Rural household economies dependent on rainfed agriculture are increasingly turning to irrigation technology solutions to reduce the effects of weather variability and guard against inconsistent and low crop output. Organizations are increasingly using market-based approaches to disseminate technologies to smallholder farmers, and, although women are among their targeted group, little is known of the extent to which these approaches are reaching and benefiting women. There is also little evidence on the implications of women’s use and control of irrigation technologies for outcomes, including crop choice and income management. This paper reports findings from a qualitative study undertaken in Tanzania and Kenya to examine women’s access to and ownership of KickStart pumps and the implications for their ability to make major decisions on crop choices and use of income from irrigated crops. Results from sales-monitoring data show that women purchase less than 10 percent of the pumps and men continue to make most of the major decisions on crop choices and income use. These findings vary by type of crop, with men making major decisions on high-income crops such as tomatoes and women having relatively more autonomy on crops such as leafy vegetables. The study concludes that market-based approaches on their own cannot guarantee access to and ownership of technologies, and businesses need to take specific measures toward the goal of reaching and benefiting women.

This paper looks at the gendered impacts of a development project that provided improved dairy cattle and training as part of a broader effort to develop a smallholder-friendly, market-oriented dairy value chain in Manica province, Mozambique. The project targeted households, registered cows in the name of the household head, and, initially, trained registered cow owners in various aspects of dairy production and marketing. Subsequently training was expanded to two members per household to increase the capacity within households to care for cows, a change which resulted in a significant number of women being trained. Using qualitative and quantitative data on dairy production and consumption and on gendered control over income and assets, the paper explores how men and women participated in and benefited from the project. We find that despite being registered to men, in practice dairy cattle are in some cases viewed as jointly owned by men and women. Beneficiary households dramatically increased dairy production and income, with men, women, and children all contributing labor. Women’s incentives for participation in dairy are less clear. Despite their recognized rights and responsibilities related to dairy cow management, women exercise relatively little control over milk and milk income as compared to men. Various explanations related to monetary and nonmonetary benefits of MSDDP and dairying for women are explored, along with their implications for women’s level of effort and overall project outcomes.

Achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment in food systems can result in greater food security and better nutrition, and in more just, resilient, and sustainable food systems for all. This paper uses a scoping review to assess the current evidence on pathways between gender equality, women’s empowerment, and food systems. The paper uses an adaptation of the food systems framework to organize the evidence and identify where evidence is strong, and where gaps remain. Results show strong evidence on women’s differing access to resources, shaped and reinforced by contextual social gender norms, and on links between women’s empowerment and maternal education and important outcomes, such as nutrition and dietary diversity. However, evidence is limited on issues such as gender considerations in food systems for women in urban areas and in aquaculture value chains, best practices and effective pathways for engaging men in the process of women’s empowerment in food systems, and for addressing issues related to migration, crises, and indigenous food systems. And while there are gender informed evaluation studies that examine the effectiveness of gender- and nutrition- sensitive agricultural programs, evidence to indicate the long-term sustainability of such impacts remains limited. The paper recommends keys areas for investment: improving women’s leadership and decision-making in food systems, promoting equal and positive gender norms, improving access to resources, and building cross-contextual research evidence on gender and food systems.

Increasingly, women’s property rights are seen as important for both equity and efficiency reasons. While there has been debate in the literature about women are better off with individual rights in contrast to rights jointly with their husband, little empirical work has analyzed this question. In this paper, the relationship of women’s individual and joint property ownership and the level of women’s input into household decisionmaking is explored with data from India, Mali, Malawi, and Tanzania. In the three African countries, women with individual landownership have greater input into household decisionmaking than women whose landownership is joint; both have more input than women who are not landowners. The relationship with other household decisions is more mixed, as is the relationship between housing and input into household decisionmaking. No similar relationship is found in Orissa, India.

The third annual Global Food 50/50 Report, a joint initiative of Global Health 50/50, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and UN Women, reviews the gender- and equity-related policies and practices of 51 global food system organizations to assess two interlinked dimensions of inequality: inequality of opportunity in careers within organizations and inequality in who benefits from the global food system. The Report highlights the progress, or lack thereof, made by food organizations in promoting diversity and equality in their leadership and decision-making. For the first time, the 2023/2024 Report expands its focus to address a policy area that plays a decisive role in promoting equality of opportunity in the workplace: the extent to which workplace policies recognize and support employees’ care responsibilities.

The United Nations Food Systems Summit, aimed to move food systems transformation to the top of the global policy agenda. An important element of the discussions were the “levers of change,” cross-cutting areas of work for food systems transformation. This paper reviews the operation of two levers: gender and finance. It analyzes the main debates and implementation issues related to mainstreaming gender dimensions and to leveraging finance for food system transformation. Using a political-economy framework of analysis, the paper draws conclusions for global food system governance and the likelihood of the UNFSS agenda for action to succeed.