Photo Credit: A. Fleuret/USAID
Traditionally, agricultural development and research tended to ignore gender, which contributed to the marginalization of women and missed opportunities to reduce poverty. Recognizing International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI) leadership on gender and agriculture, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) called on IFPRI in the late 2000s to collaborate on projects tackling gender issues and their effects on agricultural development.
In 2009, FAO asked IFPRI to contribute to FAO’s 2010–11 SOFA: Women in Agriculture: Closing the Gender Gap for Development, which enriched the evidence on the importance of women in agriculture. IFPRI provided four background papers and two briefs as well as technical inputs to the expert review. This SOFA report revealed systematic evidence that gender equality is more than a lofty ideal; it is crucial for agricultural development and food security. This evidence influenced the global debate on the issue. Building on this work, the two organizations released the book Gender in Agriculture: Closing the Knowledge Gap in 2014 to shed light on the gender gaps in agriculture, the obstacles women face, and ways to address these inequities.
Strengthening women’s land rights is often associated with improved health, nutrition, and education of their children. However, measuring these impacts was challenging because available data did not include gender-disaggregated indicators. In 2014, with support from the IFPRI-led CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM), FAO and IFPRI joined forces to construct gender-disaggregated indicators related to women’s control of land, which are instrumental in measuring gender gaps in land rights. These indicators were incorporated into FAO’s Gender and Land Rights Database—an important source of information on gender inequalities in land rights. FAO and IFPRI’s work in this area informed the United Nations Security Council’s decision to adopt, in conjunction with other UN agencies and member states, the use of two land-related, gender-disaggregated indicators to measure progress toward target 5.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals: end all forms of discrimination against all women.
Currently, FAO and IFPRI are collaborating to develop and pilot a streamlined, project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (Pro-WEAI), designed for use in agriculture and food security projects and activities. This Pro-WEAI is being developed under the FAO-IFAD project known as the UN Joint Programme on Rural Women’s Economic Empowerment in Ethiopia, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development, and the IFPRI-led CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH).
For more information on IFPRI's work in partnership with FAO, please go to this brochure.
