Enhancing women’s empowerment and resilience 

Women’s empowerment is important in and of itself, but empowerment can also deliver a variety of other benefits linked to agrifood system livelihoods: when women report greater decision-making power, children’s nutrition, household dietary diversity and household-level food security all improve, and agricultural productivity also increases. ¹⁴

Discriminatory social norms are at the heart of gender inequality, creating power imbalances between women and men in agrifood systems. Informal social norms and practices, as well as gender-blind policies and institutions, can create barriers to women’s empowerment and socioeconomic well-being. Gender-transformative approaches go beyond inclusion and seek to address the underlying constraints to equality by working on social norms and institutions at both the community and policy level. These approaches are cost-effective and also have a positive impact on local norms, delivering high returns.¹⁵ However, they require additional, dedicated investment in order to have a more systematic impact at scale. 

Additionally, women play a crucial role in ensuring food security and building resilient agrifood systems, yet they are disproportionately affected by crises, whether caused by climate change, economic shocks, conflict or food price volatility. Structural gender inequalities often limit women’s ability to prepare for and recover from disruptions, as they face weaker access to financial resources, land ownership, social protection and decision-making spaces that shape resilience planning. As crises disrupt essential systems that support access to nutritious foods and services, evidence shows that these disruptions disproportionately affect the nutritional status of women and children, exacerbating existing vulnerabilities (particularly in protracted crises).¹⁶ Moreover, research suggests that climate change also has an unequal economic impact on women: every year, female-headed households lose 8 percent more income from extreme heat events than those led by men, and 3 percent more during floods. Additionally, women’s unpaid domestic work and care burden increases in response to climate shocks.¹⁷

When external shocks occur, women’s limited access to finance and safety nets makes them less able to invest in adaptive agricultural techniques, diversified income strategies or post-crisis recovery.¹⁸ Evidence shows that livestock plays a key role in women’s resilience building and response to emergencies: not only is it an economic asset that is easier to accumulate and a key source of household nutrition, it can also be exchanged quickly for cash to cover essential expenses in times of crisis. ¹⁹

Social protection is one important tool to increase the resilience of women and their families and communities. More broadly, projects which intentionally focus on women’s empowerment as an outcome have been shown to significantly improve the resilience of families facing shocks. Employing these approaches at scale could increase the resilience of 235 million people.²⁰ 

“We demand responsibility and commitment to build together the path towards a world of abundant and high-quality food, equality for rural women and men, healthy lives and food – produced in an agroecological way.” 

Maria da Conceição Dantas Moura
former Undersecretary of Rural Women, Ministry of Agrarian Development and Family Agriculture, Federative Republic of Brazil
CGE launch event, New York, 13 March 2024

Commitments in this thematic area address these multiple challenges and opportunities in a comprehensive way, with a view to removing barriers to women’s empowerment and resilience. It is critical to take up methods, tools and policies which have demonstrated their potential for improving these outcomes at scale, in order to ensure that women, communities and economies can all benefit.

The CGE initiative strengthens women’s empowerment and resilience in agrifood systems by advancing gender-transformative approaches and strategies that enhance women’s adaptive capacity and economic security in the face of crises. With a commitment to expanding financial inclusion, access to climate-smart agriculture practices and social protection systems, CGE partners promote actions that enable women to better sustain livelihoods during disruptions. Aiming to bridge the gender gap in food security and nutrition, particularly during crises, the CGE initiative offers a way forward for creating more inclusive and resilient agrifood systems, recognizing women’s economic empowerment as central to these efforts.