Given the right support, women can significantly boost yields and help make farming more resilient, writes Alina Paul-Bossuet of the CGIAR in an article on the website of the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

She highlights the need for greater attention to gender in ensuring climate change does not amplify inequalities in developing countries.

“Despite providing half of the agricultural workforce and having a strong role in ensuring proper family nutrition – especially for children and vulnerable household members – a great majority of women in the 500 million smallholder farming households don’t have much say in how farm resources are allocated,” says Paul-Bossuet.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN estimates that closing the gender gap could boost agricultural production by 2.5 to 4 per cent globally, reducing the number of hungry people by up to 17 per cent. “Tackling gender inequities would also improve household capacity to adapt to climate change,” says Paul-Bossuet.

In conducting participatory research in villages around the world, CCAFS has shown that a combination of improved farming practices, such as techniques that save irrigation water, agroforestry, and tailored climate advisories through mobile phones, can raise farms’ productivity and incomes as well as their resilience.

These climate-smart practices are just as likely to be adopted by women as men, but women are often less likely to be aware of them. CCAFS is therefore focusing on women’s involvement in their climate-smart villages program so that they can identify the most effective and beneficial practices.

As part of the UN Climate Change talks in Lima, Peru, a special seminar involving CARE International, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) will discuss gender issues as well as nutrition, local action and scaling up.

Read the full story: For more food and more resilience, turn to women