Advancing gender equity through women producers’ dialogue series

As one of the implementing partners of the Forest and Farm Facility, IIED is hosting an online dialogue series for women-led or majority women forest and farm producer organisations.

The aim is to create a space for women producers, entrepreneurs and leaders to connect with each other, share and exchange experiences and ideas, and support and inspire one another around women’s empowerment in their own contexts.

Agency through entrepreneurship

Despite major progress in reducing overall global poverty levels, new research shows a ‘feminisation’ of poverty, meaning that women are at greater risk of slipping into or remaining in poverty.

This is especially true in the agriculture and forest sectors of the global South. Even though women play important roles along agricultural and forest value chains, they suffer large gender inequalities in access to agricultural assets, inputs, services, new technology, education, information, markets, rights and legal protection, networks and decision-making processes.

Women also have less control of the products and income from their sale. This causes large costs to their countries, communities and households.

Finding ways to reconcile family and work life is a challenge for working women everywhere. But greater empowerment of women can lead to greater public investments in childcare, education and health. In turn, this has many positive effects on women’s livelihoods and wellbeing.

Issues of gender often touch on deeply sensitive and controversial topics, including division of labour at the family level or the treatment of gender by religion. However, gender equality in business is often a more acceptable entry point for reducing women’s vulnerability and empowering their status within organisations and households.

Women’s economic empowerment through entrepreneurship is an opening to other forms of empowerment. It is also one of the most important factors contributing to equality between women and men.

The economic empowerment of women is considered essential for poverty reduction and sustainable economic development. The enhancement of gender equity and women’s agency is one of FFF’s core cross-cutting themes.

Guided by women leaders

The Forest and Farm Facility (FFF) focuses on strengthening forest and farm producer organisations (FFPOs). Formal and informal producer organisations can help rural communities overcome poverty and facilitate their access to resources, assets, markets and services.

Women-only producer organisations can be crucial where existing producer organisations are restricted to men or where culturally it is uncommon for men and women to sit together and jointly negotiate and make decisions. However, women-only groups often remain limited to the community or village level.

In mixed organisations on the other hand, women may be well represented as members, but few of them occupy leadership positions. Generally, women are often excluded or poorly represented in such organisations, which tends to reinforce existing gender inequalities.

As part of its gender strategy, the FFF aims to offer opportunities that allow women producers to take part in peer-to-peer (women-to-women) sessions to exchange knowledge and experiences and enable greater economic empowerment.

While the challenges for women’s economic development are manifold, FFF acknowledges that many trailblazing women producers and producer organisations in its extended network may offer valuable lessons to their peers.

This prompted FFF and IIED to work with women leaders of these organisations, including India’s Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), which works to economically empower women, to initiate a global rural women producers’ exchange platform.

IIED is also working closely with women leaders of NGOs, exchange programmes and the private sector across Africa, Asia and Latin America within the wider FFF network.

A series of dialogues

Each dialogue within the series, which started in 2023, focuses on a topic around rural women producers’ agency and entrepreneurship, and features case study presentations by invited speakers, the opportunity for conversations in small circles and facilitated discussions.

Topics so far have included: