‘What Works and For Whom?’

Even though the need to minimize adverse social and environmental effects from supply chain activities is globally recognized, gender equality is still inconsistently prioritized, gender compliance challenging and consensus on its meaning, still elusive. But women play an important and valuable, though often invisible, role in agriculture. A reality that is not only unjust -women’s input and contribution to agriculture as well as the burdens they bear are not matched by an equal share of resources or influence in the sector-, but also costs individuals, households, and commodity supply chains.

As part of the Good Growth Partnership’s mission to place sustainability at the heart of commodity supply chains, we are committed to long-term knowledge sharing, including the development of several Knowledge Products intended to enable exchange and lessons learned from the ground up.

This Knowledge Product, developed under the UN Good Growth Partnership’s Adaptive Management & Learning project, seeks to underline and stress the added value of using a gender lens in the design and implementation of activities in agricultural supply chains, and reflects on current trends in gender mainstreaming, opportunities to accelerate action, and critical lessons-learned from initiatives that have already been implemented.

Presenting a clear business case for gender equality and women’s empowerment in agricultural supply chains, it will prove a useful guidance on gender mainstreaming to stakeholders involved in commodity-related projects.