FAO leads new initiative & reinforces its commitment to accelerate gender equality efforts in agrifood systems | FAO News

NEW YORK – Correcting the gender gap in agrifood systems would dramatically reduce the worldwide hunger rate, raise the incomes of hundreds of millions of people & add $1 trillion to global gross domestic product, offering one of the most effective pathways towards the common objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Some 75 percent of agricultural & rural development policy documents from 68 developing countries recognize women’s roles & challenges, indicating awareness of the issue. Yet only 19 percent of these have actual policy goals related to gender, underscoring the need for more focus & commitment.

With the aim of promoting greater alignment of policy & outcomes on gender, the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has launched Commit to Grow Equality (CGE), a mechanism to accelerate gender equality & women’s empowerment in agrifood systems through financing, investments & partnerships by enabling a diverse range of actors to report against a strategic set of commitments.

“We have the evidence to show us how to overcome gender gaps – evidence that calls upon all of us to act, collectively & urgently,” FAO Director-General QU Dongyu said at “Commit to Grow Equality: Invest in the Future of Women & Girls”, a high-level action event pitching CGE during the UN General Assembly.

“Closing these gaps & empowering women & girls in agrifood systems would greatly improve economic growth, food security, access to healthy diets & resilience for women, their households & their communities, particularly in rural areas,” he said.

High-level speakers at the CGE event included ministers from Ireland, Norway & Türkiye among others, some of whom announced new resource commitments to the initiative. Others included representatives from Brazil, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Zambia & other Members, as well as major UN agencies, multilateral institutions, non-governmental organizations & the private sector.

The CGE initiative, formally begun earlier this year, has attracted partners across sectors & could benefit up to 54 million women worldwide, more than one of every 10 women working in agrifood systems. To support this, an estimated $1 billion of investments will initially be aligned to CGE.

How it works

Central to the Commit to Grow Equality initiative is a Commitments Matrix, which enables stakeholders to consider & articulate the concrete commitments that can be brought to make a tangible difference in the lives of women & girls.

One of the overarching objectives is to increase the number & value of projects that are gender transformative from the design through implementation stages. Others include increasing linkages & synergies between financial commitments being made on climate change, resilience & other areas, & bolstering & expanding partnerships between the array of actors pursuing policies & investments to promote gender equality & women’s empowerment in agrifood systems.

For donors & project sponsors as well as for Members, businesses, producer organizations & local authorities, the matrix puts particular emphasis on efforts to close the gender wage & productivity gaps, as well as ways to increase data, research & evidence.

Exemplary objectives include increasing commitments to direct procurement from women entrepreneurs, increasing gender parity in corporate leadership positions, provision of training for upskilling of women working in agrifood supply chains, policies & programmes to increase access to child care, credit & technology, & intensified efforts to collect sex & age-disaggregated data for farm plot sizes, ownership, revenues & the like.

How FAO is showing commitment

Director-General Qu , highlighted three high-salience & specific objectives FAO will pursue in the coming years.

First, FAO commits to track gender-transformative actions in all of its projects & assure they feature in 10 percent of them by 2030. Gender-transformative approaches show promise in changing discriminatory social norms, are cost-effective & have high returns, improving food security, nutrition & livelihood outcomes for women, households & communities.

Second, FAO commits to promoting the dissemination & uptake in 10 countries by 2026 of the Committee on World Food Security’s Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality & Women’s & Girls’ Empowerment, a critical tool for improving policy frameworks.

Third, FAO is committed to launching a gender domain in its statistical database, FAOSTAT, by 2026, which will make it possible for the public to access all available data on key dimensions of gender equality such as women’s work, training  & asset ownership in agrifood systems as well as data on women’s food security & nutrition. Such data, & easy open access to it, will generate greater visibility of the important gaps that remain in measuring & achieving progress on gender equality in the sector.

An indication of the road ahead was offered by FAO’s 2023 report on The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems, which offers a series of findings such as a 24 percent productivity gap between female- & male-managed farms of the same size, that women in wage employment in agriculture earn on average 82 cents for every dollar that men earn, & that women on average work an extra hour a day to cope with climate change.

The Director-General also noted that the UN has announced that 2026 will be the International Year of the Woman Farmer & FAO looks forward to coordinating with partners to implementing related activities.