Nouvelles

A new FAO-CCAFS practice brief, A Gender-responsive approach to Climate-Smart Agriculture: Evidence and guidance for practitioners, has some of the answers. The brief was developed under the Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture (GACSA) and is one of a series.

Focus of the brief

The brief calls for recognizing and addressing women’s and men’s needs, priorities, and realities in climate-smart agriculture (CSA) design and implementation to ensure they equally benefit. It focuses on CSA practices, but recognizes the need for a holistic gender-responsive approach at different levels (e.g. research and evidence-building; policy formulation; development of financial instruments, institutional change) to enhance the field of CSA.

Key messages

The practice brief shares three messages:

• The gender gap in agriculture affects how men and women access and benefit from CSA.
• A gender-responsive approach to CSA addresses this gap by recognizing the specific needs and capabilities of women and men.
• Site-specific CSA practices that are also gender-responsive can lead to improvements in the lives of smallholder farmers, fishers and foresters, as well as more sustainable results.

What does the brief provide?

A number of different issues are covered in the practice brief, including:

• Criteria for evaluating whether CSA-sensitive practices are following a gender-responsive approach.
• Challenges to adopting a gender-responsive approach.
• Gender-sensitive indicators of CSA performance.
• Case studies that have applied a gender-responsive approach to introducing CSA-sensitive practices.