By Deborah Rubin - Brenda Boonabaana - Cristina Manfre

1. Building an Inclusive Agriculture:
Strengthening Gender Equality in
Agricultural Value Chains
Deborah Rubin, Cultural Practice, LLC
Brenda Boonabaana, Makerere University
Cristina Manfre, TechnoServe

2. Background
Women in agriculture – anthropology, sociology,
rural development, agricultural economics
Economic value chain analysis
Global commodity chains
Project documentation
Research
Practice
Inclusive
Agriculture
Gender and
Value ChainsL
I
T
E
R
A
T
U
R
E
… including
those historically
excluded from
participation
and/or benefits
from their
participation …
reducing
malnutrition &
poverty

3. Intentional Design for Gender
Equality and Women’s Empowerment
• Fosters equitable participation of men and women
across all nodes of the chain
• Addresses women’s specific needs to reduce participation
barriers
• Supports women’s economic advancement through
upgrading and entrepreneurship
• Promotes gender-equitable market-driven solutions
• Includes mechanisms to ensure that women benefit
financially and can control those benefits
• Supports women’s economic and overall
empowerment
Source: Rubin, Manfre, and Nichols Barrett (2009)
Gender
Relations
Agricultural
Value Chains
Gender
Relations
Agricultural
Value Chains
Gender
Relations
The impact of
value chains on
gender equality
and women’s
empowerment
can be positive
or negative

4. Advances in Knowledge
• Extensive evidence on gender disparities
• on land ownership; access to credit, inputs, extension; transport;
technology
• Voluminous literature on women’s engagement in different
value chains and different regions
• Regional, cross-border and local trade in Africa
• High value AND staple food crops; livestock and fish
• VCs for nutrition
• Linking VC engagement to women’s empowerment
• Increasing attention to each VC node not only production

5. Advances in Guidance
and Implementation
• Numerous guides on nearly every sub-sector in agriculture in
many geographies
• Growing use of household methodologies and programs that
involve spouses, mothers-in-law, and community leaders to
achieve gender equality
• Private sector recognition of the value of hiring, promoting,
and retaining women as primary producers and
wage/salaried workers AND working with women
agripreneurs

6. Lessons Learned: Research
• Fill data gaps on:
• the capacities and characteristics of ALL women in
agriculture:
as smallholders, agripreneurs, or wage workers
• women’s motivations for starting agribusinesses
• systematically measuring results of VC
development to identify which nodes and types of VCs
lead to women’s empowerment
• WEAI4VC is a tool to answer this question
• Improve data quality
• Use mixed methods, qualitative and
quantitative methods
• Don’t forget the long view

7. Lessons Learned: Practice
• Consult guidance to help projects
• Design deliberately
• Define gender equality goals -- what do you want to
happen?
• Consider context
• Men/women/youth - activities change from place to
place over time
• Support Village Savings and Loan Associations
and Cooperatives as starting points for VC
engagement
• Promote women’s entrepreneurship –
expanding from small to medium to large
• Provide “bundled services” – e.g., credit with
training
• Explore public-private partnerships
• Kenya Market-led Dairy Supply Chain Project

8. Finding synergies between research
and practice
Practice
• Expanding women’s involvement
in poultry, fish, and livestock
chains
• Benefits in nutrition and income,
as well as control over income
• Improved payment mechanisms
• Private Sector innovation
rewarding improved production
practice
• Sustainable Harvest’s Premium
Sharing RewardsTM (coffee)
Research
• Collecting individual level, sex-
disaggregated data on
engagement in and benefits from
value chains
• Use of digital technologies by
women
• Strategies for empowerment:
Reach, benefit, empower

9. What’s Next?
• Supporting women agripreneurs across the value chain in:
• Expanding agribusinesses, e.g., CTA’s Value4Her program
• Transport, export, and higher value industries with higher returns
• Climate-smart, sustainable businesses
• Make agribusinesses workspaces safe spaces
• Addressing gender-based violence across the value chain,
in the family, the fields, and the factories:
• Better evidence and intentional implementation -  working conditions
• Researching “what works” for young men and women
• Recognize the importance of context and demographics
• Avoid “one size fits all”
• Refining and standardizing gender and VC analysis methods
• Mixed methods
• Intersectionality

10. Our Challenge:
Moving Beyond Stereotypes
….proactively using evidence from research
and practice on gender dimensions of
agricultural value chain operations to
deliberately promote gender equality and
women’s empowerment for the benefit of all.