information and a powerful participatory communication approach allowed villagers in isolated communities across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Niger, Ghana, Senegal, Mauritania and Burundi, to improve gender equality and empower women. FAO Dimitra community listeners’ clubs are helping rural populations to develop and strengthen the resilience of their communities and themselves.

The Dimitra Clubs enable members – women, men and youth – to share concerns and take collective action. Collaborating with rural radio stations that feed and broadcast their discussions, the clubs have become agents of change in agriculture as well as in other areas of society. The Clubs have taken on sensitive issues such as HIV/AIDS, early marriage and the right of women to inherit land.

The approach boosts members’ self-confidence – especially that of women – and raises awareness about the needs and priorities of rural populations. With the clubs’ support, rural populations, and women in particular, have better access to information on topics such as food security and nutrition, gender roles, good practices in agriculture, health and diets, and they are able to use their knowledge to build resilient livelihoods. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a female member of a Dimitra Club indicated that before the clubs, the Lokelé women did not fish; now, they have their own nets and have become fishers. She also added that they had been waiting for this for a long time! There are about 30 000 members of the Dimitra clubs - about 50 percent of members are women - and more than 175 000 indirect beneficiaries.

What can we learn?

> Information is power. Integrating a community-listeners’-club approach with other participatory approaches (e.g. FAO Caisses de résilience, farmer field schools, etc.) have the potential to help challenge existing, entrenched gender roles at the household and community levels. ⬤

YEMEN: Strategic partnerships for women’s empowerment

In Hajjah Governorate in Yemen, one-third of households derive their main income from agriculture. Women are responsible for household duties – including feeding their families – as well as agricultural work, from gathering fodder, drying and storing grains to small livestock husbandry and other activities such as collecting water for irrigation and household use. The women lack advanced knowledge and have limited access to agricultural services and training that would allow them to improve productivity, diets and income. Gender segregation has traditionally made it difficult for women to gain access to agricultural extension services, which are dominated by men.

The project created interdisciplinary extension teams at the district/village level to be trained as trainers. FAO worked with the Yemeni Women’s Union, composed entirely of women volunteers who facilitated community sensitization and dialogue with female beneficiaries. Support was provided to improve women’s skills in establishing and efficiently managing home gardens and keeping small livestock. An increased set of skills, together with assorted production inputs, allowed women to remain in full control of the backyard component and to generate income. Nutrition education of women, men and children, and awareness campaigns aimed at both women and men enabled the households to make the best use of their assets and to produce food in an equitable way. Increasing and diversifying household food production in combination with water harvesting techniques, training of women on best feeding practices and behavioural change interventions among men resulted in communities that increased and diversified their consumption of nutritious foods and where the women were empowered.

What we can learn?

> Finding a partner with a genuine ambition for women’s empowerment and gender equality can be a good strategy for increasing outreach to women beneficiaries, as in the case of the women volunteers of the Yemeni Women’s Union.

> Women facilitators ensure that women will be reached in conservative environments. This was a well-accepted implementation strategy at the local level and received support from the elders and the men in the communities in Yemen.

> Nutrition education can be coupled with awareness-raising on gender issues, targeting men, women, youth and children. ⬤

IRAQ: Cash for work for women’s empowerment

Iraq has been affected by decades of conflict, which has led to humanitarian crises and mass displacement. The consequences for women and girls are specifically acute, as radicalized gender norms have restricted their ability to live a free and safe life, increased tensions within families and the risk of gender-based violence, and dramatically decreased their access to livelihoods and services.

As part of its programming, FAO provided women across Iraq with opportunities to improve their livelihoods through both short- and more long-term support prioritizing women and female headed households. Short-term activities included cash for work projects to meet basic income generation needs. Longer-term activities focused on skill-based support such as vocational trainings complemented by activities that strengthened women’s technical skills in agro processing and product marketing.

This programme continued the work of existing FAO programmes, including setting-up cottage industries in different rural areas in Erbil and Sulaiymaniya governorates, as well as forming new associations. The project also assisted beneficiaries with registration formalities and put them in contact with local public services and other professional associations to promote the interests and concerns of agrarian associations/ production groups.

In addition, FAO’s programmes for providing livestock and vaccines contributed has improved the health and productivity of livestock as an important asset for women-headed households and the local economy. Women were able to access more food, since their production of milk, meat, and other livestock products is expected to increase due to good animal health and livestock feeding management. This also increased the supply of surplus milk that families could sell to increase their income and acquire other essentials.

What we can learn?

> Cash for work has allowed women to earn income, which at the same time increased their social status, and allowed them to contribute to decision-making both within their households and in the community.

> The availability of livestock and vaccines improved the welfare of the entire family in terms of increased food and access to additional welfare benefits especially in families where women are the only income providers. ⬤

SYRIA: Strengthening resilience through capacity building and knowledge

Qandil Valley in Lattakia Governorate received internally displaced people from Khan Aljoz in the same Governorate.

FAO established a programme in Quandil for making soap from locally-available medicinal plants such as lavender, rose, rosemary, laurel, thyme and chamomile flowers, which were then dried and processed into liquid soap and shampoo. FAO staff conducted the training, which taught local trainees about oil extraction, oil plant species, harvest timing for the different cultivars and soap ingredients.

What can we learn?

> This easy training programme and income generation activity had a quick turnover and can be easily replicated in emergency areas to build resilience.

> The programme has benefitted even those who knew how to make soap by providing them with new techniques, and it has considerably increased their skills. ⬤

KYRGYZSTAN: Cross-border cooperation for sustainable peace and development

A project on cross-border peacebuilding aimed at improving relations between the communities of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan by implementing mirroring and joint activities on both sides of the border. A conflict-sensitive and bottom up approach ensured that border residents and authorities were involved in implementing the project.

The project comprehensively addressed key issues (water, social infrastructure, education, border crossing, etc.) and groups (youth, women, water users, duty bearers, etc.). It offered a unique platform to discuss common neighborhood problems, and it determined measures to avoid future problems. Each community, including the local population and authorities, determined their roles in the agreed activities and participated in the implementation.

The project consolidated the efforts of the United Nations Development Programme, the World Food Programme, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Women and FAO in both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, where each agency uses its comparative advantage to achieve results for peace and sustainable development in cross-border communities.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan had many unresolved border-related issues, with almost half the borderline not being delineated and demarcated. A lack of clarity and disagreements over the exact location of the border lead to misunderstandings and distrust between neighboring communities. Small, local conflicts quickly created ripple effects that ed other communities living in the border areas, which then exacerbated distrust and a negative perception of the “other”. It is easy for local conflicts to escalate and become violent leading to a deterioration of the political climate.

Many of the underlying root causes of conflict in the region remain unchanged, such as demographic pressures, increased stress on natural resources, the lack of a clear border, and an infrastructure that was built during the Soviet era without regard for national borders. Recent media images have fueled distrust and stereotypes Initiatives to rebuild trust and ensure communication between communities are needed.

The project adopted a multi-faceted approach to dealing with the complex nature of the challenges that both countries face in their border area. The interventions included conflict monitoring, cross-border intercommunity dialogue, awareness raising and information sharing, cooperation between border security forces and communities, and confidence-building measures that included youth initiatives, cooperation in natural recourses management, immediate peace dividends through conflict sensitive social infrastructure development and livelihood support.

The Gender Mainstreaming Plan prepared and identified key principles and tools. the plan highlighted gender-balanced representation of women in all activities, including cross-country dialogues, complaint-resolution mechanisms, and addressing women’s insecurities in the training provided to border-security guards, Water Users Associations (WUAs) and local self-government. The date was disaggregated by sex data for monitoring and evaluation purposes.

What can we learn?

> The overall number of cross-border incidents dropped in 2018 compared to previous years. Project interventions contributed to mitigating the risks of conflict, and the overall number of incidents of conflict dropped from 34 in 2015 to 20 in the first 10 months of 2018. Overall, there is a sense that relations between Kyrgyz and Tajiks have improved.

> There has been a significant decrease in cross-border tensions in many key areas, including a decrease of tensions in border communities, especially around issues of access and allocation of water resources. The situation in the border bazaars has significantly improved, the flow of people and goods in the bazaars have increased and mutual commercial ties are growing. The work of law enforcement services is becoming more open, transparent and accessible to the public, and their technical mechanisms for handling complaints are improving. ⬤

3) Increasing women’s access to and control over assets and resources

Eleven of the practices submitted were related to horticulture and vegetable production. Half of them combined backyard/kitchen gardens and poultry production. Four practices were related to dairy or small ruminants. They respond to specific needs and allow women to generate more income while also improving the food and nutrition security within their households. Studies show that resources and income controlled by women are more likely to be used to improve family food consumption and welfare, reduce child malnutrition (FAO & Tufts, 2019), and to increase the overall wellbeing of the family.

Although access to land was not the focus of any of these activities, it was still a sign of success for members of the community to acknowledge and address women’s limited access to land. Land is an important productive resource, often a prerequisite for credit or participation in rural institutions. Women across all developing regions are consistently less likely to own or work land; they are less likely to have access to rented land, and the land they do have access to is often of poorer quality and in smaller plots (Brown, Crawford and Hammill, 2006). It is commonly recognized that land tenure security and resource rights build the resilience of individuals and of communities to disasters, and several studies have shown that assets under women’s control give women greater bargaining power and often contribute more to important welfare outcomes for the household such as children’s education. It is important for FAO also to systematically promote women’s access to resources in resilience-related work.

KENYA: Addressing gender inequalities in resilience building

A project devoted entirely to tackling gender inequalities in resilience building and disaster risk reduction was implemented in Kenya in 2014. The activities included distributing drought-resistant seeds and other farm inputs, raising awareness about nutrition, using energy saving technologies and vaccinating poultry. There was also a component to support women’s increased participation in local political decision-making. The participating women were given technical skills, critical inputs and improved access to services. Their inclusion in local political processes was also supported.

Training and equipping 20 community-based vaccinators greatly improved disease control and reduced bird deaths to almost zero, according to the testimonies of the participants. Skills learned through farmer field schools and through using drought-resistant varieties of seeds helped to the reduce pests and diseases that affect vegetables. This increased household incomes (four-fold in some households) and diversified diets. Women farmers were also linked with local decision-making structures, and they engaged in participatory hearings for the county budget process.

What can we learn?

> A project can successfully combine activities to promote practical needs (agricultural assets, skills and services) while also addressing women’s long-term strategic needs, such as access to political processes, to greatly enhance the sustainability of the intervention

> Including a veterinary component to livestock initiatives (poultry), and engaging women as community vaccinators, can minimize the risk that disease might undermine success in the long-term. ⬤

Pillar 4: Prepare and respond to crises

Whenever and wherever disasters strike, people must be able to count on effective emergency response. FAO seeks to strengthen capacities at the local, national and international levels in preparedness to improve responses to, and recovery from, future threats to food and nutrition security, and to reduce the potential impact on livelihoods.

Gender determines the way women and men are affected by and respond to a crisis, as this is a consequence of the roles and responsibilities, skills and capabilities, opportunities and challenges women and men have prior to the crisis. Women are less mobile in many societies and have limited access to information, which makes them less likely to participate in the public sphere where information is shared or preparedness measures taken, as well as where relief is organized and delivered when a disaster strikes. Often relief efforts are targeted at household heads, without considering the different needs of men and women. Unprotected women-headed households are often more vulnerable to land and asset grabbing and gender-based violence.

Most of the submitted practices under Pillar 4 on preparedness and effective response were focused on ensuring women were included in the response: women-inclusive targeting, selection and distribution, and targeting of women-led activities such as kitchen gardening or providing a poultry package. Attention was given to the cultural context and there was a do-no-harm approach. It is important to ensure that traditional community leaders and men in the communities are also informed and engaged in women-targeted programmes to avoid a negative backlash. A strategy found useful by several of FAO offices was also to mobilize female extension workers or volunteers to facilitate the access and inclusion of women to services.

Of the two examples presented here the first one from the Philippines describes how gender and age were factored into planning the emergency response after Typhoon Haiyan with the Accountability to Affected Populations approach. The second example from Guatemala and Honduras describes how FAO supported boosting preparedness with community contingency funds.

PHILIPPINES: Gender and age sensitive targeting, selection and distribution models

Typhoon Haiyan (locally known as Yolanda) devastated central Philippines on 9 November 2013 causing death and displacement, affecting over 150 000 farming and nearly 50 000 fishing households according to the Department of Agriculture.

During the first phase of the emergency response, FAO distributed certified rice seeds to affected farmers in Regions IV and VIII, together with fertilizer, tools and pumps to ensure that farmers could plant within the planting season. FAO joined forces with other organizations to ensure that the response was informed by evidence and invested in activities that would be accountable to the typhoon-affected populations. Beneficiary targeting was done together with the local government to identify men and women in need, as well as women’s groups. Learning from women’s existing capacities through needs assessments, facilitated the targeting process. In some areas, there was preferential treatment for women and the elderly to address the needs of the most vulnerable.

FAO developed key messages for communities clearly presenting the criteria and process for selecting beneficiaries, providing inputs and emphasizing that the inputs are free of charge and unconditional, to prevent sexual or other exploitative arrangements. Mechanisms such as community consultations, site visits and direct interviews allowed FAO to respond to concerns identified by women and men. In response to some concerns expressed by women, FAO adopted distribution times that do not conflict with household chores and are not during the hottest hours of the day to allow for easier access for the elderly, pregnant women and those with children. The distribution times were communicated in advance to minimize the waiting time.

What can we learn?

> Develop key messages for communities to ensure that everyone understands the criteria and process for selecting beneficiaries, what type of assistance is provided, and ensure these are communicated systematically within communities

> Put in place mechanisms to allow for direct feedback from beneficiaries within the communities. ⬤

HONDURAS AND GUATEMALA: Community preparedness with the use of Mutual Contingency Funds (Cajas Rurales)

The increase in frequency and severity of extreme weather in Central America is alarming. It is estimated that nearly 90 percent of the soils are affected by erosion. Subsistence farmers and their families lack assets (physical, natural, human, financial and social) and they lack an enabling environment to effectively engage in resilient development and be prepared to face the increasing frequency of natural disasters. FAO uses the Cajas Rurales approach1 in Honduras and Guatemala as an entry point to develop community capacities for preparedness and resilience through small-scale financial services at the farmer group level. While the formal insurance sector has still not been able to tailor feasible solutions for subsistence farmers, some organized producer associations have gone ahead and developed contingency funds to support disaster-affected members to recapitalize their productive activities. The disaster-affected farmers can access inputs to resume food production with the credit from the funds. Some groups establish conditions for acquiring loans and tie them to the application of good practices on disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and natural resources management, which in turn fosters production by reducing weather-related risks and correlated losses. This contributes to a virtuous circle when the capacities of members to reimburse loans are improved, capital of the groups increases, and in case of emergency, basic costs are covered to start the next production cycle. Reducing rural poverty by strengthening household incomes allows households to be food secure, to build assets and to reduce their vulnerability to disasters.

In both countries, the project supported already existing associations of men and women farmers to reinforce community-based disaster preparedness by developing contingency funds. The Cajas Rurales approach makes special efforts to distribute loans to women who are particularly challenged in accessing credit. The farmer groups consist, on average, of 53  percent women. In Guatemala, 1  098 households participate, of which 71 percent are women-headed households. The initial results seem to indicate that the project contributes towards gender equality. Some women have reported an improved ability to communicate and negotiate with their husbands on decisions concerning production and managing funds within the household. Women in the project area take part in meetings at the community banks and are more involved in community decision-making.

What can we learn?

> Community revolving funds can increase considerably the resilience of women who usually have little access to financial services.

> In addition to building resilience, inclusive and equitable financial services can contribute to women’s empowerment and gender equality. ⬤

IRAQ: Backyard poultry farming – improving livelihoods

In 2014, the food security situation in Iraq was severely affected by loss of income and the loss of immediately available, sufficiently nutritious and diverse food sources (eggs, milk, meat and fresh vegetables). This resulted in a greater reliance on food basket assistance over an extended period of time, particularly for the poorest of the internally  displaced people and their host communities.

FAO established a cash for work programme designed to benefit widows. For example, Galawezh Mawrod Aula heads a household of eight daughters in Delaza village, located in Qushtapa sub district with no means of financial support. Galawez was among the first in the community to receive support from the programme, which provided her with laying hens, feed and certain essential tools, all of which improved her family’s livelihood. With the current escalation of largescale armed conflict, Galawezh and many others living in war affected areas with host families, were food insecure or at risk of becoming food insecure.

After only two months, Galawezh had successfully lifted her family out of poverty by putting the inputs provided by the programme to good use.

“I did not have enough money to buy tools and food for the chickens, and, therefore, the chicks were producing low-quality eggs. Over these two months, I learned how to properly use and maintain the feeders and water bins, to ensure that my chickens were fed over a longer period of time. Now each chicken produces an egg. It has been a great and positive change for me and my family” says Galawezh.

Galawezh was also able to market part of her surplus production to others. The feeders reduced losses substantially, and this has increased Galawezh’s self-confidence, given her independence and the skills she needs to run her farm.

FAO extended this programme to support many other households and saw similar success. Families were able to produce enough eggs to sell, which gave them the income they needed to buy a variety of foods inputs increasing the overall quality and nutritional variety of their diets.

What can we learn?

> Develop key messages for communities to understand that women, just like men, are capable of contributing to household income when given the proper support and training.

> Emergencies have broken open some stereotypes because women had to perform activities that had been done exclusively by men. This has improved their self-confidence, it has made them more independent, and it has given them the skills to earn an income to improve the livelihoods of their families. ⬤

KYRGYZSTAN: Revival of traditional nutrition as the basis of business in rural areas of (Kara-Kuldja district, Osh region)

The more complex the conditions of life, the lower the level of welfare of the people, the more people are skeptical of new ideas and the more resistant they are to change.

In May in Kara, a village in the Kuldja district of Osh region, which is a mountainous area with limited arable land, far from the regional centre and trade routes, FAO created the Rural Women Economic Empowerment (RWEE) project aimed at helping women. The district does not have its own budget; it exists on state subsidies. The main income of the population is animal husbandry, however, the number of livestock in recent years has greatly decreased. The village has little infrastructure, which has also pushed the youth to migrate, leaving behind the elderly, small children and a few other people with no work opportunities.

Despite the difficulties the village was experiencing, women attended the RWEE project meetings and gatherings, even though they were reluctant to do so. It was difficult to create groups, and people did not believe that poor women would be able to start a business and make a profit.

The association of solidarity groups, consisting of five self-help groups and 37 women, attended a training on the principles of social mobilization and learned about the rules of working in groups, the purpose of saving money, gender issues, and about the revolving fund. The training focused on teaching these women to have confidence in their abilities and on motivating the members of the groups to produce positive results.

Fifteen women from the Joogazyn and the Bai Tushum self-help groups created a small business to process and market their own homemade noodles. The local population appreciates these noodles, but as so many young people were moving away, the tradition of making these noodles was dying out.

The women used the knowledge they gained in the training to set the price for their product, and the business turned out to be quite lucrative. It improved the overall quality of life in the households concerned. The women used their profit to buy more diverse foods for their households, including meat, which had been completely lacking from their diet.

These two groups felt that the secret of their success was that they identified a need in the village for these traditional noodles, and were able to sell them to the villagers who mainly work in the fields and need this nutritious food.

In addition, the behaviour of the women in the self-help groups began to change. They became actively involved in the association meetings and also in the village gatherings. They understood that they had a role to play in their community and that they ought to take part in decision-making within their families, the community and the country.

Later, FAO gave seeds to grow cucumbers, tomatoes and cabbages to the members of the association of self-help groups. They now use greenhouses to germinate seeds and to grow food. They have all realized that their work will pay off.

What can we learn?

> Awareness of and capacity development in local populations, women in particular, is crucial for building confidence in their capacities and in motivating group members towards positive results, which pays off in the form of improved livelihoods for whole households and communities.

> The revival of a traditional food in this case satisfied a need in the local populations, generated income and made it possible to diversify the diet at home. ⬤

GUATEMALA: Contingency mutual funds in times of drought, promote women’s leadership and strengthen the resilience of the livelihoods in communities

Mutual contingency funds are managed by an organized group of producers with the objective of supporting their members in an emergency by financing activities that can alleviate the problems of the most vulnerable families affected by an unexpected calamity, such as drought, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and other extreme events. Contingency mutual funds are addressed to households that do not have access to formal financing and insurance systems to protect their families.

This good practice has the potential to:

• complement the sustainability livelihood sources, the savings and credit system of the organized group, while developing savings, basic insurances and creating an investment culture;

• strengthen leadership and entrepreneurship capacities in the family and the related social sphere with gender equity;

• empower women in crop production;

• develop capacities for economic independence;

• create a culture of savings;

• strengthen knowledge about managing economic resources;

• stimulate the participation of women in organized groups where the objective is to increase the resilience of livelihoods and community development;

• generate income for families, which allows them to access food;

• make loans accessible, mainly to promote entrepreneurship; and

• create economic capital management.

This project was implemented in Guatemala, and mainly targeted women. Some concluding observations:

• implementing the mutual contingency funds allowed families to recover their productive units;

• the initiative has responded to disaster risk reduction needs by strengthening the organization, enhancing women’s participation, strengthening resilience and adapting to climate change;

• mutual contingency funds can finance a variety of activities, as long as they are approved by the association’s board of directors, such as purchase of inputs for a new agricultural season when a harvest has been lost, family and household expenses in emergencies and productive and trade activities that generate benefits for when the community has lost its sources of income;

• community contributions towards implementing mutual contingency funds decreased the dependencies and paternalism of communities;

• affected farmers have quick access to credit and can resume food production as soon as possible without having to sell assets or contract debts;

• community addresses concerns about resilience and livelihoods through participatory planning and risk decision-making;

• community builds a culture of learning through practice, savings, investment, responsibility, solidarity and ownership;

• generate income for family benefit, which allows for more access to food;

• access to loans for economic financing promotes entrepreneurial activities;

• strengthen the organization and administration of mutual funds of contingency; and

• increase economic capital of communities and households.

> For two periods of prolonged drought, mutual contingency funds have enabled families to deal with the loss of their crops by creating other income-generating activities so they can buy basic foods. The following are some benefits:

• Since 71 percent of members are women, they were fundamental in mutual contingency funds, where they ensured sustainability and fulfilled payments for savings.

• Women have developed leadership roles in their communities.

• Communities have increased their capacity to prepare and respond to disaster risk management.

• Communities have adopted good practices for disaster risk reduction, adaptation to climate change and natural resource management.

• Women have greater access to productive goods, competencies and services.

• Communities have access to flexible funds at the community level to organize local disaster responses.

• Family’s have become more supportive when they see the economic improvement that comes from women’s entrepreneurship.

What can we learn?

> The organized groups of Guatemala established their own methodology and work plan to invest the funds in community productive projects, which has generated work during the lean season brought on because of drought.

> Contingency mutual funds have been instrumental to households who lack access to formal financing and insurance systems to protect their families. ⬤

6. Conclusions and way forward

Conclusions

This stock-taking exercise showed that there are a number of successful initiatives that FAO is implementing in different parts of the world. They have been identified as good practices and can be upscaled to increase the resilience of livelihoods in a gender-equitable way. For example, labour-saving technologies, both in the productive and domestic spheres, are easy ways to reduce the work burden carried by women while also contributing to gender equality. Participation in groups or associations, such as women open schools, farmer field schools, and community organizations, can result in knowledge exchanges, and also in increased decision-making power among the participating women both in the community and in the household. Some of the approaches, such as the community listeners’ club or the junior farmer field and life schools, actively address gender inequalities through group discussions involving both women and men, and they result in changed perceptions about the multiple roles of women.

Protection from sexual and gender-based violence is an area of work that merits attention particularly in areas of protracted crises. FAO is taking a Safe Access to Fuel (SAFE) approach to promote the use of fuel-efficient stoves and practices to reduce the need for firewood, to reduce the risks women and girls confront when collecting firewood, particularly in situations of displacement.

Another important factor for success was the different ways women facilitators were deployed to increase outreach to women. The deployment of women field staff was sometimes done by taking measures to train women as community vaccinators, animal health workers, facilitators, or through women volunteers or other field staff working through strategic partnerships, such as with the Yemeni Women’s Union.

Among the gaps identified, the most obvious was the lack of good practices related to policy level work and integrating rural women and men, and their specific needs and priorities, in high-level strategic actions. Another gap was the lack of submissions related to cash transfers and other types of social protection mechanisms, besides the good practice on mutual contingency funds.

There is also the issue of women being perceived as marginal in the programmes. When projects or programmes have women-targeted components, they tend to be small. If there is an overall target for the number of women among beneficiaries, even in many of these success stories, the target for the number of women is 30  percent. According to FAO (2011), globally women make up 43 percent of the agricultural labour force, and in some parts of Africa the figure is more than 80 percent. Perhaps we should be aiming higher than the 30 percent?

Another overall observation is that most of the submissions across the four pillars are about women rather than about gender relations. There is an awareness of the gender dimension and recognition of differences in gender roles and inequalities, but the practices do not try to challenge the imbalance of power between men and women. In many situations where rigid gender roles and highly unequal relations exist between men and women and their access to resources, knowledge and information, such a challenge can be an appropriate first step. Activities that are traditionally the responsibility of women, such as vegetable and poultry production, and family nutrition, can be a good entry point in those settings where reaching women may be difficult. However, more transformative approaches do exist as well alongside the traditional ones, and these are also applied in conservative settings. The community listeners’ clubs and farmer field schools have the potential to generate powerful messages about gender equality. FAO must scale-up these approaches and be innovative about finding context-specific ways of supporting the resilience of men and women of different ages equitably.

Way forward

The immediate next step is to share and disseminate the findings of this exercise, and to encourage cross-fertilization of experiences between the participating offices as well as those that have not yet submitted. In addition to sharing this exercise, a webinar on gender-responsive prevention and mitigation practices is proposed by FAO Headquarters, for an online presentation of some of these good practices by selected FAO country offices and their collaborators.

Some of these practices are already being followed up and scaled-up, such as: the fuel-efficient stoves under the umbrella of an interagency initiative on Safe Access to Fuel and Energy; and the cajas rurales or caisses de résilience as one of the livelihood approaches building on associations of farmer women and men. The accountability-for-affected-populations (AAP) approach deployed in the Philippines is being scaled-up through a network of AAP focal points in the decentralized offices.

In the longer term, it is proposed that gender-focused impact assessments will be conducted on a few selected practices to prepare full good practice documents, perhaps with accompanying videos or other promotional material, to assess and exhibit how addressing gender inequalities can foster more resilient livelihoods.

7. References

Brown, O., Crawford, A. & Hammill, A. 2006. Natural Disasters and Resources Rights: Building resilience, rebuilding lives. Winnipeg. IISD. 28 pp. (also available at https://www.iisd.org/pdf/2006/tas_natres_disasters.pdf).

ECOSOC. 1977. Agreed Conclusions 1997/2. https://www.refworld.org/docid/4652c9fc2.html

FAO. 2011. State of Food and Agriculture, Women in Agriculture: Closing the gender gap for development 2010–2011. Rome. FAO. 148 pp. (also available at http://www.fao.org/3/i2050e/i2050e.pdf).

FAO. 2013. FAO Policy on Gender Equality: Attaining food security goals in agriculture and rural development. Rome. FAO. 24 pp. (also available at http://www.fao.org/3/i3205e/i3205e.pdf).

FAO. 2018. Good Practice: FAO Dimitra Clubs. ICTs as drivers of rural women’s empowerment. http://www.fao.org/gender/projects/detail/en/c/1104337/

FAO. 2019. Our priorities – The Strategic Objectives of FAO. Rome. FAO. 28 pp. (also available at http://www.fao.org/3/I8580EN/i8580en.pdf).

FAO and Tufts University. 2019. Highlights on the resilience and vulnerability of populations affected by conflict. http://www.fao.org/3/ca7104en/CA7104EN.pdf

FAO. 2020. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2020. Sustainability in action. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/ca9229en

Grassi, F., Landberg., J. & Huyer, S. 2015. Running out of time: The reduction of women’s work burden in agricultural production. Rome. FAO. 37 pp. (also available at http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4741e.pdf).

Herrera Garibay, A., de Wit, P. & Eleazar, L. 2011. Land tenure and natural disasters. Addressing land tenure in countries prone to natural disasters. Rome. FAO. 118 pp. (also available at http://www.fao.org/3/I1855E/i1855e.pdf).

Mueller, V., Gray, C. & Kosec, K. 2014. Heat stress increases long-term human migration in rural Pakistan. In: Nature Climate Change. 182–185 pp. (also available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2103).

Samee, Duree, Nosheen, Farhana & Kahn, Haq Nawaz. 2015. Women in Agriculture in Pakistan. Islamabad. FAO. 136 pp. (also available at http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4330e.pdf).

Samiullah, Atta-Ur-Rahman & Shaw, Rajib. 2015. Gender and Disaster Risk Reduction in Pakistan. In: Disaster Risk Reduction Approaches in Pakistan. Verlag: Springer. Japan. pp 379-394. (also available at https://www.springerprofessional.de/de/gender-and-disaster-risk-reduction-in-pakistan/4627032).

UNDRR. 2007. Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters. UNDRR (formerly UNISDR). Geneva (also available at https://www.unisdr.org/files/1217_HFAbrochureEnglish.pdf).

UNDRR. 2015. Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. UNDRR. Geneva. 32 pp. (also available at https://www.undrr.org/publication/sendai-framework-disaster-risk-reduction-2015-2030).

United Nations Global Compact. 2010. Women’s Empowerment Principles: Equality Means Business (also available at https://www.unglobalcompact.org/library/65).

Annex 1:

Useful definitions

Gender equality: when women and men enjoy equal rights, opportunities and entitlements in civil and political life. For FAO, gender equality also means the equal participation of women and men in decision making, equal ability to exercise their human rights, equal access to and control over resources and the benefits of development, and equal opportunities in employment and in all other aspects of their livelihoods.

Gender mainstreaming: refers to the globally recognized strategy for achieving gender equality. It is a process rather than a goal in itself. UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) describes gender mainstreaming as “the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.” (ECOSOC, 1997).

Women’s empowerment: has five components – i) women’s sense of self-worth; ii) their right to have and to determine choices; iii) their right to have access to opportunities and resources; iv) their right to have the power to control their own lives, both within and outside the home; and v) their ability to influence the direction of social change to create a more just social and economic order, nationally and internationally (UN Principles on Women’s Empowerment).

Annex 2:

Good practice template

FAO gender-focused resilience good practices template

The purpose of this template is to document those good practices adopted within the work of FAO aimed at developing the resilience of households, communities and food systems, while contributing to gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Resilience means the ability to prevent disasters and crises as well as to anticipate, absorb, accommodate or recover from them in a timely, efficient and sustainable manner. This includes protecting, restoring and improving the livelihoods systems of both men and women in the face of threats that impact agriculture, nutrition, food security and food safety.

Work that contributes to gender equality and women’s empowerment entails assessing the implications of planned activities on men and women, boys and girls, and taking concrete steps to ensure that the disadvantaged groups benefit equally and that inequality is not perpetuated.

This template is a checklist to verify that the necessary areas are covered when documenting a good practice. The right-hand column provides guiding questions to assist in documenting the elements on the left-hand side.

Annex 3:

Overview list of good practices

[1] http://www.fao.org/emergencies/how-we-work/resilience/en/

[2] FAO identifies five types of disasters: natural disasters (floods, droughts, etc.), socio-economic crises (food price crises, etc.), violent conflict (civil unrest, interstate conflict, etc.), food chain crises (transboundary pests and diseases, food safety emergencies, technological threats, etc.) and protracted crises (complex, prolonged emergencies combining two or more of the above).

[3] FAO Office of Evaluation (2014): FAO’s contribution to crisis-related transition and (2013): FAO’s role and work in Disaster Risk Reduction in Asia and in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Both are available from the http://www.fao.org/evaluation/oed-home/en/

[4] FAO Emergency Preparedness and Response Area of the FAO Corporate Handbook – Gender. (http://intranet.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/manual_section/docs/print_option/Gender_updated.pdf)

[5] FAO Regional Office for Africa (RAF) (Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, the Niger, Somalia, South Sudan, Zimbabwe), FAO Regional Office for the Near East (RNE) (Egypt, Gaza Strip, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, West Bank, Yemen); FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (RAP) (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines); FAO Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean (RLC) (Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Paraguay).

[6] A full list of the submitted practices can be found in Annex 3.

[7] According to Mueller, Gray and Kosec (2014), high temperatures were the dominant driver of mass migration of Pakistani men from Pakistan.

[8] A very good example related to extension services was also received from Pakistan. It shows that Women Open Schools were used to enable women to increase their knowledge and skills in poultry production.

[9] The Cajas Rurales approach is similar to the Caisses de Résilience approach successfully employed by FAO in Africa.