To increase agricultural productivity while ensuring sustainable natural resources management, advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment in agriculture is essential. Gender gaps in agricultural productivity persist across the developing world. In order to support member countries and FAO technical units with the design and implementation of gender-responsive policies and programmes, FAO addresses the gender equality dimensions in country-level interventions and its normative work, including its major statistical databases and surveys. Amid a growing emphasis on natural resource governance within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the international agricultural development agenda and more specifically within its own Strategic Framework, FAO aims to further the understanding of gender-specific impacts of interventions on agriculture and the environment such as water and land resources, and ecosystems at large to inform evidence-based and gender responsive programming and implementation.

Addressing women’s economic and social contributions to society is essential for sustainable growth. Conclusions from this policy brief underscore the importance of strategies enhancing rural women's education, training, and job access. Integrating rural women in decision-making and ensuring equal representation at all levels, along with governmental quotas, can ensure a balanced distribution of resources and opportunities for every member of the community.The Rural Clustering and Transformation Project highlights the imperative of integrating rural women into decision-making processes at all levels. Understanding women's workload and investing in gender-transformative programs can lessen domestic burdens, enabling wider social and economic benefits for the community.

The study examined published works on the contribution of agricultural extension to the empowerment of women for agricultural development. It also explored the theoretical and practical implications. The findings revealed that research on women’s empowerment in agriculture through capacity building had grown steadily since 1987, with leading journals being Gender, Technology and Development and the Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension. Quisumbing, Mudege, and Ponnusamy emerge as prolific authors, while India boasts the most distributed studies. Beyond a comprehensive review, this work introduces a novel concept for understanding women’s empowerment in agriculture. The concept comprised of five extension methods designed to empower women farmers, emphasising informed decision-making and leveraging the various forms of capital.

Recognizing and promoting the role of women in climate change adaptation and mitigation, and their contributions to creating resilient food systems, is key to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 and keeping global warming to no more than 1.5°C as called for in the Paris Agreement. This paper develops the case for investing in rural women as a means of achieving climate mitigation and adaptation goals, while simultaneously addressing gender inequality and poverty.

At the core of measuring gender transformative change is the understanding that discriminatory social institutions and unequal power relations need to change, and that there is value in assessing how deep and enduring any changes have been to date. Social institutions that embed and (re)produce unequal power relations between women and men in a circular reinforcing process are the root causes of gender inequality. These institutions comprise formal and informal rules and norms that organize social, political and economic relations. The transformation of social institutions to make them more gender-equitable fosters more cooperative forms of power and relationships, affirming people’s capabilities, aspirations, critical awareness and dignity.

Women farmers in developing countries, including Pakistan, face challenges in accessing agriculture extension advisory services, with most of those services geared towards the needs of male farmers. Alongside other challenges faced by women farmers, this contributes to the gender gap in agriculture productivity in developing countries, whereby women-managed farms are 20–30% less productive than farms managed by men. It has been estimated that closing this gap would help to boost agriculture production by 2.5–4%, improve food security and improve the welfare of rural households (FAO, 2011). In the context of the launch of CABI’s new PlantwisePlus programme in Pakistan, which aims to enhance the knowledge and uptake of climate-smart plant health practices through responsive digital advisory tools, this report presents the results of an assessment of the current state of gender-sensitive extension services in Pakistan, and provides recommendations for making improvements.

  A core activity of the Plantwise Plus programme in Ghana involves working to raise awareness around gender-related inequity and related issues within the country’s agricultural sector. To evaluate the indicators of change that have resulted from work in this area to date, an assessment, involving insights from national-level stakeholders, extension agents, and farmers, was conducted between December 2022 and March 2023. Findings indicate that there have been changes in knowledge, attitudes and behaviour around ensuring that the agricultural extension system in Ghana is more focused on the needs of women farmers. Changes are being implemented at all levels, with further work and actions to be done to move the extension system from gender sensitive to gender transformative.

Due to growth of the agriculture market professionally and progressed economies worldwide, the world is treating farming differently. Farming has shifted from a passionate livelihood to a livelihood that needs the opportunity to be fostered by newly added business incentives. As a result, many farmers developed their skills and competencies to fit in market-orient farming and value chain demand, so they become agripreneurs. However, can every farmer become agripreneur? What does it take to be an agripreneur? The purpose of this study is presenting common challenges and opportunities in agripreneurship supported by successful stories from East region Cameroon.

Female farmers, who make up on average 43 percent of the agricultural labour force, face gender-specific barriers which limit their agricultural productivity compared with that of men. These constraints include lack of access to rural advisory services (RAS) and producers’ organizations. Improving women’s access to RAS can help close the gender gap in agriculture by making information, new technologies, skills, knowledge, and other productive resources more accessible to female farmers. The GRAST provides: • A methodology for assessing the gender-sensitiveness of RAS and organizations; • feedback on areas of the RAS provision that need improvement or that are working well. The tool focuses on three areas of inquiry (the enabling environment, the institutional level, and the individual level) and is expected to help systematize good practices and lessons learned to provide targeted policy advice and capacity development to member countries working towards gender-equitable rural advisory services. 

While much has been written about the importance of mainstreaming gender in agricultural value chains (and the challenges inherent in doing so), relatively few studies have provided details on cases in which gender integration 1 has been successful. This study, therefore, presents a collection of experiences in which rural advisory services (RAS) were able to successfully mainstream gender into agricultural value chains, categorised in terms of “best-fit practices”. While the examples presented here cannot be precisely replicated in other contexts, they provide general guidance for organisations that implement programming related to agricultural value chains.

in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda

While there is mounting evidence on the link between promoting women’s equality and economic empowerment and other development outcomes, such as sustainable agricultural and economic growth, gender issues are being inadequately reflected in agricultural policy strategies and programs. At the same time, a changing climate means that there is a shrinking window of opportunity for action, and it is imperative that climate-smart approaches to agriculture help close the gender gap and promote women’s empowerment, economic development, and societal resilience to shocks.

This manual is a resource and toolbox for NGO practitioners and programme designers interested in diagnostic and action research for gender sensitive and socially inclusive climate change programmes in the rural development context. It is meant to be an easy to use manual, increasing the research capacity, skills and knowledge of its users. Integrating gender and social differentiation frameworks should ideally begin from the start of the programme cycle and be coordinated throughout research, design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation phases. The data gathered using this toolbox supports this programme work.

A facilitator’s guide to incorporating gender awareness and analysis into extension training and programming

The Facilitator’s Guide is the overall summary of steps and processes to be followed by workshop facilitators during all or part of the sessions used. The Participant’s Guide is for use by participants during the workshop and accompanies the CD to be provided at the end of the workshop. The Appendices contain case study and gender tool examples for use during specific workshop sessions. There are also pre and post evaluations that can be administered before and after the workshop to track participant learning outcomes.