Towards equitable and inclusive climate adaptation policies and practices

The presentation discussed the importance of looking at issues through a lens of gender and social diversities and thus paying attention to differences, inequality, and power dynamics among farmers. It emphasized that women-oriented technologies and adaptation strategies can help strengthen resilience to climate change at the community level

Integrating gender and social inclusion in WP2 Workplan

The presentation tackled how to integrate gender and social inclusion in the CGIAR Initiative on Asian Mega-Delta’s (AMD) Work Package 2: Nutrition Sensitive Deltaic Agri-food Systems. Workplan. It was presented during the AMD Work Package 2 - Nutrition Sensitive Deltaic Agri-food Systems Planning Workshop in Penang, Malaysia on 17 October 2022

Consumer willingness to pay a premium for orange-fleshed sweet potato puree products: a gender-responsive evidence from Becker–DeGroot–Marschak experimental auction among low- and middle-income consumers in selected regions of Nairobi, Kenya

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is a major public health problem affecting people of all ages, particularly women of reproductive age and young children in the Global South. Nutrient-enriched (biofortified) orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) has promising potential as a sustainable food vehicle to combat VAD. Part of ongoing efforts to combat VAD, particularly among the urban poor populations, include the introduction of innovative OFSP puree, which is utilized as a functional and substitute ingredient in widely consumed baked and fried products. In Kenya, the OFSP puree is used to make commercial products that are affordable by low- and middle-income households. However, there is limited knowledge of consumer awareness, willingness to pay (WTP), and/or how gender plays a role in the uptake of these products. Following a multistage sampling technique, this study employs the Becker–DeGroot–Marschak (BDM) experimental auction method to assess if men and women consumers—from selected, highly populated low- and middle-income areas of Nairobi County in Kenya—are aware and if they would be willing to pay for OFSP puree products. Integrating gender considerations, we use three of the most widely consumed OFSP puree products, bread, buns, and chapati, and three treatment categories, naive, nutritional information, and OFSP puree substitute products' references prices to deduce the WTP for OFSP puree products among men and women. Results showed limited awareness of OFSP and OFSP puree products among men and women. However, both men and women were willing to pay a premium for the OFSP puree products. The intergender comparison showed that women were more willing to pay a premium for the OFSP puree products than men. Gender, age, education, knowledge of OFSP puree products, income category, availability of nutritional information, and reference pricing stand out as significant determinants of WTP

A gender perspective on pest and disease management from the cases of roots, tubers and bananas in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa

Considering gender in research on pests and diseases is increasingly important as it facilitates development of more efficient approaches to increasing the adoption of crop protection technologies and practices by women and men farmers according to their roles, knowledge, and capacities. However, this task is often assigned to social scientists in isolation from agronomists. Meanwhile, agronomists often struggle to understand how taking a gender perspective could enrich their research. Drawing on a number of different cases from both published and unpublished field research in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, this perspective article illustrates how a gender perspective can broaden the aspects of agronomy research and thereby contribute to improving crop production and scaling up of existing technologies and practices. Its targeted audience are agronomists and development practitioners, in particular, young researchers who are central to transdisciplinary agricultural research in the future

Policy framing and crisis narratives around food safety in Vietnam

While progress has been made recently in understanding food systems per se, much less is known about policies around those food systems. In this paper, we aim at understanding the food system policy context with the specific objective to look at policy dynamics—defined as the way policy agendas are identified, justified, and framed by decision-makers, and how they interact. Vietnam is used as a case study. Primary data were generated through face-to-face interviews complemented by an online survey. A policy framing approach was used to structure the research. The analysis reveals how the policy agenda is considered by many actors to be only partially evidence-based and highlights the extent to which the state government remains the most powerful actor in the setting of that agenda. The research also reveals the diffusion of the food safety crisis narrative beyond its original technical domain into a larger number of policy framings related to other issues of food systems, thus making it de facto the “center of gravity” of the current agenda on food systems in Vietnam. Yet, a comparison with data from other countries challenges this narrative, and reveals instead how the (legitimate) public concern about food safety is being instrumentalized by certain groups of actors to advance their own agenda. The implication of this “distorted” framing is the risk for the decision-makers to “overfocus” their attention on this short-term issue and lose sight of some other longer-term structural trends such as the emergence of obesity in Vietnamese urban population

Women bargaining with patriarchy in coastal Kenya:contradictions, creative agency and food provisioning

Gender analysts have long recognised that challenging existing patriarchal structures involves risks for women, who may lose both long-term support and protection from kin. However, understanding the specific ways in which they ‘bargain with patriarchy’ in particular contexts is relatively poorly understood. We focus on a Mijikenda fishing community in coastal Kenya to explore contradictions in gendered power relations and how women deploy these to reinterpret gendered practices without directly challenging local patriarchal structures. We argue that a more complex understanding of women’s creative agency can reveal both the value to women of culturally-specific gendered roles and responsibilities and the importance of subtle changes that they are able to negotiate in these. With reference to food provisioning, the analysis contributes to more nuanced understandings of gendered household food security and women’s creative approaches to maintaining long-term security in their lives