The role of gender in agricultural development

Abstract

This paper is based in the gender recommendations CGIAR made to IARCs. These recommendations are: to incorporate the gender variable in research methods and analysis; to include more women farmers in the IARC technology generation process; to increase the number of women from NARS in IARC training programs; and to engage more women professionals in the ranks of IARC scientific staff, management, and boards. Adoption of the recommendations varied, and for this reason this paper looks at why some centers have been successful while others have found it difficult to address gender issues. This paper presents the reasons to include gender issues in agricultural research and development. It highlights innovative strategies and approaches used to address gender issues giving examples from several projects. It also presents suggestions and alternative strategies to enhance capacity while looking into the future. These are: to understand that counting women is not the same as representing women, the need to have experienced gender scientist to improve gender analysis, the need to improve communication between scientists (men) and women, a need to have greater individual and organizational gender sensitive accountability, to improve gender disaggregated data collection both for women in the field and the different organizations, presentation of information needs to improve to be represented of women at all levels. More focus is needed on sensitization and awareness; gender analysis methods; and training of trainers.