Progress in gender equality and women’s empowerment in agrifood systems is possible if policies, programmes and investments are intentionally designed to tackle the multidimensional and interrelated challenges that men and women face. They must address the gaps in resources and assets identified in this report, many of which were called out in The State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) 2010–11: Women in Agriculture – Closing the gender gap for development1 but have not been sufficiently addressed in the last decade. They must also address the constraints that underlie the gender gaps in agrifood systems, including discriminatory social norms and constraining institutional and policy frameworks that fail to adequately acknowledge and address gender inequalities. And they must do so across scales, from individual and community to national.
Reducing gender inequalities in livelihoods, access to resources and resilience in agrifood systems is critical to efforts to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment and more just and sustainable agrifood systems. Empowerment, which focuses on increasing an individual’s ability to make choices and the ability to exercise such choices, requires adequate resources, skills and agency. In agrifood systems, key resources include land, water, technology, services and finance, and opportunities for education, extension and training, group participation and networks. Increasing agency requires approaches aimed at strengthening women’s participation in intrahousehold decision-making over the use of land or income, approaches that often include addressing policies and norms.
This chapter looks at the range of programmes, policies and specific design features that have successfully reduced gender inequalities in these domains and contributed towards women’s empowerment in agrifood systems. In many cases, empowerment is the end goal of these interventions; in others, specific gains in productivity, income or resilience are measured as pathways to empowerment. While there are numerous case studies to draw on, there is less comprehensive evidence of what works across contexts and outcomes, particularly for women facing additional intersectional constraints related to their age, ethnicity or other sources of marginalization.
Nevertheless, some programmatic features appear consistently and allow some lessons to be drawn. For example, access to education and training is critical, and the way that this training is offered matters. Likewise, interventions aimed at improving women’s work and productivity have been successful, particularly when they have addressed care and unpaid domestic work burdens, strengthened women’s capacities, improved their access to technology and resources and strengthened their land tenure security. Closing the gap in secure land rights is particularly important, as such rights have multiple positive impacts.
Achieving these impacts requires that services from extension to social protection and resources such as technology and finance be designed with women’s needs in mind. Digital tools and information and communications technology can facilitate closing multiple gaps. Group-based approaches are important both for increasing women’s empowerment and for increasing resilience to shocks and stress such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. Social protection programmes have been successful in helping women manage risk, develop livelihood options and build resilience.
Three elements are critical to moving the agenda forwards. First, the collection and use of high-quality data, disaggregated by sex, age and other forms of social and economic differentiation, and the implementation of rigorous qualitative and quantitative gender research are paramount for effectively monitoring, evaluating and accelerating progress on gender equality in agrifood systems. Despite improvements in the past 10 years, significant gaps remain in the availability, scope and granularity of data and in the evidence on what works and under what conditions for building more inclusive agrifood systems.
Second, localized interventions that address multiple inequalities that have been proven to close gender gaps and empower women in agrifood systems should be carefully scaled up, taking into consideration the local context. Scaling up can occur through policy pathways, through greater levels of investment or through uptake by public- and private-sector actors. Only by reaching scale can we achieve large benefits for women’s well-being as well as economic growth and food security. FAO estimates that closing the gender gap in farm productivity and the wage gap in agrifood-system employment would increase global gross domestic product by 1 percent (or nearly USD 1 trillion). This would reduce global food insecurity by about 2 percentage points, reducing the number of food-insecure people by 45 million.
Finally, interventions must be designed to close gender inequalities and empower women and, when possible, should use transformative approaches at community and national level to address discriminatory gender norms and attitudes. As explained later in the chapter, although a surprisingly large percentage (65 percent) of bilateral aid focused on agriculture and rural development is marked as incorporating a gender lens, outperforming most other sectors of aid, only a small share (6 percent) currently treats gender as fundamental in the design of the project. FAO estimates that if half of small-scale producers benefited from development interventions that focused on empowering women, it would significantly raise the incomes of an additional 58 million people and increase the resilience of an additional 235 million people.
As highlighted in Chapter 4, discriminatory social norms and rules affecting women and girls are at the heart of gender inequality and they are slow to change. Achieving lasting transformative change for gender equality in agrifood systems requires addressing informal (norms) and formal (policy) factors that perpetuate gender inequality, while concurrently addressing gendered resource constraints in work, productivity, assets, services and shocks.2 A number of gender-transformative approaches have emerged that are designed to actively address barriers to gender equality at different levels (household, group/community, organization/institutional) and to different degrees of formality (formal policies and informal norms) within agrifood systems (see Box 6.1). Given the relational nature of social norms that govern behaviour in communities and societies, engaging with power holders (e.g. local leaders, customary authorities) and with men and boys is key to shifting discriminatory norms and constraining policies (see Box 6.2).
Programmes and interventions seeking to challenge unequal gender relations and address discriminatory gender norms through the incorporation of mechanisms of social change are often referred to as gender-transformative approaches. They seek to achieve sustainable improvements in gender equality by transforming barriers to change, such as norms and policies, rather than working around them. Gender-transformative approaches focus on the systems that perpetuate gender inequality.i They embrace transformative methodologies and often use participatory methods and engage with agents of social change, including local and religious leaders.ii, iii They aim at shifting discriminatory gender relations and build on ways to influence norms by changing individuals’ attitudes and social expectations with information and reflection, social pressure, social sanctions and incentives, or by altering the symbolic meaning or signaling function of norms.iv, v Gender-transformative approaches typically include both women and men with the aims of fostering more egalitarian power relationships and transforming harmful masculinities into more positive norms of manhood (see also Box 6.2).vi, vii, viii, ix Gender-transformative approaches may also address institutions, policies and legislation that constrain empowerment.
Examples of these methodologies include the Dimitra Clubs and Gender Action Learning System (GALS) tools. The Dimitra Clubs challenge gender-discriminatory social norms and behaviours at the community level and tackle several forms of gender-based violence such as domestic violence and early marriage by harnessing the power of collective action and community engagement.x Dimitra Clubs work closely with chiefs (administrative and customary) and community leaders with the aspiration that they can be role models in promoting more gender-equitable norms and behaviours. This process has led to behavioural changes such as men engaging in tasks traditionally assigned to women (e.g. household chores) and women experiencing greater freedom of movement and engagement in socioeconomic and political activities.xi In sub-Saharan Africa, the Dimitra Clubs have been shown to enhance women’s agency and increase couples’ cooperation within the household.xii, xiii
GALS focuses on peer-to-peer learning and facilitates the development of individual and joint vision for change using participatory and visual tools such as graphics and concept maps. It has been used at multiple levels – individual, household, community and organizational – and implemented in different areas of the agrifood system such as agricultural production, value chains, agribusiness and enterprise development, nutrition, rural finance and climate-change adaptation. The approach has influenced behavioural change at household level, leading to increases in productivity, improved access to services and markets, improved food security and nutrition and increased investments in education for boys and girls.xiii In Zimbabwe, the implementation of GALS led to an increase in the number of women taking leadership positions and the number of women speaking in public and being consulted by community leaders; it also saw a shift in gender social norms at the household level that led to increases in household productivity and women’s control over assets and income.xiv
However, because gender-transformative interventions may cause changes in established power relations between different groups, it remains particularly important to regularly identify and address any potential backlash, tensions, setbacks or any other unintended negative consequences that may derive from their implementation.iii Notwithstanding the potential of gender-transformative approaches, the evidence remains limited for assessing the sustainability and depth of norm change ensuing from their implementationxv, xvi and on their effect in sustainably improving agricultural and nutritional outcomes.
Men and boys have been successfully engaged as allies for women’s empowerment and gender equality, incentivizing more equitable gender relations through processes of self-reflection, couples’ household vision goal setting, and peer-group support. In eastern and southern Africa and Asia, interventions using Promundo’s “Journeys of Transformation” methodology – which incentivizes engagement of men in caregiving and household tasks and focuses on critical reflection on unequal power relations among couples – resulted in more equitable gender attitudes, increased support of men for women’s engagement in paid work, increased participation of men in child care and household chores and decreased conflict between couples.i Working on masculinities, rather than just working with women, has also been shown to have significant potential towards more gender-transformative results in violence prevention, fragility and peacebuilding interventions,ii although, as noted throughout the report, changing norms can also lead to backlash and gender-based violence.iii
Simultaneously targeting both male and female co-heads of households can be also effective in improving intrahousehold cooperation. The World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab has found that working with men and women can yield enhanced outcomes in a number of circumstances, including land titling, women’s engagement in contractual farming work and increased productivity in specific value chains.iv, v, vi
In the context of agrifood systems, gender-transformative approaches have shown positive results in enhancing women’s self-worth and negotiation capacities within couples;3 shifting norms related to women's empowerment involvement in agriculture;4 increasing women’s decision-making in households and access to cash-crop income,5, 6, 7 and enhancing their roles in fisheries,8 livestock9 and forestry.10, 11 They have also contributed to more equitable sharing of resources12 and enhanced young women’s ability to own a business and decide on use of income.8, 13 In South Asia, the implementation of gender-transformative approaches has resulted in changing discriminatory norms and increasing both men’s and women’s empowerment in both Nepal14 and Bangladesh.15, 16
A central requirement for transformative change is the design of institutional frameworks and public policies that go beyond acknowledging gender gaps to including programmatic interventions able to address systemic constraints to gender equality and women’s empowerment. Instances of gender-transformative interventions in policy include the inclusion of gender-transformative messaging in education and extension curricula and the design of policies that address harmful gender stereotypes and discriminatory norms and practices.2 Programmatic policy interventions promoting gender-transformative change include the promotion of the active involvement of men in feeding and caring for children and the development of material and tools to address sociocultural barriers to women’s nutrition, as in the Ethiopia Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture Strategy of 2016,17 or the inclusion of household methodologies to improve gender relations, as in the Malawi National Agriculture Investment Plan 2017/18-2022/23.18
As highlighted throughout the report, women are vulnerable to gender-based violence in all segments of agrifood systems – in the household, the factory, the market and elsewhere. This constrains their economic and social opportunities, the realization of their rights and thus their empowerment and well-being. While a range of interventions such as empowering women, access to social protection and protective infrastructure can minimize the incidence of gender-based violence, policies and laws which impose penalties for violence are key to addressing the root causes of the violence against women and girls at scale.19
Women’s rights activists and civil society organizations play an important role in creating sustained demand for gender-transformative change in agrifood policy. Their meaningful engagement in policymaking processes – including building their capacities for effective participation and enhancing their authority to influence these processes – is thus fundamental to such change.2 Nationwide policy consultation processes were found to represent well the diversity of women’s realities in the design of the 2017 Gender Equality Strategy for Ethiopia’s Agriculture Sector.20 In Zambia, civil society organizations have been shown to advance gender-transformative change in customary tenure systems through leveraging global and national frameworks and by working with traditional authorities, local magistrates and men and women at the village level.21
As noted in Chapter 2, despite the importance of agrifood-system employment for women, their roles tend to be marginalized and their working conditions are more likely to be on worse terms than those of men. Women’s participation in and returns to work in agrifood systems are constrained by various factors, including their high care and domestic work burden, lesser education and skills and unequal access to resources. Several actions can be taken to address these constraints. These should often be taken in coordination with actions successful at closing asset and resource gaps. These are reviewed in the next section.
Interventions to improve women’s employment outcomes must address the disproportionate care and domestic work obligations faced by women, which influence their engagement in paid work and the types of paid work they do. Access to child care has a large positive effect on mothers’ employment opportunities in agrifood systems22, 23, 24, 25, 26 and can also increase women’s ability to join and participate in rural organizations.27 Provision of child care allowed single women in Nairobi, Kenya, to shift into better jobs with more stable and regular hours of work, earning the same while working fewer hours.23 In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the provision of rural child-care centres enabled women to reduce multitasking while farming, leading to a greater sense of control and happiness. Both spouses increased their participation in commercial agriculture with large gains in agricultural productivity and household income.28 Projects that attempt to shift norms about the distribution of care and unpaid household work between spouses have also been successful in Colombia, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Malawi, Uganda and Zimbabwe, with a stronger effect in households where both men and women participated in the project.29
Better education opens greater opportunities for work in higher-paid sectors and occupations, away from vulnerable forms of employment30 and is linked to smaller gender gaps in wages, as Chapter 2 showed. Education can also facilitate women’s access to the resources needed to participate in better-remunerated activities in agrifood systems. While having more education and technical capacity alone is not enough to change deeply rooted social attitudes, in Nicaragua women with higher levels of education had higher participation in household decision-making.31 Higher education and literacy are associated with greater take-up of agricultural technologies and financial products,32, 33 disadvantaging rural women who on average tend to have fewer years of schooling and lower levels of literacy.
Capacity development through extension and business training can be also effective in strengthening women’s livelihoods and empowerment in agrifood systems. Capacity building in value chains can increase female farmers’ and entrepreneurs’ empowerment by building their confidence34, 35 and abilities to negotiate with family on access to resources and with traders and buyers.36 Impact evaluations from the Côte d’Ivoire rubber sector, Ethiopia and Uganda37, 38 show that gender-responsive extension training, discussed in more detail in the next section, and behavioural-change training that includes both spouses can increase women farmers’ adoption of high-value crops and improved technologies, resulting in higher productivity.
Soft-skills training and adapting business training to the needs and constraints of women entrepreneurs are promising approaches for growing women-led businesses, including in agrifood systems.39 Personal-initiative training, which focuses on building participants’ socio-emotional skills, had greater impacts on both men and women entrepreneurs’ profits than did traditional business training in a randomized experiment in Togo40 and appears to be especially effective for women who start at low levels of empowerment.41 Combining business training and gender-oriented content such as how to enter male-dominated sectors and deal with gender stereotypes has been effective in increasing profits and the adoption of recommended practices.42, 43
Capacity development creates opportunities in more profitable agrifood-system activities.
Greater access to land and enhanced tenure security for women can facilitate investment in crops and technologies, with greater returns in the longer run. In Ethiopia, for example, acquiring land rights encouraged women to engage in cash-crop production and invest in better technology.44 The impacts of women’s land rights on participation in collective or policy processes has been found to be small but positive in several countries.45, 46, 47 A recent review of women’s land rights as a pathway out of poverty found high agreement on the positive link between women’s land rights and outcomes relevant for agrifood systems, including natural resource management, access to services and institutions, resilience, food security and consumption; it also found that enhanced women’s land rights increased their bargaining power and decision-making capacity (Table 6.1). However, evidence on the link between women's land rights and several other outcomes including access to credit and technology, agricultural productivity, and non-agricultural livelihoods is uneven.
Technologies (including improved seeds, fertilizers, improved agricultural practices and mechanization) have been shown to contribute towards women’s empowerment by facilitating women’s entry into new value chains,48, 49 increasing their assets50 and increasing productivity and freeing labour for other employment opportunities.51 In the United Republic of Tanzania, for example, providing women with improved bean varieties and training in good agricultural practices resulted in a 34 percent increase in productivity in women’s plots and a reduction in the gender productivity gap.52 In Nepal, the provision of low-cost pedal threshers and weeders translated into both increased participation of men in threshing and an overall reduction of women’s drudgery, resulting in increased overall production and productivity at the household level.53
The design of agricultural technology that takes into consideration the specific preferences, needs and constraints of men and women can influence livelihoods strategies and agency at the individual and collective level.54 For example, a barley breeding programme in the Syrian Arab Republic using participatory seed improvement and seed governance increased women’s recognition as farmers, increased their economic contribution to the household, enhanced their access to information and seed and strengthened their decision-making power in agriculture.55, 56
However, there are certain pitfalls related to the introduction of technologies that must be avoided. Even when input subsidies and the provisions of inputs through agricultural programmes target women, requirements for cofinancing the inputs can exclude women, who are often more resource-poor than men.57 Such discrepancies between policy aims and implementation mechanisms can help explain the absence of impacts. For example, evidence from Malawi, the United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia – where national input schemes have deliberately targeted female farmers since 201058 – shows that maize intensification programmes providing seed and fertilizer did not result in a significant increase in yields nor in a reduction of gender productivity gaps in Malawi and the United Republic of Tanzania. They substantially increased yields in Zambia but gender productivity gaps between plot managers persisted, with double the yield increases in plots managed by men (45 percent) compared with plots managed by women (22 percent).57 Moreover, the mechanization of traditionally female-dominated value chains can displace women’s labour, as discussed in Chapter 3, suggesting that inclusive technology distribution should also consider complementary policies or interventions such as reskilling programmes and social protection to support those who may lose livelihoods opportunities with the introduction of new technologies.
Gender-responsive financial products can also enhance women’s productive capacity along agricultural value chains and help support women’s climate action.59, 60 Savings groups have been shown to have positive impacts on women’s empowerment and microenterprise outcomes in Ghana, Malawi and Uganda61 and on food security and savings levels in Mali.62 In Côte d’Ivoire, offering private direct-deposit commitment savings accounts to help convert productivity increases into long-term savings increased labour productivity and earnings among female workers in cashew-processing plants.63 However, a review of 32 meta-studies (systematic reviews and meta-analyses) on the impacts of financial inclusion found that, while financial services related to credit, saving, insurance and mobile money on average have positive impacts on women’s empowerment, these impacts are often linked to other programme features such as being in a group, opportunities to leave the house, and rights and skills training.64 The evidence on the effects of financial inclusion (microfinance, microcredit and savings) on women’s economic status and livelihoods is not robust, with only one meta-analysis finding that women’s participation in self-help groups had generally positive and significant effects on women’s economic outcomes.64
Collective action and group-based approaches are important tools for more inclusive development. Membership in a farmers' organization, including associations, cooperatives, self-help and women’s groups, is associated with positive and significant effects on farmers’ incomes in a majority (57 percent) of cases reviewed across 24 countries.65 Women’s groups, in particular, have consistently been shown to improve women’s economic empowerment and broader well-being.66, 67
Group-based approaches have been successfully used for gender-based interventions and have been shown to strengthen women’s income-earning opportunities,68 support greater access to financial resources for women in fisheries businesses,69 improve social outcomes,70 enhance agency71 and enable women to take on leadership roles, such as in the tea sector in Kenya.72, 73 A recent review, however, emphasizes that, while women’s groups generally achieved positive impacts on women’s economic outcomes – mainly through the delivery of information, resources and training at scale, which is often the primary motivation for joining a group – impacts on other outcomes (for example, decision-making or norms) require intentional interventions.67 Marginalized farmers, including younger, less-educated and female farmers, tend to derive fewer benefits from farmers’ organizations.65
National policies and laws are also critical for giving women equal opportunities in agrifood-system employment. Countries with more gender-egalitarian laws, in particular laws regulating marriage, parenthood, assets and entrepreneurship, exhibit smaller gender gaps in vulnerable employment (that is, a smaller difference in the share of women and men working as contributing family workers and own-account workers).74
Private governance mechanisms, which include the use of voluntary standards such as labour codes and auditing, also play a role in addressing gender inequalities, but the evidence for their effectiveness in improving women workers’ circumstances is conflicting. A systematic review of the evidence on the socioeconomic impacts of certification systems75 on agricultural producers and wage workers in low- and middle-income countries found that they have had little or no effect on improving gender-equality outcomes as they do not engage with gender norms that undermine women’s ability to participate in and benefit from such initiatives.76 Women producers in certification systems remained invisible as they were less likely than male producers to participate in farmers’ organizations and they saw their workloads increase without an equal share of the benefits. Female workers on certified plantations continued to receive lower wages than their male peers and were less likely to occupy supervisory or management positions.76 While some studies report benefits of certification programmes in terms of improved participation in household decisions, greater access to training and capacity development and even changes in norms,36 more carefully designed studies are needed to evaluate under what governance mechanisms and under what conditions such interventions can support gender equality and women’s empowerment.
Social assistance and labour-market programmes develop livelihood options through management of risks and facilitating liquidity.77 Evidence from Lesotho, for example, shows that the Child Grant Programme led women to increase work on their own farms78 and girls to reduce time spent on household chores in male-headed households.79 The Ghana Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty programme increases the probability of transitioning from unemployment to employment for both men and women.80 In the Plurinational State of Bolivia, a nearly universal conditional cash-transfer programme for families with school-aged children increased women’s employment, in particular in areas with low access to financial services, suggesting that overcoming liquidity constraints may play a role in improving women’s employment opportunities.81
As noted in Chapter 3, women’s access to assets and resources that are key to agrifood systems continues to lag behind men’s. Successful approaches to closing gender gaps in women’s access to resources such as land, water, livestock, extension services and technology include comprehensive interventions, collective action and building human capacities through training and extension. Policies are critical for creating an environment that enables the achievement of a more equal and equitable distribution of resources. Some approaches that have reduced gaps in access to specific resources, such as closing the gender gap in landownership and extension services, are a good source of evidence to guide policies, investments and interventions in the agrifood system.
Comprehensive approaches, with interventions focused on improving women’s agency while closing gender gaps through adequate resources, skills and capacity, are crucial to successful results. For example, in several impact assessments conducted by the IFAD,82 it emerges that projects that strengthened women’s access to resources and their role in decision-making while also paying attention to developing their technical and financial capacities and their collective power are successful in improving welfare in various domains for the entire household, including income, food security, resilience and dietary diversity.
For example, in the Indonesian Coastal Community Development project, formal fishers’ groups were formed and equipped with better fishing tools, whereas women’s groups were formed for business enterprises to process, transform and sell fish products. The groups were also given financial support and technical training and were directly connected to markets. The project increased women’s participation in fish and marine processing by 27 percent and their general participation in community groups by 84 percent. Overall, the project increased household-level income by 33 percent and sales of fish and marine products by 28 percent.83
In a similar project in Djibouti, earnings from fisheries-related activities where women are main decision-makers increased by 91 percent while income increased by 32 percent and food insecurity decreased by 35 percent.84 The Rural Enterprise Program III in Ghana, which sought to trigger local economic development through agribusiness enterprises and better agricultural production, improved women’s empowerment along several dimensions. It has provided women with training in business management and other skills together with complementary inputs. It also increased their access to financial services and control of income-generating activities and other resources, with the overall result of increased income (50 percent), enhanced resilience (6 percent), more diversified diets (10 percent) and increased food security (24 percent).85
Women’s groups and women’s movements can be powerful forces for change around women’s rights to resources and assets. In the peacebuilding process following the 2008 post-election violence in Kenya, rural and urban women’s organizations mobilized in unprecedented ways to promote women’s rights within key legal instruments, including the Constitution, challenging the deeply traditional norms that excluded women from landownership. The participatory process led to the recognition in the Constitution of the equal rights of women and men to inherit land and to matrimonial property, and the inclusion of commitments for women’s representation in elective and appointed bodies.86 In the United Republic of Tanzania, a bottom-up participatory process strengthened women’s knowledge of their land rights, which contributed to an increase in women’s claims for individual plots of land. The requirement that at least half of village assemblies should be women and the establishment of women-only committees gave more voice to women in local assemblies, thus contributing to gender-equitable decisions.87
Rural organizations have effectively influenced changes in gendered access to water and related technologies. In Sri Lanka, for example, the participation of women’s groups in community water-resource management was associated with improvement in women’s skills related to water management (e.g. meter reading, billing and money collection) and increased their decision-making in village water-resource management.88 In northern India, participatory village committees addressing water access, health and nutrition issues have facilitated shifts in discriminatory norms, enabling women to speak in front of men and take on public roles.89 In Egypt, landownership, educational attainment, institutional support and access to training in irrigation technologies were key in enabling women to participate meaningfully in public institutions related to irrigation, such as water user associations.90
A community-based initiative aimed at changing gendered social norms that was implemented as part of the larger United States Agency for International Development Water Resources Integration Development Initiative in the United Republic of Tanzania triggered changes in social norms, with positive impacts on women’s participation in water-related governance structures.91 Interventions that address constraints in the formal rules (e.g. rules of group membership) and in the governance structures of such groups can help address women’s participation in them.92 Women’s groups were also central in the target countries of the UN Joint Programme for Rural Women’s Economic Empowerment, which helped build women’s social capital and increase their participation and influence in public spaces.93
Interventions and institutions that enable collective action in forest and farm producer organizations have shown to be effective in improving women’s empowerment and entrepreneurship.94 Participatory rangeland management in East Africa has been shown to increase women’s participation and decision-making power in rangeland governance.95 Producer groups and rural organizations are also important for the dissemination of new and improved technologies and practices in both primary agricultural production and agribusiness and have been shown to facilitate pathways for women’s empowerment. In Bangladesh, interventions that promoted vegetable growing and group fishponds that operated through women’s groups and that provided them with access to resources (credit and fishpond sites) showed a great potential to reach and benefit women by improving decision-making power and the nutritional status of women and girls by more than other individual interventions.96
Greater education and capacity development can strengthen women’s claims over and access to resources and property.97 Women’s education is correlated with greater ownership of land,98 while literacy, including legal literacy, contributed to greater gender equity in the inheritance of land in Latin America.99 The provision of legal aid at the community level has been shown to strengthen women’s knowledge of their rights and, when complemented with interventions addressing the underlying norms that discriminate against women, can increase women’s ownership of land (Box 6.4).
Targeting both spouses with extension services is a promising approach to strengthening women’s access to training and information, with significant positive impacts on farm productivity and productivity. In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, targeting both female and male co-heads in an agricultural extension training for rubber production showed improved efficiency of household farm production and promoted higher levels of investment.i In Ethiopia, rural capacity-building interventions that targeted both women and men, and that were designed to be more responsive to female smallholders’ needs, increased the adoption rates of high-value crop farming, the total area of land cultivated and the economic participation of household members.ii
In Uganda, a behavioural-change training programme for couples that addressed cooperation between spouses, gender training and women’s participation in cash-crop production resulted in increases in women’s self-confidence, self-esteem and life satisfaction and reductions in intimate partner violence.iii Additionally, an economic intervention providing incentives to the couples improved women’s access to productive resources and their decision-making power regarding financial, agricultural and household management.iv
When women’s equal rights to land are enshrined in law, community-based legal aid programmes can improve women’s and men’s awareness of their rights and access to justice in the case of land-related disputes.1 However, to be effective and shift perceptions towards gender equality, legal aid must be supported by sensitization activities tailored to the needs of the beneficiary community.i
A field experiment in Liberia that introduced trained community paralegals to mediate legal disputes on a range of topics, including land and debt disputes and criminal acts, increased women’s satisfaction with the outcomes of dispute resolution.ii Evidence from a randomized control trial of a community-based legal aid and education programme in the United Republic of Tanzania showed that women with access to a trained voluntary paralegal experienced an increase in legal services and knowledge of land-related regulations. However, these did not result in a shift in women’s attitudes or more favourable gendered land practices.
In Kenya, the Justice Project included legal training for chiefs, elders, women and youth and information campaigns for the broader community. Men who received the training were 21 percent more likely to recognize women’s constitutional right to own land than those who did not. The project also increased the probability of women and girls inheriting land – 84 percent of wives in the Justice Project compared with 67 percent of wives in the control group and 39 percent of girls in the Justice Project compared with 3 percent of girls in the control group.iii
Women’s access to and use of extension services is conditioned by who conveys extension material and whether information is provided through social networks.100 In Mozambique, increasing the number of female extension agents that served farms led by women increased awareness and adoption of sustainable land-management techniques.101 Similarly, in two interventions in Uganda, the use of women model farmers to facilitate training and access to hybrid maize seed and the inclusion of women role models in video extension resulted in increased adoption rates of recommended agronomic practices, increased food security and a shift in norms.102, 103 Including gender and women’s empowerment components in farmer-led rural advisory services has also been shown to be effective in other contexts.104, 105, 106
Addressing time and mobility constraints is central to improving rural women’s access to extension and advisory services.107 In Ethiopia and India, successful strategies for addressing rural women’s time and mobility challenges included planning training sessions around women’s schedules and time availability; recruiting local trainers with awareness of women’s time constraints and seasonal variations in workloads; delivering trainings in easily accessible locations; allowing women to take their children to the trainings; and providing child-care services during the trainings.104, 106
Understanding rural women’s literacy and education constraints in accessing and benefiting from extension and rural advisory services is also crucial to the effective delivery of such services.107 Effective strategies include videos, demonstration plots, theatre and group discussions, and using local languages and local trainers.104, 105, 106 Other strategies to improve access to and effectiveness of extension and rural advisory services for rural women include the provision of demand-based training so that services are tailored to the constraints, needs and interests of rural women;104, 37 offering a variety of trainings to allow women to diversify their livelihoods;106 and bundling extension trainings with other services to increase women’s knowledge and ability to claim their rights.106
Combining complementary interventions that strengthen women’s intrinsic agency with other extension efforts can also be effective. In Mozambique, pairing agricultural extension with a psychology-based training that encouraged female farmers to adopt a more entrepreneurial and proactive mindset resulted in doubling the share of women engaging in profitable off-farm businesses and in the generation of additional income for the household.28, 108
Involving both men and women in water management and related trainings has been critical for facilitating more gender-equitable access to and control over water resources. Expanding women’s rights to and participation in irrigation and water management interventions has been shown to reduce their labour burden for water collection, increase their leadership in water-related areas and shift discriminatory norms. In northern Ghana, women who participated in a small-scale irrigation intervention saw benefits in terms of agency and well-being and reduced labour burden in irrigated agricultural production.109 In Fiji and Vanuatu, interventions that applied a gendered participatory approach to water, sanitation and hygiene interventions have been shown to reduce women’s labour in water collection, increase leadership of women and increase responsibility of men in hygiene roles in the household, with some limited evidence also pointing to a decrease in the instances of gender-based violence as a result of conflict over water management.110 Beyond involving men and women (often from different households), targeting both spouses with agriculture and agribusiness training shows positive effects on women’s empowerment and on investments and productivity in agrifood systems (Box 6.3).
Strengthening women’s rights to land in the law is critical to improving access to and ownership of land in practice. Joint land registration programmes have been successful in strengthening women’s land rights as evidenced by case studies from Ethiopia, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the Philippines and Uganda. In Ethiopia, evidence from the early phase of the nationwide joint land registration and certification programme, which started in 1998, found that between 35 percent and 45 percent of registered land was in the name of women.111 While not strictly comparable, by 2019, more than half of all landowners in Ethiopia were women (Chapter 3). The programme increased women’s awareness and claims of their rights to land.112 In some regions with low literacy rates, a photo of all owners was required for joint land certification, which increased women’s visibility and improved accountability.113 Similar positive results were observed in the Philippines under the Land Administration and Management Program, which started in 2002.114 The Second Land Titling Project in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic also stressed the importance of including additional activities to raise women’s awareness of their land rights even when women’s right to land is formally recognized in the law.115
Behavioural approaches aimed at encouraging joint titling of land through making couples aware of the benefits have also proved useful. A randomized field experiment in Uganda, conducted in 2018 during the rural land titling programme, found that the demand for joint titling increased when price subsidies were conditional on the registration of the wife as co-owner of the land and when additional information about the benefits of co-titling was provided.116 Small price incentives also increased women’s access to land titles in the United Republic of Tanzania.117
Joint titling can significantly increase women’s decision-making power in the household.118 In Rwanda, land titling programmes that include women’s names led to increases in rural land investment that were nearly twice as large in female-headed households as in men-headed households, but benefits can fade if strategies are not put in place to prevent reversion to informality.119
Digitalization offers great potential for closing the gender gaps in access to resources, including extension and advisory services, business training, markets and market information, finance and savings options. It thus has the capacity to strengthen women’s livelihoods and empowerment. For example, in Uganda delivering extension and advisory services to women through videos had a positive effect on their knowledge of agronomic practices; increased their participation in agricultural decision-making, especially on the adoption of recommended practices and inputs; and increased maize yields and the quantities of maize women sold on the market.102 Similar impacts were observed with video-mediated extension services in Ethiopia.120 Providing women with mobile phones and targeting both women and men living in the same household with agricultural extension information improved the adoption of practices and women’s participation in household decision-making and agricultural production.121
Similarly, the digitalization of financial services offers innovative ways to ensure meaningful financial inclusion of women. Mobile money has facilitated changes in women’s financial behaviour, increased their financial independence and strengthened their incomes and economic empowerment.122, 123, 124, 125, 126 In the Niger, cash-transfer programmes using mobile delivery have also been shown to improve women’s decision-making regarding the use of the money.127
Agricultural e-commerce platforms can empower rural women by improving their bargaining rights and increasing their incomes.128 A study using information from interviews with key informants and survey data from 821 farmers who are members of the four most prominent digital agricultural platforms in Uganda found that women on digital platforms reported having a greater access to formal work than those who were not on platforms: 21 percent of female farmers who were on platforms received formal contracts for their produce and 49.5 percent had access to working capital loans, compared with 9.3 percent and 29 percent of those female farmers not using the platform, respectively.129 In Bangladesh, a digital agricultural crowdfunding platform, iFarmer, allows investors to provide capital to rural women cattle farmers, and ekShop Shoron, an e-commerce platform, has been used to help build the livelihoods of Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.130 Nevertheless, there is considerable variation in the readiness of developing countries to support agricultural e-commerce in rural settings and ensure that the platforms are accessible by women, particularly those in remote areas, with low education and literacy and other intersecting drivers of exclusion.
Large-scale initiatives specifically focused on equipping rural women with digital literacy and skills are rare, but a few promising examples exist. For example, the Bangladesh Access to Information programme, with over 5 000 digital centres in rural and remote regions, connects around 5 million visitors each month. The centres offer a Digital Skills for Entrepreneurs programme, which has trained 3 000 women entrepreneurs on business, digital and hardware repair skills that equip them to open their own information technology repair centres, a much-needed service in many rural areas.131 In Rwanda, half of the positions within the government-backed Digital Ambassadors Program are reserved for women, to enable them to be advocates within their own communities and networks to encourage other women and girls to go online.132 As of December 2019, the program had provided digital skills training to 41 980 women, youth and rural people across 12 districts. An impact assessment reported that 87 percent of those trained reported increased incomes, and use of e-government services increased by 129 percent.133 Seventy-five percent of the women trained reported increased determination and interest to use technology, while 58 percent reported increased family incomes. As of March 2020, the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority estimates the internet penetration rate in Rwanda to be 62.9 percent – double the figure from 2016.134
Improving women’s low technology adoption rates will require policy reforms or the introduction of policy frameworks that directly address hurdles facing women in accessing improved technology. Gender-responsive sectoral policies are key to bridging the gap between rural women and men in their ability to benefit from information and communications technologies. An analysis of data from 46 countries conducted by GSMA demonstrated that an enabling regulatory framework is strongly associated with higher mobile money use, particularly among women.135
Policy measures that explicitly seek to close the digital gender gap have also proven successful. Leaders in this area include Botswana, Costa Rica, Nigeria, the Philippines and Senegal, all of which set clear targets for women’s inclusion in their national broadband policies. The Botswana national broadband strategy includes gendered targets for smartphone access, improving digital literacy and increasing the number of female graduates in information and communications technology-related fields, while the digital plan in Senegal includes a high-level commitment to mainstream gender in all broadband policy decisions and explicitly set a target for 33 percent use of e-commerce and public services by rural women by 2025.136
Chapter 5 presented information that shows that coping mechanisms and resilience to shocks and stressors are shaped by gender inequalities. Three mechanisms have served to enhance women’s resilience and leadership in anticipatory and shock-response actions: community-based approaches, policy engagement and social protection. A number of interventions have proven effective in empowering women in conflict, post-conflict and fragile contexts, including asset and cash transfers and group-based approaches.
Group-based approaches have been shown to enhance women’s empowerment and resilience to shocks. Participation in groups has increased access to climate information and adoption rates of climate-smart agricultural practices in India and Viet Nam.137, 138, 139 Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, women who were part of village saving and loans associations were less likely to report negative impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic on food security and health, suggesting increased resilience to crisis.140
In Kenya, group membership contributed to the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices, improved women’s safety nets and contributed to household resilience.141 Additionally, groups have been shown to increase productivity and income in Southeast Asia;142, 143 to reduce workload and increase production through the management of solar irrigation pumps in Nepal;142 to improve women’s adaptive capacity through microcredit and training in Kenya;144 and to increase women’s participation in local environmental decision-making in Senegal.142
In the Niger, Dimitra Clubs (see Box 6.1) enabled communities to innovate and develop climate-resilient solutions, increasing women’s voice in the community and empowering women to overcome barriers to accessing the solar irrigation pumps.145 There and in other countries of the Sahel region, Dimitra Clubs have also played a key role in strengthening community social cohesion and building rural women’s leadership skills to act as peace mediators in farmer–herder conflicts, increasing resilience and fostering the prospects for peace at community level.146, 147, 148
In Vanuatu, a community-based adaptation programme implemented by CARE International also increased women’s self-esteem and confidence to participate in activities, with a positive shift in community attitudes towards recognizing women’s crucial roles in climate adaptation.32 In Ethiopia, another CARE International initiative that aimed at increasing household income and resilience to climate change through a gender-transformative community-led approach also saw increased participation of women in groups (saving groups, women’s associations, livestock marketing groups) and reported increased recognition of the public role of women at community- and local-government-administration levels.149
Group-based approaches are also effective in fragile and conflict-affected states. A systematic review of evidence from 104 distinct quantitative and qualitative studies published between 2000 and 2021 from 29 countries and across 14 intervention types found that interventions that engaged with self-help groups in fragile and conflict-affected states had positive and significant effects in all domains of women’s empowerment: resources, agency and achievements.150
Gender-responsive climate policies and investments are central for creating an enabling environment that enhances resilience and reduces gender inequalities in agrifood systems.59 The formulation of gender-responsive climate policies and investment strategies has been slow but has gradually improved in recent years.59, 151 An impact assessment of the Zambian National Agricultural Sector Investment Program, which introduced gender-transformative approaches in nutrition and introduction of climate-smart technologies, shows that, in addition to increasing production of food crops and enhancing household food security, the programme improved relationships within couples and their roles and access to resources, decision-making and division of labour.152
Group-based approaches to collective action on climate policy have also shown great potential to foster capacity development tailored to women’s specific needs59 and to decrease gender inequality by supporting women’s climate action and increasing their access to information, collective resources, finance and collective agency.142, 153 For example, the inclusion of women in policy consultation processes helped in the formulation of gender-sensitive policies on climate change and food security in Latin America.154
Social protection programmes have been successful in supporting women’s resilience. They have facilitated climate resilience in helping recovery from shocks and in improving well-being outcomes in high climate-risk contexts.155, 156 Labour guarantee systems that include provisions to promote the equal participation of women have shown potential to transform gendered power structures and increase resilience to climate change.157 In Bangladesh, the Chars Livelihoods Programme, which transfers assets and provides training on livelihoods and nutrition to extremely poor women, has increased the social and economic abilities of programme participants to prevent and cope with the impacts of floods and erosion.158
A systematic review of interventions in conflict and fragile states found that asset- and cash-transfer interventions have large positive effects on women’s access to resources, including diverse assets, credit and income.150
Empowering women and closing gender gaps in agrifood systems lead to significant benefits for the well-being of women and their households. The analysis and review of evidence carried out for this report uncovered a wide range of interventions and specific features that have proven to enhance gender equality and women’s empowerment. As a way forward, three actions are critical to facilitating the transformation of agrifood systems for gender equality and women’s empowerment.
Developing strategies to close gender gaps and tackle the structural causes of inequalities in agrifood systems requires high-quality research and data disaggregated by sex, age and other dimensions of social and economic differentiation. As evidenced by this report, great strides have been made in the past decade in terms of the availability of sex-disaggregated qualitative and quantitative data, tools to measure women’s empowerment and high-quality empirical research. However, important challenges and gaps remain in the availability and use of quantitative and qualitative data to measure and analyse gender equality and women’s empowerment over time and across areas relevant to agrifood systems.
First, harmonized, multidimensional measures of agency and empowerment need to be more consistently integrated into national-level surveys and measured over time. They also need to be better linked to individual-level indicators on access to resources (e.g. irrigation and finance) and achievements (e.g. employment, wages and food security). The Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems recently developed under the 50x2030: Data-Smart Agriculture Initiative159 is an important initiative in this regard.
Second, more work is needed to develop methods to collect and measure changes in norms and sources of structural inequalities, including in large-scale data initiatives. The Joint Programme on Gender Transformative Approaches for Food Security and Nutrition160 and the CGIAR HER+ initiative161 are examples of efforts to develop tools to measure gender-transformative change in agrifood systems.
Third, increased attention to the collection of qualitative and quantitative data and research focused on marginalized populations is necessary to better understand and address overlapping inequalities and distinct experiences of discrimination.
Fourth, efforts to systematically collect nationally representative disaggregated data related to employment activities (in agriculture and outside of agriculture), time use and access to assets and resources relevant for agrifood- system livelihoods should move beyond the relatively small number of countries in the LSMS+ initiatives, which primarily focus on sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.162
Fifth, increased availability of longitudinal data is central for following changes over time in the same individuals and households and facilitating the identification of the causal drivers of change.
Sixth, greater efforts need to be made on data collection and research throughout agrifood systems. Substantial progress has been made in gathering global sex-disaggregated data in the fisheries and aquaculture primary sector and along the entire value chain.163 However, progress in other sectors such as livestock and forestry is still insufficient.164 More broadly, national and multicountry data on gender relations, roles and individual’s empowerment are relatively scarce beyond the primary agricultural sector, such as in manufacturing and processing, wholesale and retail trade, transportation and food services,36 and high-quality individual-level dietary survey data are lacking in many countries, especially in low- and middle-income countries.165 The report also found a lack of relevant sex-disaggregated data on the impact of climate change, adaptive capacity and resilience, and relatively scarce sex-disaggregated data about access to important assets and resources (e.g. irrigation, fertilizer and technology).
Seventh, while important advances have been made in the evaluation of gender-focused interventions, such as the experience of the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab, more systematic efforts should be made to evaluate interventions using rigorous impact-evaluation methods in order to provide evidence on what works best in different contexts, with a particular focus on capturing change in the underlying discriminatory social norms and entrenched unequal power dynamics sustaining gender inequality.
Eighth and finally, more data and evidence on the cost-effectiveness of interventions addressing gender inequality will contribute to finding solutions and political commitment to work at scale.
Addressing these gender data gaps can support rigorous research that better identifies the constraints to gender equality and women’s empowerment in agrifood systems, including those faced by women and men experiencing multiple and overlapping sources of discrimination. Advances in data would also support a more accurate assessment of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of agrifood-system programmes and policies, which should in turn inform the prioritization, design and roll-out of interventions and policies that can successfully contribute to building transformative, equitable and empowering agrifood systems for all.
Solutions at scale are needed to achieve tangible changes in gender equality and women’s empowerment. Unfortunately, many of the interventions reviewed for this report are relatively small in scale. Widespread change in gender attitudes is unlikely to occur unless lessons learned about ways to reduce gender-based discrimination are scaled up beyond households and communities to markets and policy and legal spheres.166 While it remains critical to engage with communities and households about gender-biased local norms through gender-transformative approaches, it is imperative that governments, international organizations, civil society organizations and the private sector influence positive changes in gender norms and improve women’s access to resources through national policies, campaigns and large-scale integrated programmes.
Scaling, however, poses challenges about what and how to scale. Approaches that have shown promise in multiple contexts, and where there are clear pathways to enlarge their reach and scope, are appropriate for scaling. Assessing this requires not only successful pilots, but also rigorous monitoring, evaluation and knowledge about results (see above on the need to ensure adequate data and monitoring and evaluation for gender equality). Above all, scaling up requires political will and commitment from government and societal leaders. Scaling can occur through governments that decide to make policy changes, mainstream approaches into national programmes or provide domestic co-financing for international projects. It can also occur through private-sector investment, increased financing and advocacy from development actors or through the efforts of communities and groups to invest in and adopt successful approaches.167 It is critical to ensure that approaches that have been successful in one context are tailored to new contexts, and that elements that were not a priority of interventions at a small scale (e.g. national policy engagement) are included when scaling.
Achieving gender equality in agriculture and agrifood systems at scale could bring tremendous benefits. Using data presented in Chapter 2 on gender gaps in farm productivity and wage gaps in agrifood-system employment, FAO conservatively estimates that closing the gender gaps in farm productivity and the wage gap in agrifood systems alone would increase global gross domestic product by at least 1 percent (or nearly USD 1 trillion). This would reduce global food insecurity by at least 2 percentage points, reducing the number of food-insecure people by 45 million (see Annex 3).
Interventions are more likely to bridge gender gaps in agrifood systems and bring about positive and lasting improvements in women’s welfare when they integrate explicit actions towards gender equality and women’s empowerment. The impacts are largest when social norms and institutional barriers that discriminate against women are also addressed.168 Interventions aiming at empowering women might inadvertently also result in disempowering outcomes, and avoiding these will require intentional and carefully designed interventions.36 For example, interventions targeting women may present trade-offs in terms of women’s greater decision-making and increased work burden, with important implications for development outcomes.169 Most projects that claim to empower women often include only strategies that reach and benefit women; few projects include strategies explicitly aimed at transforming gender norms and relations that can usher in greater gender equality and women’s empowerment. More-effective interventions aimed at enhancing gender equality and women’s empowerment in agrifood systems require a multidimensional nature, targeting multiple gender constraints across different scales and aiming at addressing structural causes of gender inequality. Information from several cost-effectiveness studies show that gender-transformative approaches provide a high return on investments (see Box 6.5).
Data and information on the costs and benefits of moving from gender mainstreaming to gender-transformative approaches in development interventions are scarce, consistent with the lack of data overall on the impact of gender interventions in agricultural and rural development interventions. Only 10 percent of interventions in agriculture and rural development assess gender differences in outcomes of interventions.i
Nonetheless, three studies, from Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, show that gender-transformative approaches are a cost-effective solution for improving rural livelihoods and enhancing gender equality.
In Côte d’Ivoire, the World Bank used a randomized control trial to compare the impacts of inviting both husbands and wives to an agricultural extension training on rubber production with the more traditional extension training targeted mainly at men, who traditionally dominate this export crop. The inclusion of wives in agricultural trainings led to higher levels of investment (planting 20 percent more rubber seedlings) while maintaining preprogramme levels of agricultural production on older trees and other crops.ii These changes come primarily from greater agricultural management by wives, increased retention of the action plan and improvements in the gendered division of tasks.ii Although the cost of these interventions was an additional USD 25 per household, or USD 35 if the time to design the training is included, households that benefited from the gender-transformative approach were able to maintain rubber production to pre-programme levels while households that benefited from the traditional approach experienced a USD 346 drop in annual value of rubber production.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Africa Gender Innovation Lab of the World Bank conducted a randomized control trial between 2019 and 2021 comparing gender-transformative provision of community-based child-care centres against informal child-care arrangements. An assessment of these interventions showed an average increase of USD 34 per month in household income as a result of increased labour supply due to significant reduction in the time that household members spent on child care. Although the evaluation did not take into consideration indirect or future benefits, the intervention had a significant positive impact on early childhood development. The cost-effectiveness analysis indicated “a high return on investment”iii with a monthly cost of USD 144 per centre (between USD 10 and 16 per child per month) compared with a USD 34 gain per month in household income.
In Burundi, between 2016 and 2019, CARE and partners tested the effectiveness of a gender-transformative approach known as Empowerment through Knowledge and Transformative Action as part of a randomized control trial against a “gender-light” approach and a gender-blind control. An evaluation revealed that women’s empowerment was significantly greater in the transformative group and the gender parity index improved by 51 percent compared with less than 10 percent in the gender-light and gender-blind interventions.iv Additionally, the project had significant positive impacts on women’s dietary diversity and led to important changes in men’s and women’s perceptions about gender-based violence.v The cost-benefit analysis estimates that the value of the gender-transformative approach is two times greater than that of gender-light approach and approximately 8.5 times greater than the gender-blind approach.v
Although a surprisingly large percentage (65 percent) of bilateral aid focused on agriculture and rural development is marked as incorporating a gender lens, outperforming most other sectors of aid (Figure 6.1), only a small share (6 percent) currently treats gender as fundamental in the design of the project.170 A similar proportion of multilateral aid that undergoes screening has a gender focus (67 percent of multilateral aid in all sectors).171
A meta-analysis of impacts achieved by 24 projects funded by IFAD, representative of a portfolio of 96 projects worth USD 3.1 billion in IFAD investments and an overall investment of USD 7.1 billion including cofinancing, shows that projects that contribute to women’s empowerment by increasing their decision-making power over income and/or resources are also significantly more effective in increasing household incomes, dietary diversity, food security and resilience than projects that do not address women’s empowerment. In particular, results show that the number of people that see appreciable gains in their incomes increases by 5 percentage points and the number of people that see significant gains in resilience increases by 20 percentage points (see Annex 4 for methodological details).
Repurposing a share of bilateral funding from mainstreaming gender towards treating women’s empowerment as a fundamental objective in project design would thus be likely to produce significant additional benefits in terms of incomes, dietary diversity, food security and resilience. If half of small-scale producers benefited from development interventions that focus on empowering women, it would significantly raise the incomes of an additional 58 million people and increase the resilience of an additional 235 million people compared with a gender mainstreaming approach. These outcomes could be achieved by repurposing the significant amount of money currently mainstreaming gender towards projects that intentionally seek to empower women in a cost-effective fashion.172
