Farmers carry baskets filled with cucumbers through the waters of river Ganges at Phaphamau in the northern Indian city. REUTERS/Jitendra Prakas
“We cannot succeed when half of us are held back." ―Malala Yousafzai
In September 2015, more than 150 world leaders agreed on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with 169 targets encapsulated in 17 global goals known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The broad roadmap sets forth ambitious targets for the next two-and-a-half decades. Goal 5 calls on the world to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. But this aim is more than a stand-alone target in itself: it is in fact at the heart of achieving all of the SDGs, from achieving food security and ending poverty to promoting peaceful and inclusive societies. We cannot reach our collective goals without empowering girls and women.
Girls’ and women’s empowerment is more than a sound bite, more than a slogan, and more than just a moral imperative: empowered girls and women are transformative for the nations and societies they reside in, and for the global community more broadly—for poverty alleviation, food and nutrition security, improved health and well-being, economic growth, and stability. In particular, women and girls will be key to ending hunger and malnutrition, as the world struggles with how to feed over 9 billion people by the year 2050.
Women are essential to global food and nutrition security. Women are the world’s food producers, making up nearly half of the world’s agriculture work force overall, and at even greater proportions depending on the region and commodity. For example, women make up two-thirds of the world’s livestock keepers—which, as demand for animal-sourced foods grows with increasing urbanization and rising incomes in emerging markets, demonstrates their important role in meeting the world’s demand for food.
But an immense gender gap in agriculture inhibits women’s capacity to produce food and fully participate in the food system: according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), women farmers are less likely to own or have access to agricultural land due to legal and cultural restrictions; they have poorer access to credit and other financial mechanisms; they are less likely than men farmers to use modern agricultural inputs like seeds, fertilizers, and tools; and are less likely to benefit from agricultural extension services. Unsurprisingly, these barriers lead to lower agricultural productivity among women compared with men—female farmers typically see yields 20 to 30 percent smaller than their male counterparts. Economic growth alone won’t close this gap: the gender gap in agriculture has been found to remain constant even when a country’s wealth increases.
Women’s role in feeding the world extends well beyond the farm. Women play important roles as employees or entrepreneurs in the rural small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that form the backbone of food supply chains that deliver food from farm to fork. Women’s entrepreneurship and employment is an untapped source of economic growth, spurring job creation, higher disposable income, and increased spending on education and healthcare. In rural SMEs in food supply chains in particular, women-owned enterprises can generate off-farm employment opportunities for women and men, and also play important roles—such as in food processing or retail—in meeting consumer food demand. Yet barriers including cultural norms and lack of access to credit and financial tools limit women’s ability to become business owners, holding them back from their full entrepreneurial potential.
Women, as mothers, meal preparers, and caregivers, are the center of improving nutrition and ending hunger. The evidence is demonstrably clear that good nutrition—or lack thereof—during a child’s first 1,000 days (the period from pregnancy through the child’s second birthday) establishes—or impedes—physical and cognitive development for the rest of their life. Poor nutrition during this time cannot be made up for in the future. Physical and cognitive stunting as a result of poor nutrition in the first 1,000 days is costly, for an individual and for society more broadly: adults who were undernourished as children earn at least 20 percent less than those who were not; in some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, undernutrition in childhood may be responsible for losses of up to 16 percent of national GDP.
The benefits of women’s empowerment to their families is clear: women are more likely than men to invest their wage-earnings in their families’ nutrition and health, and more educated women have better nourished children. And, today’s girls are tomorrow’s mothers, demonstrating the need for empowerment of girls, including adolescents on the cusp of adulthood. The nourishment of the future depends on the education, prosperity, health and well-being of women and girls.
Simply put, a world free of hunger and malnutrition will never be achieved without empowerment of girls and women. Girls’ and women’s empowerment matters for individuals and households, but it also matters for national and global well-being, prosperity, and stability. Closing the gender gap in agriculture could increase agricultural output in low-income countries by up to 4 percent, and reduce the number of chronically undernourished people worldwide, currently estimated at 795 million, by 100-150 million people. Increases in rates of girls’ secondary education attendance lead to increases in a country’s average per capita growth, and evidence shows that countries where women are most equal to men are also the most secure and stable. Girls’ and women’s rights are a basic tenement of human rights and democracy, as identified by leaders in the United States and worldwide.
The importance of girls’ and women’s empowerment—as a goal unto itself as well as a means for alleviating hunger and poverty, improving health and nutrition, and ensuring nations’ growth and stability—is not a new idea. The antecedent to the SDGs, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), were established in 2000 and included “Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women” (Goal 3) and “Improve Maternal Health” (Goal 5) among its agenda for 2015. To be sure, the MDGs did see significant improvements in the status of women and girls, with about two thirds of developing countries reaching gender parity in primary school enrollment, and significant reduction in maternal mortality rates.
Yet despite the growing global attention to girls and women’s empowerment and improvements under the MDGs, women and girls still lag far behind men in myriad health, socio-economic, cultural, and political ways: women make up nearly 50 percent of the agricultural workforce in sub-Saharan Africa but only 15 percent of agricultural land owners in the region; women in the Middle East are half as likely as men to have a bank account; despite increasing primary education enrollment among girls, their enrollment rates for secondary education still lag; women around the world perform an average of 4.5 hours of unpaid work each day—over twice as much as men—leaving less time for paid work; and a dramatic lack of gender data renders girls and women invisible for much of the measurement, evaluation, policymaking, and agenda-setting. These inequalities, large and small, hold women and girls back from their full potential—and minimize their contributions to their households, communities, and countries.
How can we move the needle on girls’ and women’s empowerment? In this blog series, I’ll explore avenues like improved nutrition and health, financial access and inclusion, access to and quality of education, and other key topics, looking at stories of success and opportunities for progress. Because when she succeeds, we all succeed.
We want to hear from you: tell us what has and will empower women and girls. Tweet your examples and stories of progress at @GlobalAgDev using #SheSucceeds. And join the Council on March 10 for the International Women’s Day Global Health Symposium as we explore how innovation, storytelling, and technologies are improving the lives of women and children globally.