The status of women in agrifood systems report uses extensive new data and analyses to provide a comprehensive picture of women’s participation, benefits, and challenges they face working in agrifood systems globally. The report shows how increasing women’s empowerment and gender equality in agrifood systems enhances women’s well-being and the well-being of their households, creating opportunities for economic growth, greater incomes, productivity and resilience.The report comes more than a decade after the publication of the State of food and agriculture (SOFA) 2010–11: Women in agriculture – Closing the gender gap for development. SOFA 2010–11 documented the tremendous costs of gender inequality not only for women but also for agriculture and the broader economy and society, making the business case for closing existing gender gaps in accessing agricultural assets, inputs and services. Moving beyond agriculture,
The status of women in agrifood systems reflects not only on how gender equality and women’s empowerment are central to the transition towards sustainable and resilient agrifood systems but also on how the transformation of agrifood systems can contribute to gender equality and women’s empowerment. With the launch of the report, FAO makes a commitment to do even more to mainstream gender considerations in our efforts to achieve Better Production, Better Nutrition, Better Environment and Better Life.
The Director-General of FAO will open the event, and government officials, policy makers, and distinguished researchers will speak at the event. Presenters will highlight the relevance of the report’s findings for decision makers, development actors, the private sector, civil society and academia. Different stakeholders will share insights from their own work on gender equality and empowering women in agrifood systems, as a key ingredient for the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Measuring women’s empowerment with the WEAI
I was also asked about ongoing efforts to measure women’s empowerment in agrifood systems. A lot of the evidence generated on the returns to women’s empowerment over the past decade came from our work developing the WEAI. In 2012, FAO and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) co-hosted the launch of the WEAI during the 56th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Since then, WEAI-based metrics have been adopted in 247 organizations in 59 countries—we celebrated its 10th birthday last year!
These efforts have generated clear evidence that positively associates women’s empowerment with agricultural production, food security, diets, and nutrition. We made direct associations because we collected data on all these outcomes from the same individuals within the same households.
We recently did a review on the relationship between women’s empowerment and food systems outcomes, based on studies using the WEAI (Myers et al. 2023). The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems report prominently features the review findings, which affirm the significance of women’s empowerment and gender equality in enhancing diets and nutrition, boosting agricultural productivity, and investing in the next generation, in addition to recognizing their intrinsic value. Nevertheless, we found that there is still very little evidence on the relationship between women’s empowerment and environmental outcomes, and between women’s empowerment and resilience. We need to know more about these relationships; that will require collecting more WEAI data and outcomes of interest in more countries and contexts.
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