This document reports on a workshop held in South Africa in June 2003 to address continuing insecurity of women's land rights. It brought together a broad group of participants covering NGO, grassroots, government, UN agency staff, researchers, activists, lawyers, and women living with HIV/AIDS.

Using the 2009 round of the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey, this paper examines the medium-term impact of the land registration on investment behavior by households, particularly the adoption of soil conservation techniques and tree planting. It investigates whether men’s and women’s knowledge of their property rights under the land registration (as measured by answers to a list of questions regarding the provisions of the registration, covering such areas as tenure security, land transfer rights, and rights related to gender equity and inheritance) has an impact on these investments.

We examine the role of gender in adoption and diffusion of orange sweet potato, a biofortified staple food crop being promoted as a strategy to increase dietary intakes of vitamin A among young children and adult women in Uganda. As an agricultural intervention with nutrition objectives, intrahousehold gender dynamics regarding decisions about crop choice and child feeding practices may play a role in adoption decisions. Also, most households access sweet potato vines through informal exchange, suggesting again that gender dimensions of networks may be important to diffusion of the crop.

This paper explores initial findings from four case studies in the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project on changes in gender relations in different agricultural interventions. It documents the adaptive measures projects are taking to encourage gender-equitable value chain projects. Findings suggest that the dairy and horticulture value chain cases have successfully increased the stock of both men’s and women’s tangible assets and those assets they own jointly.

This survey was planned and executed in order to address key policy and research questions which have arisen as priorities for the research agenda, but for which there has been a lingering data gap. Successful commercialization of farming enterprises and f

Book chapter

This paper uses a rich dataset from a survey undertaken by the Ethiopian Economic Association (EEA) and the Interna-tional Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in 2009 in eight woredas in seven regions of Ethiopia with a sample of 1,117 households and 73 agricultural cooperatives. Using descriptive statistics and econometric analysis under a critical gender lens, the paper identifies which cooperative, household, and individual level characteristics influence women’s participation in agricultural cooperatives.

One potential path for increasing yields is to invest in land cultivated by women. Although agricultural intensification has been the standard approach to increase yields, there is a recent push to emphasize sustainable land management (SLM). The traditional mode of technology diffusion is through the provision of agricultural extension services, which typically cater to male farmers. To better understand the role of gender in the dissemination of SLM techniques, we exploit a policy experiment conducted in 200 communities in the Zambezi valley of Mozambique.

Brief

This study uses five rounds of household panel data from Tigray, Ethiopia, collected in the period 1998–2010 to assess the impacts of a land registration and certification program that aimed to strengthen tenure security and how it has contributed to increased food availability and, thus, food security in this food-deficit region.

In the context of increasing vulnerability to climate change for people dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods, the International Food Policy Research Institute and partner organizations in Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, and Bangladesh undertook a project broadly aiming to create knowledge that will help policymakers and development agencies to strengthen the capacity of male and female smallholder farmers and livestock keepers to manage climate-related risks.

Recent experience has shown that as countries get richer, nutritional status does not necessarily improve. In a recent article in the journal The Lancet, IFPRI researchers and others explain that creating the right conditions for nutritional advances often requires political action. The feature article in this issue of Insights looks at how some developing countries and regions—Ghana, Peru, Thailand, and the state of Maharashtra, India—have made nutrition a political priority and how they’ve turned political commitments into widespread changes on the ground.