Smallholder women farmers in the eastern Indian state of Odisha play a crucial role in the management of goat and backyard poultry. However, they face significant challenges due to fodder shortages, which adversely affect their livelihoods. This abstract highlights the efforts of Heifer International in addressing the fodder scarcity through sustainable farming practices, with a particular focus on smallholder women farmers in Odisha.

Smallholder farmers often lack documented land rights to serve as collateral for formal loans, and their livelihoods are inextricably linked to increasingly variable weather conditions. Resulting credit and risk constraints prevent them from making potentially profitable investments in their farms. We implemented a randomized evaluation of the impacts of KhetScore, an innovative credit scoring methodology that uses digital technologies to unlock credit and insurance for smallholders including landless farmers in Odisha, a state in eastern India.

Climate change poses a profound threat to the wellbeing and sustainability of farming and farm-based livelihoods in fragile socioecological systems. Climatic challenges to farming have often been addressed by diverse forms of sustainable intensification that aim to maximize farm outputs and resource-use efficiency through climate-smart innovations. However, climate change poses specific challenges to women farmers, who play important roles in agri-food systems, often in the absence of their male counterparts who recursively migrate from the climatically challenged regions.

The increasing agricultural wages in rural India have lent significant R&D and policy support for laborsaving agricultural technologies. While some are heralded as ‘game changers’ in achieving food sufficiency goals, less research is devoted to understanding whether farmer adoption of these technologies worsens economic inequalities. We hypothesize that the rapid diffusion of laborsaving agricultural technologies could result in a reduction in employment and loss of a key source of livelihood for the nonfarming rural poor, especially women from socially marginalized groups.

Cashew is one of the cash crops mostly grown by smallholder farmers in Tanzania. It provides a major source of rural employment and income. Women provide 90% of labor in small-scale cashew processing and largely sell to the domestic market. However, women face constraints in increasing the productivity and profitability of small processing operations. This study assesses the effectiveness of an intervention that provided equipment and training to women’s cashew processing groups (WCPGs) in the Mtwara and Lindi regions, implemented by the Small Industries Development Organization (SIDO).

The Indian agricultural system is undergoing rapid degradation because of climate-induced shocks and stressors. As a result, there have been endeavors among governments, civil society organizations and researchers to embrace transformative approaches toward the agri-food system. Within this context, agroecology has emerged as a comprehensive methodology that aims to reshape food systems by harnessing the interconnectedness between indigenous knowledge, local conservation practices, social capital and strategies for adapting to the climate crisis.

The present study attempts to understand the farmers’ gender-differentiated perception of climate risk and its impact, access to climate information, and adaptation strategies in Senegal’s dry regions. Study uses data collected from 514 households through primary survey between May and June 2022 covering Kaffrine, Louga and Thies subregions and multiple communes, including 5% women-headed households and 12% women respondents.

Consumption of diverse diets has been associated with improved maternal health and child growth. Diverse diets are a proxy for micronutrient adequacy. The nutritional effects of women’s empowerment on women and children are understudied, especially in urban locations. Hence, this study has been conducted on the status of maternal and child nutrition, understanding how it relates to various dimensions of women’s empowerment in urban settings.

Currently there is little evidence on differentiated gender roles and empowerment in value chains in the Latin America region and few comparative analyses on value chains and between value chain nodes. In this study, we examine different indicators of women’s empowerment among the production and processing nodes of two agricultural value chains—cashew and dairy—in Honduras to understand whether and how women’s roles in the value chains are related to their empowerment.

Land ownership has long been argued to enhance farm productivity by improving tenure security. But does this hold for both female and male owners? Few studies have empirically examined the relationship between gender, landownership, and productivity globally, and even fewer have done so for Asia. Gender differences in the likelihood of landowners self-cultivating as opposed to leasing out their land are even less explored.

The Integrated Watershed Development Programme (IWDP) is key for rejuvenation and improvement of waterscarce landscapes in India. Despite policy guidelines, there has been limited success in ensuring community participation and inclusion in IWDPs, especially for women and people from vulnerable social groups. This study attempted to explore the politics of inclusion and exclusion because local hierarchies of caste and gender inhibit decision-making, access to services, participation and benefits from IWDPs.

Agri-food systems constitute a huge proportion of global jobs and economies, but are failing to provide healthy diets, equitable livelihoods and sustainable practices. Women in rural areas are highly prominent in the sector and most vulnerable to climate impacts.