Making Food Systems Work for Women and Girls

Gender equality and women’s empowerment are key contributors to sustainable food systems, food security, and nutrition for people, helping to ensure they are more resilient, empowered, and better able to meet their essential needs. The achievement of the SDGs and the Zero Hunger goal will not be realized where there are gender inequalities. The goal of the coalition is to ensure that women and men, boys and girls, and other groups have equitable roles, responsibilities, opportunities, and choices and that countries, communities and households, individuals are equipped to participate in local, global, and regional food systems activities in a meaningful, dignified, and equitable way. The coalition will do this through a focus on 4 critical levers of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.

The Gender Lever, working with Action Tracks prioritised actions under each of these four areas;

1. Expanding women’s agency with three proposed solutions: (i) Alliance for Anemia Actions, (ii) Innovation hubs focused on profitable, nutritious foods (including indigenous crops) grown and traded by women, and (iii) Global Food 50/50, a global accountability mechanism for tracking women’s representation, leadership and voice in food systems organizations.
2. Increasing access and rights to resources, services, and opportunities with three priority actions (iv) Alliance of 50+ global and national financial institutions to implement gender-transformative finance mechanisms, (v) Blended financing mechanism to small initiatives locally-owned by women and youth, and (vi) Land Rights for women and equitable community-based decision-making mechanisms and information systems on land rights, and access and control over essential food-producing resources.
3. Eliminating systemic institutional and legislative biases against women with three priority actions (vii) Integrating Gender Transformative Approaches in policies, programmes, and systems, (viii) Alliance of countries adopting feminist food systems policies and regulatory frameworks that advance women’s leadership in local, sub-national and national levels, gender-responsive budgeting, and the inclusion of appropriate s*x-disaggregated indicators and targets for measuring progress, and (ix) Global Data Hub for Enabling Gender Transformative Food Systems Policies.
4. Shifting harmful and constraining gender and social norms with 1 priority action (x) A campaign and programme of work to tackle harmful social and gender norms, customs, and values that engage men and women, boys and girls together as agents of change at all levels.