Running Out of Time: The Reduction of women's work burden in agricultural production


Book Description

Based on a broad literature review, this publication discusses rural women’s time poverty in agriculture, elaborates on its possible causes and implications and provides insight into the various types of constraints that affect the adoption of solutions for reducing work burden. This paper raises questions about the adequacy of women’s access to technologies, services and infrastructure and about the control women have over their time, given their major contributions to agriculture. It also look s into the available labour-saving technologies, practices and services that can support women to better address the demands derived from the domestic and productive spheres and improve their well-being. The reader is presented with an overview of successfully-tested technologies, services and resource management practices in the context of water, energy, information and communication. The findings elaborated in this paper feed a set of recommendations provided for policy makers and development partners. A gender-transformative approach at community and household level is suggested as a way forward to promote women’s increased control over the allocation of their time.




Post-harvest management: bridging gaps and embracing innovations


Book Description

This publication contributes to ongoing initiatives aimed at reducing post-harvest loss (PHL) through capacity development and knowledge sharing. It aims to enhance understanding of the gaps in post-harvest management and how to address them. The publication highlights the importance of reducing post-harvest losses (PHL) in developing countries by integrating gender perspectives, providing support to agribusiness and entrepreneurship, and promoting climate change adaptation. Additionally, the publication provides recommendations for further actions. It targets practitioners, including extension staff, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community-based organizations (CBOs), and academic institutions involved in providing technical support to farmers and policymakers, particularly those engaged in gender and climate change issues. Furthermore, the publication will benefit, guide, and inspire current and future FAO field projects that incorporate a post-harvest component.




Addressing gender equality in sustainable soil management


Book Description

This technical guide for addressing gender equality in Sustainable Soil Management (SSM) is designed to provide an easily accessible and understandable reference on how to apply the Voluntary Guidelines on Sustainable Soil Management (VGSSM) for building healthy soils, while ensuring gender equality and women’s empowerment in all aspects of SSM. It is intended for use by a wide audience, including policymakers, public institutions and development partners, as well as by rural communities, farmers’ organizations, women and youth groups, and agricultural advisory services involved in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of soil management policies and programmes. The guide may also be useful for other relevant stakeholders, including academia and research organizations, intergovernmental organizations and non‑governmental organizations, civil society and the private sector, who can play an important role in supporting, strengthening and documenting efforts made to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment in SSM.




FAO framework on ending child labour in agriculture


Book Description

The purpose of the FAO’s framework is to guide the Organization and its personnel in the integration of measures addressing child labour within FAO’s typical work, programmes and initiatives at global, regional and country levels. It aims to enhance compliance with organization’s operational standards, and strengthen coherence and synergies across the Organization and with partners. The FAO framework is primarily targeted at FAO as an organization, including all personnel in all geographic locations. But the framework is also relevant for FAO’s governing bodies and Member States, and provides guidance and a basis for collaboration with development partners. The framework is also to be used as a key guidance to assess and monitor compliance with FAO’s environmental and social standards addressing prevention and reduction of child labour in FAO’s programming.




The Politics of Knowledge in Inclusive Development and Innovation


Book Description

This book develops an integrated perspective on the practices and politics of making knowledge work in inclusive development and innovation. While debates about development and innovation commonly appeal to the authority of academic researchers, many current approaches emphasise the plurality of actors with relevant expertise for addressing livelihood challenges. Adopting an action-oriented and reflexive approach, this volume explores the variety of ways in which knowledge works, paying particular attention to dilemmas and controversies. The six parts of the book address the complex interplay of knowledge and politics, starting with the need for knowledge integration in the first part and decolonial perspectives on the politics of knowledge integration in the second part. The following three parts focus on the practices of inclusive development and innovation through three major themes of learning for transformative change, evidence, and digitisation. The final part of the book addresses the governance of knowledge and innovation in the light of political struggles about inclusivity. Exploring conceptual and practical themes through case studies from the Global North and South, this book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners researching and working in development studies, epistemology, innovation studies, science and technology studies, and sustainability studies more broadly.




Developing gender-sensitive value chains


Book Description

These guidelines aim to respond to these questions and support practitioners in translating the Gender-Sensitive Value Chain Framework, developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) into action (FAO, 2016a). Building on FAO’s comparative advantage on gender in agriculture and food security, these guidelines are primarily intended to assist practitioners in designing and implementing interventions that provide women and men with equal opportunities to benefit from agrifood value chain development. They offer practical tools and examples of successful approaches to foster a more systematic integration of gender equality dimensions in value chain interventions in the agricultural sector and enhance the social impact of these interventions.




Climate resilience and disaster risk analysis for gender-sensitive value chains


Book Description

The purpose of this publication is to facilitate gender analysis in value chain operations, considering climate change effects, in order to enhance adaptive capacities of value chain actors. It aims to facilitate the analysis of the factors that determine gender-differentiated vulnerability to climate change and risks. It is intended for use by practitioners and service providers, including governments, civil society and academia, to guide interventions within the agrifood sector.




Introduction to gender-sensitive social protection programming to combat rural poverty: Why is it important and what does it mean? – FAO Technical Guide 1


Book Description

Many social protection programmes, including cash transfers, public works programmes and asset transfers, target women as main beneficiaries or recipients of benefits. Extending social protection to rural populations has great potential for fostering rural women’s economic empowerment. However, to tap into this potential, more needs to be done. There is much scope for making social protection policies and programmes more gender sensitive and for better aligning them with agricultural and rural development policies to help address gender inequalities. Recognizing this potential and capitalizing on existing evidence, FAO seeks to enhance the contribution of social protection to gender equality and women’s empowerment by providing country-level support through capacity development, knowledge generation and programme support.To move forward this agenda, FAO has developed the Technical Guidance Toolkit on Gender-sensitive Social Protection Programmes to Combat Rural Poverty and Hunger. The Toolkit is designed to support SP and gender policy-makers and practitioners in their efforts to systematically apply a gender lens to SP programmes in ways that are in line with global agreements and FAO commitments to expand inclusive SP systems for rural populations. The Toolkit focuses on the role of SP in reducing gendered social inequalities, and rural poverty and hunger.




Building resilience through Safe Access to Fuel and Energy (SAFE)


Book Description

Globally, nearly 3 billion people rely on traditional biomass, such as fuelwood, charcoal or animal waste, as sources of fuel for cooking and heating. The multi-sectoral challenges related to energy access make it crucial to view the issue in a broader frame. FAO's work on Safe Access to Fuel and Energy (SAFE) adopts a holistic, multi-faceted approach which takes into account the mutually reinforcing linkages between energy and nutrition, disaster risks and climate change, conflict, health, gender, protection and livelihoods. This publication aims to provide a comprehensive framework for mainstreaming energy access for crisis-affected populations as a key component of overall resilience-building.




Agripreneurship across Africa


Book Description

This publication aims to inspire budding entrepreneurs in Africa to consider business opportunities in agriculture and agro-industry, broadly defined. It is intended to be a promotional tool, as a sort of call to arms, particularly for women and youth. It also aims to serve as an educational tool and knowledge product in business schools and entrepreneurship incubator programmes for case study-based learning on operating an agribusiness or agro-industry enterprise in Africa. The publication offers guidance to agripreneurs on how to overcome or avoid potential pitfalls and learn from the paths set out by the 12 agripreneurs, whose stories reflect real-life experiences of agribusiness development in Africa. It should be seen as a collection of resources on agripreneurship, focused on these four topical areas: scale, women, youth, and challenging environments, while providing guiding advice for agripreneurs and policy-makers. In addition to educating entrepreneurs, it is important to highlight the fundamental role of policy-makers in shaping the enabling environment for agripreneurship. In this context, the publication aims to provide concrete policy recommendations on how to improve the enabling environment for agripreneurship, based on the advice of the 12 agripreneurs featured here. The aim is to guide policy-makers to improve these targeted areas, and inspire them to do so by providing accounts of successful agripreneurs who have built businesses with positive economic, social and environmental impacts on national development.