Strengthening the abilities of smallholder farmers in developing countries, particularly women farmers, to produce for both home and the market is currently a development priority. In many contexts, ownership of assets is strongly gendered, reflecting existing gender norms and limiting women’s ability to invest in more profitable livelihood strategies such as market-oriented agriculture. Yet the intersection between women’s asset endowments and their ability to participate in and benefit from agricultural interventions receives minimal attention.
This paper assesses the relationships between women’s dietary diversity and various indicators of agricultural biodiversity in farms of the Hauts-Bassins, a cotton-growing region in rural western Burkina Faso. A sample of 579 farms representative of the region was surveyed at three different periods of the year. Using a qualitative 24-h dietary recall, we computed a women’s dietary diversity score (WDDS-10) based on ten food groups.
Here, it is described a new participatory protocol for assessing the climate-smartness of agricultural interventions in smallholder practices. This identifies farm-level indicators (and indices) for the food security and adaptation pillars of CSA. It also supports the participatory scoring of indicators, enabling baseline and future assessments of climate-smartness to be made. The protocol was tested among 72 farmers implementing a variety of CSA interventions in the climate-smart village of Lushoto, Tanzania.
Horticulture is one of the fastest growing subsectors of agriculture in Tanzania. Gender relations in vegetable-producing and vegetable-trading households need to be understood to make value chain development equitable. This study, carried out in northern and central Tanzania, is based on data from surveys, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews. The perceptions of men and women traders and producers are investigated with regard to labour participation in traditional vegetable value chains and gains (income and expenditure) from it.
The objective of this paper is to show how Value Chain Analysis for Development (VCA4D) applied sustainable development concept for value chain analysis to establish a manageable set of criteria allowing to provide quantitative information, which is desperately lacking in many situations in developing economies, usable by decision makers and in line with policymakers concerns and strategies (the “international development agenda”).
In this paper, the authors describe the adaptation and validation of a project-level WEAI (or pro-WEAI) that agricultural development projects can use to identify key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address identified deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment. The 12 pro-WEAI indicators are mapped to three domains: intrinsic agency (power within), instrumental agency (power to), and collective agency (power with). A gender parity index compares the empowerment scores of men and women in the same household.
The 2021 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC 2021) highlights the remarkably high severity and numbers of people in Crisis or worse (IPC/CH Phase 3 or above) or equivalent in 55 countries/territories, driven by persistent conflict, pre-existing and COVID-19-related economic shocks, and weather extremes. The number identified in the 2021 edition is the highest in the report’s five-year existence. The report is produced by the Global Network against Food Crises (which includes WFP), an international alliance working to address the root causes of extreme hunger.
This paper was synthesized from several scholarly literature and aimed at providing up-to-date information on climate change impacts, adaptation strategies, policies and institutional mechanisms that each agriculture subsector had put in place in dealing with climate change and its related issues in West Africa. For each subsector (crop, fishery and livestock), the current status, climate change impacts, mitigation and adaption strategies have been analyzed
Linking farmers to markets is widely viewed as a milestone towards promoting economic growth and poverty reduction. However, market and institutional imperfections along the supply chain thwart perfect vertical and spatial price transmission and prevent farmers and market actors from getting access to information, identifying business opportunities and allocating their resources efficiently. This acts as a barrier to market-led rural development and poverty reduction.
This paper comparatively analyzes the structure of agricultural policy development networks that connect organizations working on agricultural development, climate change and food security in fourteen smallholder farming communities across East Africa, West Africa and South Asia.