Supporting women’s groups and their collective action is considered as one of the key ways to increase their climate resilience. Women’s groups are a means to reach women with capacity building activities, and also serve as a platform where they exercise collective and individual agency to take adaptive decisions. Strengthening the capacity of women’s groups on climate information services (CIS) and climate smart agriculture (CSA) innovations is a key pillar for gender-responsive climate smart agriculture intervention.

Iron and zinc malnutrition is a global humanitarian concern that mostly affects newborns, children, and women in low- and middle-income countries where plant-based diets are regularly consumed. This kind of malnutrition has the potential to result in a number of immediate and long-term implications, including stunted growth, an elevated risk of infectious diseases, and poor development, all of which may ultimately cause children to not develop to the fullest extent possible.

Climate change has major implications for food security and the livelihood of smallholder farmers, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This is so in spite of the technical and technological innovations in agri-food systems over the past few decades which not only aimed to boost productivity but also be more climate smart. Evidence also suggests that the impact of climate change is not gender neutral (UN Women 2022).

Sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas) originated in Central America or north-western South America from where it was introduced to Europe, Africa, Asia and North America in more recent times. Sweetpotato is now cultivated in nearly all parts of the tropics and sub-tropics as well as in the warmer parts of the temperate regions (CIP, 2019). This is because Sweetpotato is a dry-land crop, tolerant to a wide range of edaphic and climatic conditions. It is more tolerant of cold than other tropical root and tuber crops, hence, it can be grown at altitudes as high as 2500 m.

The CGIAR Gender Equality Initiative organized a stakeholder workshop on 23 – 24 May 2023. The workshop focused on exploring the technology and innovation bundles that have the potential to revolutionize farming practices and enhance the resilience of women farmers.

This Report was produced as part of the CGIAR Excellence in Agronomy (EiA) Initiative’s effort to ensure that women and youth are well integrated into to the work of the Initiative’s Use Cases and that the EiA Initiative is achieving its gender- and youth-specific impacts: that women and men, youth and non-youth equally participate in and benefit from the agronomic solutions developed, validated, and piloted by Use Cases, and that social innovations that empower women and transform unequal power relations and restrictive social and gender norms are piloted and promoted.

The impacts of climate change in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA), are already well known to farmers. Climate change affects women more negatively compared to men in five impact areas: (i) agricultural production; (ii) food and nutrition security; (iii) health; (iv) water and energy; (v) climate-related disaster, migration, and conflict. Over 2 million people in Kenya face the threat of food insecurity due to climate change. Maize production is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

This study used gender-intentional participatory approaches to address the challenges of low genetic correlation and lower genetic gains for small-scale bean producers in sub-Saharan Africa.

This blog post is about how the female farmers of Malawi are coping with the after effects of the cyclone Freddy. The blog is based on information gathered during the first virtual field tour that took place on 4 April 2023.

Food insecurity and child malnutrition remain persistent problems in sub-Saharan Africa. Rice is a staple food for more than half of the world’s population. However, white rice is poor in micronutrients and records higher glycemic values compared to parboiled rice. An improved parboiling system called “Grain quality enhancer, Energy-efficient and durable Material” (GEM in short) allows the processing of quality rice with better physical and nutritional properties compared to traditional systems.