Gender and agriculture: an unlikely couple married in Southeast Asia

Capacity building for integrating gender in research and development (R&D) on agricultural innovations often remains with organizing single gender training. Alternatively, it is often limited to hiring a gender specialist to allocate a small amount of her/his time to the project. This has proofed to be ineffective and a heavy burden for gender specialists. This success story presents an innovative approach to capacity development, which successfully changed agricultural researchers’ attitude to gender in Southeast Asia, with a specific focus in Vietnam. This new approach involved various stakeholders, such as male and female farmers in Vietnam, gender specialists from research organizations and NGOs, and agricultural researchers and policymakers from government organizations and universities in Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR), Myanmar, Philippines and Vietnam.