Food Security & Gender Equity through Humanitarian Aid & Development Assistance
Author: WUNRN
Date: April 7, 2017
Presented at CSW 61 Panel on Women-Food Security-End Hunger-Political Will & Public Will
Dr. James F Oehmke, Ph.D.
Senior Food Security and Nutrition Policy Advisor
USAID/Bureau for Food Security
The US government supports improvements in food security and gender equity both through humanitarian aid and through development assistance.
The US government, through the US Agency for International Development and through the State Department’s Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration is the largest donor of humanitarian assistance. Women and children tend to be disproportionately affected by the impacts of both man-made and natural disasters, and are a central focus of the US government’s humanitarian assistance.
I work for the U.S. Government’s Feed the Future initiative, which focuses on the development side of hunger, and I work specifically on policy issues including formulation and implementation. The Global Food Security Act of 2016 reinforces our successful approach to improving food security and nutrition through Feed the Future. The corresponding Global Food Security Strategy highlights the important role of women’s empowerment within the work we do to strengthen food and agricultural systems, including challenging gender norms that hinder food security and women’s empowerment, and intentionally involving men and communities in our efforts to improve nutrition, gender equality, and empowerment for women and adolescent girls.”
Critically important here is challenging restrictive gender norms in agricultural and food systems. The Policy Division where I work in particular challenges the social norms and institutions that perpetuate unequal access to economic opportunity in these systems by
- Promoting positive norms and practices to encourage more equitable control over income and more equitable roles in caregiving and workloads between women and men
- Promoting women’s roles as entrepreneurs and leaders, across the private and public sectors[1]
One way of elevating attention to women’s agency is to measure it—and Feed the Future supported the development of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index. In Bangladesh, in the zone where Feed the Future works, the Index moved up by 13.9 points, from 27.4 to 41.2, and the prevalence of underweight women went down from 21.5% to 16.3%—in just four years (2011-2015)![2] This is really important not just for its own sake, but because in Bangladesh 14% of women and 45% of children in food secure households are hungry: empowering women means fewer hungry women and children.[3] This is an example of the positive impacts of more equitable control over income.
African Agricultural Trade provides an excellent example of how Feed the Future works on all aspects of gender issues. In southern Africa about 40% of the cross-border trade is informal and 70-80% of traders are women, indeed women are the primary informal cross-border traders throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Informal trade is a source of income for 43% of Africa’s population, including family members not participating in the trade itself. Most of the women engaged in the cross-border trade are educated at least at a primary level, and have other jobs often including retail of the transported goods.
A typical African woman trader is at several disadvantages—she may lack access to credit, she may face longer border delays or higher fees than men, toilet facilities may be unsafe, border delays may force her to spend the night in a women’s dormitory that can be a target zone for sexual predators or even in the open, delays and lack of secure goods storage mean goods are often damaged by sun or rain, and the border guards themselves may demand sexual favors in return for not confiscating goods.
Feed the Future responds in several ways. We support improvement in border facilities, streamlining import-export regulations and border waiting times, and through our Trade and Investment Hubs in Africa, we have outreach programs both for women to protect their rights and for border guards to respect and enforce women’s rights. And we have made significant progress through these programs. By opening up new and equitable economic opportunities for women, we help them better feed themselves and their families, improving their food security and their resilience.
But the underlying problem isn’t just between the trader and the border guard—it is in a wider societal perception of gender roles for both men and women that enables such behavior. Even gender neutral trade laws and regimes can have unintended negative side effects for women if there are underlying gender biases in education, training, access to inputs, control over resources, and occupational choice[4]. The Policy Division in particular challenges the social norms and institutions that perpetuate unequal access to economic opportunity in agricultural and food systems by:
- Promoting positive norms and practices to encourage more equitable control over income and more equitable roles in caregiving and workloads between women and men
- Promoting women’s roles as entrepreneurs and leaders, across the private and public sectors[5]
One of the most exciting opportunities for advancing gender equality through joint efforts of donors, governments, civil society, and the private sector, is mutual accountability. Mutual accountability is part of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. As it has evolved in agriculture and food systems, it embodies the concept that in complex socio-economic systems involving myriad stakeholders, positive change requires commitment to and accountability for positive action by all stakeholders. In cross-border trade this includes border guards to be accountable for their own behavior, and government officials to enforce laws equitably. But it also includes all stakeholders. Social opprobrium of those abridging women’s rights is one of the most powerful forces for social change. In economic jargon, voting with your feet—or walking down the street to buy your goods and services from a different vendor hits merchants where it hurts—in the pocketbook.
Strengthening mutual accountability processes is a Feed the Future policy area of emphasis. In Africa, we have provided thought leadership and support at the country, regional and continental level. We support governments to create spaces for inclusive dialog around getting the agriculture sector moving, and we have supported capacity development in civil society organizations including women’s groups to participate actively in these dialogs. This helps empower women to articulate and promulgate the policy and social changes that are most needed in their countries. We are taking this model to Asia and LAC, and putting in place support mechanisms for strengthened mutual accountability processes in those regions. With your help, with the help of civil society, the next generation will live in a world that is far more gender equitable, where women are empowered and have agency in their own lives.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
[1] BFS/ARP/POL Functional Strategy: Gender Annex, p. 6, draft of 10.12.16
[2] “Population-based survey data: Baseline and interim”. BFS/ Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Powerpoint.
[3] D’Souza, Anna and Tandon, Sharad, How Well Do Household-Level Data Characterize Undernourishment? Evidence from Bangladesh (May 1, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2657617 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2657617
[4] Gender equality and trade policy. United Nations Inter‐Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality. Resource Paper, 2011.
[5] BFS/ARP/POL Functional Strategy: Gender Annex, p. 6, draft of 10.12.16
Categories: Releases