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What role can agricultural extension and advisory services play in realizing gender equality and improved nutrition?










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    Making extension and advisory services work for women 2021
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    Women play a key role in agriculture and food security, making up around 48 percent of the agricultural labour force in low-income countries. Despite this, their important contribution is hardly visible and largely unrecognized. Gender equality regards human rights but gender-based constraints in the sector cause also major inefficiencies in value chains, and are a key impediment for rural development, food security, and social and environmental sustainability. Moreover, the severe and multidimensional constraints faced by women hamper their productive potential and livelihoods. Women’s needs for knowledge and support often differ from the services offered, which are typically tailored to a male clientele. Extension and advisory services (EAS) should play a key role in helping women improve their livelihoods by providing services to harness their potential, thus empowering them to escape poverty and participate in decision-making. However, EAS providers often fall short of this goal: services are usually geared towards male heads of household, and only seldom do EAS actors have the skills to effectively support women.
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    Supporting gender sensitive service provision: FAO’s Gender and Rural Advisory Services Assessment Tool 2016
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    Rural advisory services (RAS) can help women and men farmers to increase their yields, connect with markets, and take advantage of agripreneurship opportunities. Yet, globally, women have less access to RAS than men, and the information, technologies and services provided tend to be less relevant to the needs of female farmers. To help organizations reflect on and improve their service provision for women, FAO has developed the Gender and Rural Advisory Services Assessment Tool (GRAST), which as sesses the gender-sensitivity of RAS programs at the enabling environment, organizational, and individual (advisor and client) levels. This tool gives to RAS organizations and institutions a way to identify concretely the strengths and weaknesses of a program from a gender perspective. This can be a basis for implementing institutional reforms to improve gender equity, as well as a means to share good practices and lessons learned within the organization and with others. The GRAST can be used to assess all types of advisory service programs, including those focusing on business development and agripreneurship. The side event is hosted jointly by FAO and INGENAES (Integrating Gender and Nutrition within Agriculture Extension Services), a USAID-funded consortium of universities and institutions, has been collaborating with FAO to test and validate the GRAST in Bangladesh, with a particularly focus on the organizational level of the tool. The side event will introduce participants to t he GRAST and, through presentations and discussions, it will provide an overview on how the tool can be used. The event will also focus on sharing preliminary results and lessons learned from the GRAST validation case studies carried out in Ethiopia, India, Bangladesh and Peru.
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    Enhancing the potential of family farming for poverty reduction and food security through gender-sensitive rural advisory services 2015
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    Rural advisory services (RAS) can play an important role in addressing gender inequalities. However, RAS programmes have often fallen short of expectations to design and implement relevant services to help rural women and men achieve food security and generate more income. This paper is based on an examination of a broad selection of existing literature on gender-sensitive RAS. It looks at gender-differentiated barriers in access to RAS and challenges of effectively targeting women family farmers when delivering these services. Examples of good practices provided are those that have been successful in responding to women farmers’ specific requirements in supporting their economic empowerment. The paper provides recommendations on what can be done to improve the gender-sensitivity of RAS. It offers a reflection on actions needed to ensure that good practices and lessons learnt translate into the design and provision of demand-driven and gender-sensitive RAS for improved food security and poverty reduction.

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