Nourishing the nexus between gender, agriculture & nutrition

Excited to share our latest published study in The European Journal of Development Research. Access here: https://lnkd.in/g9YrYB6E

We investigate how agri-food & nutrition policy & practice address gender inequality with examples from Haiti, Benin, Ghana & Tanzania.

We find that the widespread emphasis on gender equality in policy and practice generally ascribes to a gender narrative that includes stereotypes of static, homogenized conceptualizations of food provisioning and marketing.

These narratives tend to translate to interventions that use and objectify women’s labor by funding their income generating activities and care responsibilities for other benefits like household food and nutrition security without addressing underlying causes of their vulnerability, making them worse not better.

We argue that policy and interventions must prioritize locally contextualized social norms and environmental conditions, and consider further the way wider policies and development assistance shape social dynamics to address the structural causes of intersecting inequalities.

Norms, Equity and Social Protection: A Gender Analysis of the Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia

New manuscript published in the Forum for Development Studies.

You can access the article here.

It was a such a privilege and joy to work with the talented Dr. Melisew Dejene and the wider team at IPDR, Hawassa University in Ethiopia.

They are the brains behind understanding one of Africa’s largest social protection programmes and are doing incredible work to translate research for policy – strengthening the much needed interventions aimed at reducing social inequality and justice.

This article is about how social protection programmes do not generally account for gendered power dynamics.

Oftentimes, they target women only as beneficiaries, which can intensify gendered disparities.

This case study uses a mixed methods research approach to conduct a gender analysis of the Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia.

We find the programme has progressive gender equity goals, but these are not well implemented. Since special provisions for women are neglected in the case study sites, they do not challenge unequal social norms nor recognize unequal roles and responsibilities.

For example, there is a recognition that women in this context have unique time constraints and reproductive work burdens. The programme aims to make special consultations and allowances for them (e.g. workload reductions, flexibility in work timing, special grievance communication). Maternity leave, awareness raising and reproductive health initiatives are also major parts of the programme. Some of these special provisions made for women are critical for gender equity.

These special provisions need to also be balanced by making them requirements to men’s participation as a way to challenge gender norms and work burdens and as a way to encourage men to participate in stereotypically feminine roles, such as childcare.

There is a need for social protection to redress inequitable social norms and structural factors that perpetuate women’s vulnerability to poverty, as opposed to simply including women or targeting them to meet their practical needs.

Alongside implementing the gendered provisions, we recommend further research into the ways that the programme can challenge discriminatory social norms.

Overall we found upon implementation that in the case study sites:

• The workload requirements for women, which should be half compared to that of men, as well as flexibility in work timing, were enforced unevenly across the communities.
  
• Women and men were also not consulted separately and implementing such provisions for women involves awareness by supervisors, none of whom were women.
  
• Most participants felt the distance needed to travel for Public Works, specifically for women, and the scheduling of activities were inconvenient.
  
• No networks or associations were established to represent different community needs and a large majority of women and men thought that they had little choice in the types of work they could pursue and that current activities compromised their health.
  
• Finally, the representation and consultation of women were politicized and sufficient childcare was unavailable.
  
• In some instances, gender sensitivity was not necessarily facilitating the transformation of norms, roles and responsibilities. Instead, negative gender norms tend to be reinforced by the program design and implementation.