Knowledge

In the framework of the EU-RBA Joint Programme on Gender Transformative Approaches for Food Security and Nutrition, these Guidelines aim at enhancing the capacity of research and development partners to design, implement, monitor and evaluate gender transformative interventions.

This paper outlines the results of a study on the Programme de Microfinance Rural in Mali. It explores the impacts on agency and use of resources in households, with a focus on the role of gender in addressing these issues.

Montenegro’s Rural Clustering and Transformation Project highlights the imperative of integrating rural women into decision-making processes at all levels. This policy brief underscores the importance of enhancing rural women's education, training and job access.

 This paper finds that investing in rural women helps achieve climate goals, while simultaneously addressing gender inequality and poverty.

This year in review is a snapshot of the Joint Programme on Gender Transformative Approaches for Food Security and Nutrition in 2022.

This evidence gap map (EGM) visualises the areas in which most research on effective interventions for women’s empowerment is concentrated—and where there are gaps.

This systematic review evaluates the effectiveness of life skills training programmes for empowering women in developing countries.

This approach paper describes the strategy for data collection and analysis and the contours of the evidence gap map and systematic review.

This protocol for the systematic review details the methods used in the meta-analysis.

This paper defines gender sensitive as recognizing different roles of women, men, boys and girls, inequalities and gender power dynamics and trying to mitigate negative impacts in programme/action design.

IFAD's unique investing position serves as a starting point for a discussion on how it might scale up and support gender-based responses for adaptation and mitigation to climate change.

This guide provides assistance on formulating indicators to measure changes in gendered social norms in the context of food security and nutrition.

This background paper examines the linkages and interactions between women’s empowerment, food systems, and nutrition.

This note provides practical guidance on how to roll out the Gender Action Learning System (GALS) for IFAD-funded projects.

This study examines how behavioural barriers and biases perpetuate the gender gap and explores how behavioural science can reduce such barriers and biases.

This collection of success stories and good practices shows the impact of the Joint Programme on Accelerating Progress towards the Economic Empowerment of Rural Women (JP RWEE) among rural women in the seven participating countries: Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Nepal, Niger and Rwanda.

This is the official flyer of the JP GTA. It provides information about the Joint Programme's overview, background, objective, expected results, key components and country-level activities as well as key issues related to gender transformative approaches.

This brief summarizes relevant findings from socio-legal analyses, combining the review of key legal and policy documents and literature on existing barriers to the recognition of women’s land rights.

IFAD’s technical assistance programme INSURED (Insurance for rural resilience and economic development) has been building knowledge about how to strengthen women producers’ access to climate risk insurance. 

This report presents the findings of the Global End-term Evaluation of the Joint Programme on Accelerating Progress towards the Economic Empowerment of Rural Women (JP RWEE).

The 25th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action, also known as “Beijing + 25”, provides an excellent opportunity for governments, civil society, the United Nations system and all development actors to take stock of progress made towards gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.

The Compendium is a product of the Joint Programme on Gender Transformative Approaches for Food Security and Nutrition implemented by FAO, IFAD and WFP and funded by the European Union.

The Gender Network, with more than 2,000 members, has the goal of increasing IFAD’s impact on gender equality and strengthen women’s empowerment in poor rural areas. 

Las desigualdades de género todavía están muy marcadas en los países andinos a pesar de la mayor atención que se está dando a la igualdad de género y el empoderamiento de la mujer. 

This report summarizes the key facts about, and current observations on, the status of gender and social inclusion within the East and Southern Africa (ESA) region.

This photo essay describes the different types of changes in the life of women that are participating in the JP RWEE.

This study analyses sex-disaggregated data from various countries to characterize rural youths’ transition to adulthood by gender. 

Little is known about the economic activities of rural youth. This study provides empirical evidence on this gap in literature. 

Development projects that integrate investments in rural indigenous people, youth and women with measures to adapt to climate change are more likely to be successful in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to a new report launched today by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

A new report from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) shows that by working with women, men, young people and indigenous peoples as change agents we are best placed to beat back the impact of climate change on rural communities in West and Central Africa (WCA).

Gender inequality is one of the most pervasive threats to sustainable development. It has negative impacts on access to, use of and control over a wide range of resources, and on the ability to fulfil human rights.

This report presents the findings from a desk-based review of household methodologies (HHM) activities and results in the IFAD loan portfolio and a consultation with individuals with first-hand experience of HHM. 

Since 1979, IFAD has worked with the Government of Sudan to develop structural reforms that tackle the roots of poverty. IFAD has continued to support rural people in Sudan through investment projects focusing on sustainable resource management, value-chain development and support to farmer organizations. 

Las organizaciones indígenas parte del IPAF han identificado los resultados más relevantes de sus proyectos.

The Asia and the Pacific region includes the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic countries and is a key driver of growth in the world economy.

IFAD, with support from the Government of Norway, developed the Rural Women’s Leadership Programme (RWLP) to strengthen the role and voice of women leaders in rural organizations, including in policy dialogue. 

Investments in smallholder goat development and related value chains are effective means to reduce poverty and increase the incomes of men and women from resource-poor households. They are also effective channels to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment in remote mountainous
areas.
 

The causes of gender discrimination pervade different aspects of our lives – social, economic, political, environmental – affecting gender roles and relations in domestic, productive and public domains and from the local to the international level. Time-bound development projects need to
address the cross-cutting and multifaceted nature of gender inequality through multiple entry points.

Interventions in the agricultural sector to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment (GEWE) mainly focus on strengthening women’s economic opportunities and decision-making capacities as farmers or in groups. However, the same women often remain disempowered within the household.

This How to Do Note (HTDN) is intended to provide guidance on how to design smallholder agriculture adaptation programmes that consider the differential impacts of climate change on women, men and youth smallholder farmers. This includes recognizing that programme interventions – from design to staffing to capacity development of beneficiaries and local organizations – need to consider how gender will affect sustainability and impact. The experiences, social positions and differing access to resources of marginalized populations are fundamental considerations in the design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation of gender transformative smallholder agriculture adaptation programmes.

The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) can be a useful tool to measure the empowerment, agency and inclusion of women in the agriculture sector. However, computing the WEAI in its current form involves large data requirements, resulting in lengthy surveys with several questions on various dimensions and indicators within each dimension. This paper proposes a reduced version of the WEAI, or the R-WEAI, and examines two possible approaches to reduce the data requirements while ensuring comparability to the full WEAI.

Gender equality and the empowerment of women are prerequisites for the eradication of poverty and hunger. First and foremost, gender inequalities and discrimination represent fundamental violations of the human rights of women. In addition, it is well recognized that gender inequality and discrimination undermine agricultural productivity globally,1 negatively impact children’s health and nutrition, and erode outcomes across social and economic development indicators.

Much work on rural women’s empowerment has focused on the need to expand women’s access to productive resources, which can allow them to increase their productivity. However, much more attention needs to be directed at underlying gender inequalities such as gender-biased institutions, social norms, and customs that negatively impact women’s work (paid and unpaid), livelihoods and well-being. Within food systems, these biases manifest themselves in limiting women’s access to productive resources, to services (such as finance and training), to commercial opportunities and social protection (including maternity protection). These manifestations may be regarded as symptoms, therefore, rather than drivers, of gender inequality.

 

This How To Do Note (HTDN) provides guidance in addressing targeting, gender equality and women’s empowerment in the context of the IFAD project design cycle.

This toolkit explains how to identify and address the diverse needs, constraints and opportunities of poor rural people through IFAD-supported projects and policy engagement.

Gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls is a pre-condition for the eradication of poverty and essential to achieve progress across all goals and targets set by the Sustainable Development Agenda. The JP RWEE facilitates transformation through rural women’s leadership, making gender equality and women’s empowerment a reality. Support to women's economic empowerment allows for increased influence, education and information for women to decide the use of their income, savings and loans, and the ability to make decisions about their life. 

This publication presents IFAD’s first glossary of terms related to gender issues.

This programme set out to empower 35,000 vulnerable women and men in rural value chains directly and another 65,000 indirectly through direct and peer capacity-building and action learning to negotiate a better position in value chains and achieve sustainable and equitable “win-win” collaboration between value chain stakeholders. 

The programme aimed to adapt and integrate participatory action learning methodologies into the policies and practices of at least 10 civil society organizations (CSOs) and to disseminate them through e-forums and capacity- building events then to be taken up by other relevant IFAD and Oxfam projects, in countries such as Ghana, India and Sierra Leone. Knowledge institutes also contributed to participatory planning and gender mainstreaming in value chain research and training.

This Household Mentoring handbook is a tool to assist household mentors to mentor selected poorer households.

IFAD has a well-established history of supporting gender equality and women’s empowerment. This commitment spans 25 years, from the 1992 paper, Strategies for the Economic Advancement of Poor Rural Women, to the 2003-2006 Plan of Action for Mainstreaming a Gender Perspective in IFAD’s Operations, the 2010 Corporate-level Evaluation of IFAD’s Performance with regard to Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment by the Independent Office of Evaluation, and finally the 2012 gender policy.

In the new IFAD Strategic Framework 2016-2025, gender equality is identified as one of the five principles of engagement at the core of IFAD’s identity and values. IFAD complies with the United Nations commitments on gender mainstreaming, including the United Nations System-wide Action Plan (UN-SWAP) on gender equality and the empowerment of women.

This module provides guidance and a comprehensive menu of practical tools for integrating gender in the planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of projects and investments in climate-smart agriculture (CSA). The module emphasizes the importance and ultimate goal of integrating gender in CSA practices, which is to reduce gender inequalities and ensure that men and women can equally benefit from any intervention in the agricultural sector to reduce risks linked to climate change. Climate change has an impact on food and nutrition security and agriculture, and the agriculture sector is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. It is crucial to recognize that climate change affects men and women differently. The initial assumption is that social differences, particularly gender inequality, must be taken into account to strengthen the effectiveness and sustainability of CSA interventions. Women are key players in the agricultural sector, yet compared to men, they own fewer assets and have access to less land, fewer inputs, and fewer financial and extension services.