by iKml1 | Jun 26, 2024
Abstract
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.
Despite many constraints and limitations including lower access to opportunities, technologies, finance and other productive resources, and weak tenure and resource rights. These constraints and limitations are shaped and reinforced by social and structural inequalities in food systems. Stark gender inequalities are both a cause and outcome of unsustainable food systems and unjust food access, consumption, and production. In the agriculture sector, for example, evidence shows that women have unequal access.
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by iKml1 | Feb 23, 2024
Resilience Building In Nigeria FAO PROGRAMME REVIEW (2024)
PURPOSE:
This document reflects an analysis of ongoing FAO Nigeria resilience building interventions and how they contribute towards the five capacities for resilience building, namely:
• PREVENTIVE: reduce existing and future risks.
• ANTICIPATIVE: act early.
• ABSORPTIVE: the ability to bounce back, overwhelmingly humanitarian (emergency response).
• ADAPTIVE: incremental adjustments.
• TRANSFORMATIVE: make fundamental changes to the system.
The five capacity areas are in most cases overlapping dur- ing specific project implementation, with the classification based on the overarching resilience capacity area.
his review comes at a time when FAO seeks to review its Resilience work in Sub Saharan Africa with the overall objective to systematically capture, document, and dis- seminate insights and best practices related to resilience building within FAO programmes for scaling up. This is intended to facilitate and harness the opportunities, and lessons learned in emergency and resilience program- ming, and integration of emergency, resilience, and de- velopment work into the priorities of Member States.
The initiative is in view of the increasing number of food and nutrition insecure people in Africa, with the Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) rising from 19.4 percent in 2021 to 19.7 percent in 2022, and the number of people facing hunger increasing by 11 million people since 2021 and by more than 57 million people since the outbreak of the COV- ID-19 pandemic. A much larger proportion of the population in Africa faces hunger compared to the other regions of the world – nearly 20 percent compared with 8.5 percent in Asia, 6.5 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 7.0 per- cent in Oceania.1 According to the region’s most recent economic update, growth in Sub-Saharan Africa was pro- jected to dip to 2.5 percent in 2023, down from 3.6 percent in 2022. Rising conflict and violence across the region ex- ert a dampening effect on economic activity, with climate shocks poised to exacerbate this fragility. About 462 mil- lion people in the region are still living in extreme pover- ty in 2023 even as growth remains uneven across the continent. While East Africa was set to record a growth rate of 1.8 percent in 2023, West Africa was expected to grow at a rate of 3.3 percent during the same year. Harnessing the potential of natural resources provides an opportuni- ty to improve the fiscal and debt sustainability of African countries. It is envisaged that if Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) can harness its natural resource wealth (oil, gas, and minerals), it can sustainably transform economically and create more job opportunities while transitioning into a low-carbon economy.
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