Publication:
Gender and Agricultural Risk: A Gendered Approach to Agricultural Risk Assessments and Management Strategies

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (3.91 MB)
795 downloads
English Text (237.42 KB)
59 downloads
Published
2017-04
ISSN
Date
2017-04-19
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to develop an approach for integrating a gender dimension into Agricultural Sector Risk Assessments (ASRAs). The focus is on the approach because both agricultural risk and gender issues are contextual, thus the outcomes of a gender-based risk assessment are highly dependent on the social, cultural, geo-graphic, and economic contexts of the setting in which the assessment is applied. The organization of the paper reflects the challenges of incorporating a gender dimension into ASRAs. The conceptual framework and step-by-step illustrations presented herein are based on lessons learned by the World Bank and other institutions in assisting developing economies in conducting sector and key commodity supply chain risk assessments (World Bank 2015a). The paper also relies on recent work by international institutions and academic research that offer insights into the complexities of gender issues in relation to agricultural shocks. These experiences inform this paper’s case for a gender-based approach to Agriculture Risk Management (ARM) and help to illustrate a practical, stepwise approach for conducting gender-based ASRAs. This paper is arranged as follows: Chapter 2 offers a summary of the conceptual framework for risk management, including addressing why a gendered approach to ASRAs is essential; Chapter 3 shows the available evidence that agricultural risk has a gender-differentiated impact on farming households and that farming households adopt a gender-differentiated response to risk; Chapter 4 describes a step-by-step operational approach for doing so, and includes guidance for formulating gender-smart policies and strategies for strengthening agricultural systems’ resilience; and Chapter 5 presents a summary of findings and concluding remarks.
Link to Data Set
Citation
World Bank. 2017. Gender and Agricultural Risk: A Gendered Approach to Agricultural Risk Assessments and Management Strategies. Agriculture Global Practice Discussion Paper;. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26398 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook
    (Washington, DC : World Bank, 2009) World Bank; Food and Agriculture Organization; International Fund for Agricultural Development
    Three out of every four poor people in developing countries live in rural areas, and most of them depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihoods. In many parts of the world, women are the main farmers or producers, but their roles remain largely unrecognized. The 2008 World development report: agriculture for development highlights the vital role of agriculture in sustainable development and its importance in achieving the millennium development goal of halving by 2015 the share of people suffering from extreme poverty and hunger. Climate change and rising food prices are reminders of the need to focus on food security and agriculture for development; and the material presented in the gender in agriculture sourcebook suggests that accounting for the different roles of women and men and gender equality in access to resources and opportunities is a necessary condition for doing so. This sourcebook is a particularly timely resource. It combines descriptive accounts of national and international experience in investing in agriculture with practical operational guidance on to how to design agriculture for development strategies that capitalize effectively on the unique properties of agricultural growth and rural development involving women and men as a high-impact source of poverty reduction. It looks at gender equality and women's empowerment, and the associated principles have the potential to make a difference in the lives of hundreds of millions of rural poor.
  • Publication
    Gender in Climate-Smart Agriculture
    (World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2015) World Bank Group; FAO; IFAD
    This module provides guidance and a comprehensive menu of practical tools for integrating gender in the planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of projects and investments in climate-smart agriculture (CSA). The module emphasizes the importance and ultimate goal of integrating gender in CSA practices, which is to reduce gender inequalities and ensure that men and women can equally benefit from any intervention in the agricultural sector to reduce risks linked to climate change. Climate change has an impact on food and nutrition security and agriculture, and the agriculture sector is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. It is crucial to recognize that climate change affects men and women differently. The content is drawn from tested good practice and innovative approaches, with an emphasis on lessons learned, benefits and impacts, implementation issues, and replicability. These insights and lessons related to gender in CSA will assist practitioners to improve project planning, design, monitoring, and evaluation; to effectively scale up and enhance the sustainability of efforts that are already underway; or to pursue entirely different solutions. This module contains five thematic notes (TNs) that provide a concise and technically sound guide to gender integration in the selected themes. These notes summarize what has been done and highlight the success and lessons learned from projects and programs.
  • Publication
    Liberia : Gender-Aware Programs and Women's Roles in Agricultural Value Chains
    (Washington, DC, 2010-05) World Bank
    This Policy Memorandum provides policy advice to the government of Liberia (GOL) in an effort to mainstream gender issues in policies, programs, and projects supporting agricultural production and value-chain development. It is organized as follows. Section I reviews women's roles in Liberian agriculture and agricultural value chains, drawing on a variety of data sources, including the 2007 Core Welfare Indicator Questionnaire Survey (CWIQ) and the two rounds of the Comprehensive Food Security and Nutrition Survey (CFSNS, 2006 and 2008). It also gives an overview of the agricultural sector in Liberia. Section II uses the same sources to analyze key constraints faced by women as agricultural producers and in value-adding activities, as well as key crop-specific issues in cassava, rice, and tree crops. Section III reviews the engagement of the GOL in gender-aware agriculture programs and recommends some key general principles to support gender-aware interventions, and specific recommendations aimed at supporting women as agricultural producers and increasing access to, and better efficiency in, value addition. Section IV discusses the institutional issues that need to be considered to support the design, implementation and monitoring of interventions. Finally, Section V discusses the availability and the role of appropriate gender aware data as the basis for policy programming and monitoring of interventions.
  • Publication
    Tajikistan Country Gender Assessment
    (Washington, DC, 2013-06-13) World Bank
    The aim of this report is to provide a broad overview of the current state of gender equality in Tajikistan. While the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region traditionally surpassed many other regions in terms of gender equality, this advantage has been eroding in recent decades. Particularly in Tajikistan, concerns have been raised that men and women have unequally born the consequences of economic, political, and social transitions after independence in 1991. The report examines several dimensions of gender equality both quantitatively and qualitatively. Tajikistan has set up a legal framework that enshrines principles of equality and non-discrimination, but better implementation results require continued efforts. Prevailing social norms and patriarchal systems of decision-making limit women s ability to make effective choices be it at home or at work. The paper is structured along the following lines. The first section introduces the idea of agency that will remain an important issue throughout the report. This is followed by an analysis of disparities in human capital endowment, including health and education. Gender gaps in the Tajik labor market and entrepreneurial activities of men and women are discussed in the fourth and fifth section. The final section concludes with some policy recommendations that might be beneficial for discussions among policy-makers, civil society actors, and development partners.
  • Publication
    Summary of the Online Discussion on Linking Gender, Poverty, and Environment for Sustainable Development (May 2 - June 17, 2011)
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-01) World Bank
    Gender-poverty-environment links: a focus on the links between gender disparity, poverty and environmental degradation is increasingly recognized as a key strategy for improving the lives of poor women and men. Acknowledging the ways in which relationships between the environment, society and the economy are gendered opens space for new approaches to poverty reduction, environmental conservation and gender equality. The Social Development Department (SDV) of the World Bank conducted in-depth studies in Ethiopia and Ghana to advance understanding of the dynamics underlying negative spirals of poverty, environmental degradation, and gender inequality, and how to foster a positive synergy in the sustainable development sector e.g. energy, agriculture, natural resource management, water, urban development, and transport. An important component of the study design was an online discussion within and outside World Bank on findings from the country case studies to ground truth the potential for wider application in other countries; and to collect and share additional good practice cases that address gender-environment-poverty-links from as broad a range of countries as possible.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    The Global Findex Database 2025: Connectivity and Financial Inclusion in the Digital Economy
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-16) Klapper, Leora; Singer, Dorothe; Starita, Laura; Norris, Alexandra
    The Global Findex 2025 reveals how mobile technology is equipping more adults around the world to own and use financial accounts to save formally, access credit, make and receive digital payments, and pursue opportunities. Including the inaugural Global Findex Digital Connectivity Tracker, this fifth edition of Global Findex presents new insights on the interactions among mobile phone ownership, internet use, and financial inclusion. The Global Findex is the world’s most comprehensive database on digital and financial inclusion. It is also the only global source of comparable demand-side data, allowing cross-country analysis of how adults access and use mobile phones, the internet, and financial accounts to reach digital information and resources, save, borrow, make payments, and manage their financial health. Data for the Global Findex 2025 were collected from nationally representative surveys of about 145,000 adults in 141 economies. The latest edition follows the 2011, 2014, 2017, and 2021 editions and includes new series measuring mobile phone ownership and internet use, digital safety, and frequency of transactions using financial services. The Global Findex 2025 is an indispensable resource for policy makers in the fields of digital connectivity and financial inclusion, as well as for practitioners, researchers, and development professionals.
  • Publication
    Business Ready 2024
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-03) World Bank
    Business Ready (B-READY) is a new World Bank Group corporate flagship report that evaluates the business and investment climate worldwide. It replaces and improves upon the Doing Business project. B-READY provides a comprehensive data set and description of the factors that strengthen the private sector, not only by advancing the interests of individual firms but also by elevating the interests of workers, consumers, potential new enterprises, and the natural environment. This 2024 report introduces a new analytical framework that benchmarks economies based on three pillars: Regulatory Framework, Public Services, and Operational Efficiency. The analysis centers on 10 topics essential for private sector development that correspond to various stages of the life cycle of a firm. The report also offers insights into three cross-cutting themes that are relevant for modern economies: digital adoption, environmental sustainability, and gender. B-READY draws on a robust data collection process that includes specially tailored expert questionnaires and firm-level surveys. The 2024 report, which covers 50 economies, serves as the first in a series that will expand in geographical coverage and refine its methodology over time, supporting reform advocacy, policy guidance, and further analysis and research.
  • Publication
    Digital Africa
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13) Begazo, Tania; Dutz, Mark Andrew; Blimpo, Moussa
    All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.
  • Publication
    Global Financial Development Report 2019/2020
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020) World Bank
    Over a decade has passed since the collapse of the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers marked the onset of the largest global economic crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis revealed major shortcomings in market discipline, regulation, and supervision, and reopened important policy debates on financial regulation. Since the onset of the crisis, emphasis has been placed on better regulation of banking systems and on enhancing the tools available to supervisory agencies to oversee banks and intervene speedily in case of distress. Drawing on 10 years of data and analysis, the Global Financial Development Report 2019/2020 uncovers new evidence on the regulatory remedies adopted to prevent future financial troubles, and particularly the impact of reforms on market discipline and bank capital. Countries should design and enforce regulations that are appropriate for the institutional environment, strength of market discipline, supervisory capacity, and business models of banks in a given country. Regulations also need to be compatible with incentives, but designing and enforcing such regulations are complex tasks, particularly where sophisticated markets do not exist and institutions are underdeveloped. Globalization and technological change are important trends that make it even more challenging to provide effective oversight of banks. The Global Financial Development Report 2019/2020 is the fifth in a World Bank series. The report also tracks financial systems in more than 200 economies before and during the global financial crisis on an accompanying website (http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/gfdr) and provides information on how banking systems are regulated and supervised around the world (http://www.worldbank.org/en/research/brief/BRSS).
  • Publication
    Soft Skills, Competition, and Hiring Discrimination
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-18) Valencia, Christian; Janzen, Sarah; Ghorpade, Yashodhan; Abdur Rahman, Amanina
    This paper conducts a correspondence study to assess demand for soft skills in the context of hiring discrimination in Malaysia. No evidence of gender-based discrimination is found, including in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics occupations. However, in line with previous studies in the same context, there is evidence of ethnic discrimination. The paper then test the relevance of two soft skills: leadership and teamwork. These tests find some evidence that the labor market rewards simple signals of teamwork for the average applicant. Teamwork also plays an important role in the context of labor market discrimination, reducing the discrimination gap by 40 percent. In contrast, signaling leadership skills has no effect. Last, the paper considers the role of labor market competition. Companies facing competition in the labor market, measured by the number of competitors advertising similar positions, are 56 to 66 percent less likely to discriminate. On the supply side, discrimination increases with the relative quality of the pool of applicants. The results provide novel evidence that soft skills and labor market competition both play important roles in understanding hiring discrimination. This underlines potential pathways to overcome labor market discrimination and improve job matching.