Pathways to power in fragile settings: rethinking women’s roles in agriculture and food systems

Figure: A women fills a water vessel from a underground rainwater harvesting tank in the Thar Desert near Phalodi, India. Photo Credit: Dieter Telemans/Panos Pictures

CGIAR April 29 2025

Research shows that women play pivotal roles in farming—across value chains, and in food systems as a whole. With harmful effects of climate change, conflict, forced migration, and other problems on the rise, many women around the world find themselves in increasingly fragile settings—creating new challenges in efforts to achieve gender equity and empowerment in food systems.

An IFPRI-organized March 13 session at the NGO Forum on the 69^th Commission on the Status of Women at United Nations Headquarters in New York highlighted recent research on different aspects of how women in fragile food systems can become empowered. Evidence shows that when equipped with tools, voice, and recognition, women act—not only to improve their own well-being but to strengthen resilience across households and communities.

Women in fragile- and conflict-afflicted settings have especially acute vulnerabilities. The 2021 UN Food Systems Summit Gender and Food Systems Framework shows how food system drivers are anchored in a gendered social, political, institutional, and economic system with structural gender inequalities that shape individuals’ and households’ risks and vulnerabilities. These drivers in turn influence the three main components of food systems—value chains, food environments, consumer behavior—and their outcomes, including nutrition, diet and food security, gender equality and women’s empowerment, economic and livelihood outcomes, environmental outcomes, and well-being outcomes.

See https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/pathways-to-power-in-fragile-settings-rethinking-womens-roles-in-agriculture-and-food-systems-2/