By P. Kristjanson, S. Andraka, A. Nini-Pavli, J. Mollins
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The benefits of engaging women in proactive leadership roles across Food Systems, Land Use and Restoration (FOLUR) program country projects are beginning to bear fruit.
At a recent FOLUR Regional Dialogue in Istanbul, which focused on maize and wheat agricultural systems, participants shared activities underway across country projects.
By highlighting the emergence of successful initiatives, discussions provided an opportunity to widen the lens and take stock of strategies and project activities aimed at being gender-responsive right across the FOLUR program.
Over the past year, the FOLUR gender equality group has led events at two other regional dialogues: a Southeast Asia session focused primarily on rice systems in Vietnam; and one in Kenya, which examined coffee and cocoa value chains. Overall, 10 Country Project team members shared progress and practical experiences to date in dealing with gender and social inclusion challenges. They discussed strategies and project activities aimed at being gender-responsive. Here, we synthesize key lessons learned from these interactive, in-person sessions with widespread relevance for additional FOLUR project teams and future food system and landscape transformation initiatives.
Approaches
It is becoming apparent that the main approaches to gender-responsiveness taken by FOLUR project teams include:
- Inclusive and participatory engagement processes that include strategic gender partners (e.g. women’s groups), particularly for integrated land use management planning
- Innovative communication efforts aimed at reaching and benefitting those that have often been traditionally marginalized
- Targeted efforts in strengthening technical capacities that are empowering, including leadership, of women, youths and others, without excluding men
- Initiatives enhancing women’s access to finance and economic empowerment
- Monitoring sex-disaggregated data on a wide range of outcomes
Engagement and partnerships
FOLUR project team members from Ghana, Tanzania, and Liberia highlighted meaningful participation of women in local forest and natural resource decision-making bodies as a key enabler of long-term empowerment. Project activities created conducive spaces and established convenient times for women to participate in workshops and dialogues.
FOLUR’s African project team participants encouraged others to use bottom-up, participatory and inclusive approaches that included mapping landscape resources with diverse community members and Indigenous Peoples.
FOLUR-India views targeted engagement with women’s self-help groups as crucial for successfully introducing more sustainable agricultural practices. In Ethiopia, in efforts aimed at increasing both information and inputs flowing to women farmers, FOLUR is working with both farmers’ groups that are predominantly male as well as village-level mutual help groups led by women to ensure they are reaching and benefiting both.
The FOLUR-Indonesia team has held 15 inclusive, participatory, national and subnational multi-stakeholder Integrated Land Use Management dialogues—consulting with 3,634 potential beneficiaries, 1,571 of whom were women (43%). This has enabled them to create strong and diverse ownership in achieving project outcomes.
In Ghana, local communities participating in FOLUR have formed community resource management areas (CREMAs) with a participatory tool that brings all land users within the landscape together, guiding them through the preparation of management plans that equitably benefit women, youth, and disadvantaged groups. CREMA governance structures and Village Savings and Loans Association (VSLA) community groups mandate that women fill leadership and decision-making positions.
FOLUR-Thailand described integrating a gender perspective in its rice sector transformation work by using an area-based landscape approach with participatory decision-making. It ensures inclusivity by engaging farmers of all genders, ages 18 and above, and Indigenous communities through a transparent selection process led by Provincial Steering Committees, which include local government agencies, field teams, and farmer organizations. Community leaders play a crucial role in introducing the project and securing informed consent, while surrounding farmers are given full autonomy to participate and inquire about potential impacts.
Communication
FOLUR-Ukraine is putting an emphasis on communicating with project beneficiaries in formats that are more appealing to women, with a careful choice of tone and language. They are deliberately choosing households led by women as project participants. Establishing a project team that is half female, hiring a gender expert and implementing a gender action plan has ensured equal representation in events, communications and outreach efforts.
The FOLUR-Uzbekistan team is pursuing a strategy of involving women in agricultural demonstration sites because women typically have differing needs and preferences for seed varieties, for example.
FOLUR-Uganda is developing radio programs targeting women, focusing on land use management and climate change resilient practices, as well as educating women on their land rights. The team will be promoting the use of subsidized mobile and digital technologies to disseminate information, particularly to women. They will also create and share communications materials, such as brochures, posters, and videos, that highlight the benefits of restoration for women and men.
Capacity-strengthening/training
The FOLUR-China UNDP-led project component targets more than 14,000 beneficiaries, 40% of whom are women. Training activities have reached over 9,000 provincial decision-makers, project managers, and technical personnel trained on project management and related technologies such as ecological and low-carbon development practices, “greener” prevention and control approaches to crop pesticides and diseases, sustainable crop production technologies, biodiversity protection approaches, and agricultural ecosystem restoration technologies. The team has shared online more than 10 technical training courses, with views of over a million through online learning platforms such as the China Rural Distance Education website. The project team also developed an innovative Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) and monitoring app, which supports knowledge management, monitoring, and evaluation. Collection of gender-disaggregated data is underway.
FOLUR-Uganda will design and implement tailored and targeted “Women’s Leadership in ILM” training programs that support women taking on leadership roles in the Mount Elgon landscape project at community as well as regional levels.
In Indonesia, women-led extension services are helping increase women’s participation in training programs, ensuring that knowledge sharing reaches both men and women equitably. Field coordinators shared firsthand experiences of mobilizing women’s voices in village-level decision-making, a shift from past practices where women’s input was largely absent.
Gender inclusion is also evident in the inclusive training approach taken by the FOLUR-Thailand team—of the 7,358 smallholder farmers trained in Chiang Rai and Ubon Ratchathani by June 2024, 58% were women.
The more inclusive and targeted training efforts in use by most country projects also include innovative approaches, such as those seen in Mexico, where the FOLUR project team has included childcare support during training events, allowing more mothers to actively participate than otherwise possible.
Financial support and women’s economic empowerment
Many of the country project gender analyses identified lack of, or limited access to, financial services for women working in commodity value chains. We heard from several teams that they are planning interventions to address this gap including improved access to credit to women producers; support for provision of post-harvest storage facilities; ensuring appropriate payment of women’s labor in livestock and other commodity value chains, agriculture and agroforestry sectors; and support to women-run cooperative businesses selling farming inputs.
For example, the FOLUR-Mexico project supports women-led businesses, such as nurseries producing seedlings for agroforestry initiatives. Savings groups enable women to reinvest in sustainable production, while women-led coffee brands enable access to premium markets, increasing visibility and value for their products. A co-financed initiative trains financial intermediaries—both public and private—on gender perspectives to ensure that financial products and services meet the needs of women entrepreneurs and farmers.
Sex-disaggregated monitoring and evaluation indicators
FOLUR project teams recognize the important role monitoring, learning and evaluation (ML&E) plays in assisting teams to adaptively manage their projects. While it is one thing to have a gender action plan that includes things like “women-targeted trainings,” it is another thing in practice to implement it in various sites with differing circumstances, as the Indonesia team and many others discussed in the gender sessions. Identifying site-appropriate, sex-disaggregated indicators linked to the implementation of specific gender-targeted activities is critical.
FOLUR-China has set up an M&E system to collect gender-disaggregated data as it targets support to e-commerce efforts for women. And in India, with its clear sex-division of farming roles, especially in project sites in Eastern India, the project team has established a gender-disaggregated M&E system to review the results of project activities targeting supply of inputs to women, among others.
Remaining challenges related to integrating gender-responsive activities in FOLUR country projects
The sessions revealed challenges that remain for project teams keen to integrate gender actions in their work. These include:
- Lack of resources for specific gender-focused interventions
- Lack of interest/willingness/gender awareness and capacity within government/programme staff/implementing partners
- Lack of local gender expertise in the context of agriculture, land management and restoration
- Majority of project staff working with communities being men (e.g. out of 170 extension workers in Uganda, 40-45 are women: this in a country where there are persistent gender norms within families and communities that do not allow women to become truly involved and benefit equally from food system activities, e.g. participating, making production decisions, land management practice choices, etc.)
- Modalities of dealing with multiple implementing partners on the ground (e.g. from different Ministries/agencies), makes it more difficult to ensure that gender is consistently integrated and monitored in project activities
- Staff turnover due to government changes and other factors within the project.
Going forward
Widely disseminating these lessons shared by the FOLUR project teams about what is working in terms of gender-responsive FOLUR project activities and remaining challenges faced in the field is important.
There remains relatively little solid evidence of how gender-focused actions can enhance the overall impacts of projects supporting food systems transformation, sustainable commodity value chains and/or environmental restoration (most of the existing evidence can be found here).
The FOLUR Global Platform team and its Gender Equality Community, part of the broader Food and Agricultural Commodities Community, will pursue multiple pathways to doing so.
The Food Systems, Land Use and Restoration Impact Program (FOLUR) is a $345 million, seven-year initiative funded by the Global Environment Facility and led by the World Bank. Seeking to transform food and land use systems, the program consists of a global knowledge platform and 27 country projects. Country-level work focuses on accelerating action in landscapes and along value chains for eight major commodities, including livestock, cocoa, coffee, maize, palm oil, rice, soy ,and wheat. Further information: https://www.folur.org
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