Office of Outreach and International Affairs
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Browsing Office of Outreach and International Affairs by Department "Center for International Research, Education, and Development (CIRED)"
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- Climate Justice, Gender, and Challenges in a Fractured WorldSultana, Farhana (Virginia Tech, 2022-03-24)Climate change has had unequal and uneven burdens across places whereby the planetary crisis involves a common but differentiated responsibility. The injustices of intensifying climate breakdown, overlapping with injustices from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, have laid bare the fault lines of suffering across sites and scales. A climate justice framework helps us to think about and address these inequities. Climate justice fundamentally is about paying attention to how climate change multipliers impact people intersectionally, unevenly, and disproportionately, as well as redressing the resultant injustices in fair and equitable ways. In this talk, I discuss how and why a feminist climate justice perspective allows for more equitable interventions to be envisioned and co-created for meaningful impacts in a fractured world.
- Engaging Men in Supporting Maternal and Child Consumption of Milk and Other Animal Source Foods in RwandaColverson, Kathy (Virginia Tech, 2021-10-21)Maternal and child nutrition practices, including consumption of milk and animal source foods, are considered the responsibility of women in many low- and middle-income countries. However, men can influence nutrition in their households through their decision-making, control of resources, and social support. Despite the role of gender and the importance of men in influencing nutrition in their households, most nutrition programs target women and men are not comfortable participating. This ongoing project funded by the Livestock Systems Innovation Lab project is exploring methods of engaging men more actively in household nutrition through a combination of training and communication materials tailored to meet their needs. Training materials were developed after extensive field research with men and women using focus groups and key informant interviews. These materials were used to train local partners on providing nutrition education to men, and assess the effectiveness of changes in household nutrition before and after the training. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the final results are pending, but should be available by the conference. The implications of this research could improve overall household nutrition, particularly as it relates to consumption of animal source foods by women and children.
- Experiences in Merging Gender Transformative Approaches With Development Efforts in Aquatic Food Systems in BangladeshChoudhury, Afrina (Virginia Tech, 2022-04-14)Afrina shares her experiences from working in Bangladesh for the past nine years and how her organization has come to embrace gender transformative approaches as a sustainable gender integration approach. She talks about the developmental and research challenges of taking up such an approach within a technical aquaculture environment and why it’s worth it. Finally, she shares how they are expanding gender transformative approach research further into new fields like entrepreneurship.
- Gender and Decision Making: Quinoa Production among Indigenous Women in Rural EcuadorCárdenas, Elisa (Virginia Tech, 2021-09-16)Women’s empowerment can be analyzed in agriculture through their ability to make choices that align with their life goals. Household farm decision-making is often examined as an individual or a jointly made choice, both frequently described as empowering in quantitative studies as women participate in agricultural decisions. However, empowerment is contextual and often difficult to measure and, thus, a qualitative methodology (focus groups and interviews) can better illuminate how joint decision-making processes occur to investigate women’s empowerment. This research asks: how is decision-making among Indigenous women influenced by their gender when producing quinoa in rural Ecuador? The findings include a feminization of agriculture among the participants, in which Indigenous women have become in charge of quinoa production, a traditionally male-dominated crop, due to Indigenous men’s absence in the farm. Furthermore, the participants described decision-making as jointly made, but men had greater authority, which was influenced by their religious beliefs, and men often made final decisions even when they had little or no participation in the farm work. Overall, women’s participation in quinoa production increased, but because the participants associated men as heads of household, women’s decision-making power was still limited even as they have become principal farmers. This study contributes to the literature of decision-making and demonstrates the importance of contextual characteristics, such as the feminization of agriculture, that influence decision-making processes. Overall, Indigenous women farmers are limited by patriarchal norms in their decision-making opportunities and overall empowerment.
- Gender in food security programs: Take-away for moving towards more inclusive systemsJacobs, Krista (Virginia Tech, 2019-03-01)Development researchers and practitioners have an opportunity and responsibility to create processes where the experiences of the different populations where we work inform the design and implementation of programs and research. The conference has highlighted gender-responsive and community-centered approaches in agriculture, health, and natural resources. Integrating gender equality and women’s empowerment into Feed the Future, the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative, is an ongoing effort of clarifying aims and expectations amongst ourselves and with our partners and of building gender capacity across technical staff and leadership. The Global Food Security Strategy and the accompanying Research Strategy mark (1) a shift to using an agricultural and food systems approach – which necessarily involves a greater variety of populations and actors, including the private sector; (2) an emphasis on building communities’ resilience to threats to food security; and (3) human impacts of Feed the Future’s research and programs. We expect to be thinking more about fostering gender equality and women’s empowerment in agricultural systems beyond smallholder production; balancing the needs for intersectional analysis and approaches with efficient data collection and use; and understanding gendered use of and benefit from agricultural technologies. Lessons learned and questions arising from Feed the Future and the wider field have implications for how gender equity and women’s empowerment are measured and for the capacities needed to conduct research and programming in agricultural and food systems.
- Panel One: Power, Positionality, & IntersectionalityFaria, Caroline; Kato-Wallace, Jane; Van Houweling, Emily (Virginia Tech, 2019-02-28)Power, Positionality & Intersectionality - an interactive panel Moderator: Dr. Maria Elisa Christie, Director, Women and Gender in International Development, CIRED, Virginia Tech *Critical feminist reflexivity & the politics of whiteness in the ‘field’ - Dr. Caroline Faria, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and the Environment, The University of Texas at Austin *Engaging men & transforming masculinities for gender equality: What we know - Jane Kato-Wallace, Director of Programs, Promundo *Misinterpreting women’s empowerment?: How a feminist postcolonial lens can reveal new dimensions of change in women’s lives - Dr. Emily Van Houweling, Assistant Professor, Masters in Development Practice, Regis University.
- The SDG gender equality agenda and the distribution of land: Research challengesDeere, Carmen Diana (Virginia Tech, 2019-02-28)Among the advances in the 2030 Sustainable Development agenda is that the goal to achieve gender equality and empower women now has nine specific targets. These cover many of the root causes of gender inequality, including women’s unequal access to economic resources. This presentation focuses on women’s ownership and control over land in Africa, Asia and Latin America and why its distribution remains a pressing development concern. Moreover, the lack of data on women’s land ownership until recently has stymied research on a number of critical questions, for example, the relationship between land ownership and agricultural decision-making and whether it makes a difference if women own land individually or jointly with their spouse. Similarly, whether land ownership or off-farm employment contribute more to enhance women’s intra-household bargaining power and better outcomes for women and children. The SDG gender equality indicators on land provide a timely opportunity to advance feminist research, but require a strong lobbying effort to assure compliance.
- Towards a politics of mobility and women's empowerment: the case of self-help groups in IndiaNichols, Carly (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2020-11-19)The Women and Gender in International Development Discussion Series is organized by the Center for International Research, Education, and Development (CIRED) and is an InclusiveVT initiative of Outreach and International Affairs (OIA). The series offers an opportunity for scholars and development practitioners to share their research and knowledge surrounding gender and international development with the Virginia Tech community and beyond.
- Women and Gender in Development Conference 2019(Virginia Tech, 2019-02-28)The conference program for the Women and Gender in Development Conference 2019, held February 28-March 1 at the Inn at Virginia Tech.
- Women, Smartphones, and Leafy Greens: How ICTs support women producers in Western Kenya to secure their position in commercializing value chains for indigenous vegetablesAgnew, Jessica L.; Sumner, Daniel M. (Virginia Tech, 2022-02-10)In Western Kenya, women are actively engaged throughout all stages of African indigenous vegetable (AIV) value chains. AIV production and marketing are important means for women to generate economically viable livelihoods and support their families’ nutrition and food security. Enhancing the efficiency and productivity of AIV value chains have the potential to enhance the accessibility of AIVs and enhance the income of women participating in the value chain. However, gender and other factors affect women’s ability to benefit from upgrading activities and improve or maintain their position in the value chain. In this discussion, we will examine how access to information communication technologies such as smartphones, the internet, and blockchain can help to secure the place of women in better functioning AIV value chains in Western Kenya.
- Women, Water, and Transformative Gender ResearchRodriguez, Mary T. (Virginia Tech, 2021-11-18)Women around the world are primarily responsible to provide water for the household. They can walk up to several hours a day to fetch water. How does bringing water to a community through the use of boreholes and/or piped water schemes impact the lives of women? How do women engage with water provision schemes in their communities? What challenges do they face in paying for water for their many household needs? Through the use of gender transformative research, we can explore these questions and more.