Engage Newsletter March 2022

March 2022

ENGAGE!

Vol. 1 Issue 1

Women's Empowerment & Active Citizenship

NEWSLETTER

In this Issue: Feature: SEWA Food Systems Webinar Series Highlights ABCD Kitchen Table Talk with WISE Christian Commission for Development in Bangladesh (CCDB) Project Update Centre Haitien du Leadership et de l’Excellence (CLE) Program Update COP26 Webinar

The Coady Institute partners with five organizations to implement the ENGAGE program in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, and Tanzania. A key component of the ENGAGE program is learning. The ENGAGE Newsletter feature updates, key lessons, and changes which partners are seeing. The March 2022 issue features SEWA’s Food Systems Webinar Series, which brought visibility to the informal women farmers and their issues, challenges, and solutions to food systems transformation. It also provides updates and success stories from the other partners: Centre Haitien du Leadership et de l’Excellence (CLE), Christian Commission for Development in Bangladesh (CCDB), Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP), and the Organization for Women in Self-Employment (WISE) in Ethiopia.

SEWA Food Systems Webinar Series Highlights Despite the central role women play in food systems—from production, processing and trade to provision within the household—their voices are barely heard in policy-level dialogue. SEWA organized a series of webinars on the theme Women, Work and Food Systems, timed to align with the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) in 2021. The webinars offered a platform to raise issues, challenges and solutions, and also to bring visibility and identity of these women farmers, agricultural labourers, sharecroppers, small scale food processors, and street vendors. Understanding the need for all sectors to collaborate for food systems transformation, the webinars brought together diverse voices from the grassroots, development practitioners, policymakers, donors and researchers. One provocative insight set the stage: “Farmers cannot eat what they grow and they are not able to grow what they eat…Why does the farmer remain hungry?”Insights from the discussions identified the following priorities for action:

• Organizing is key to help women build collective strength, leadership and solidarity. Organizing enables women from diverse communities to be heard, respected and to fill traditionally male roles. Advocacy opens access to services and resources, decision making processes, and spaces for women to act together for collective marketing, bargaining, and demand for better services.

• To overcome institutional barriers, pro-women policies need to be put in place for sustainable transformation of food systems. These policies include producers, processors, distributors and consumers. Disassociating agro-policies from land ownership will ensure small and marginal women farmers, landless labourers and sharecroppers can benefit. This will also help explicitly recognize and promote the rights of women who are structurally disadvantaged. Pro-poor and pro-farmer policies are needed to promote traditional food. More research is required on women-friendly agro-tools and technology.

Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP) Success Story: Increasing Community Participation and Local Government Response After taking part in training at the community level, community members more readily identified issues to address and put forward to the local government. The issues included crime, access to water services, and gender-based violence.

“Through our sensitization efforts of the authority you are seeing these efforts taken by the government. You can see they have already put water in place at Kivule Annex. The only challenge remaining is connecting electricity to the school that can enable pupils to start utilizing that water.” This was said by a community member who indicated that plots to construct a dispensary and a primary school were already allocated and they had sent a proposal to the district authority for action.

Mama Mwita Matiku, a resident of Majohe, said gender-based violence was decreasing. She said that previously some families were carrying out female genital mutilation (FGM) of their girls openly, but since the government’s intervention they haven’t heard such incidences.

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• Treat the farm as an enterprise by providing affordable access to productive resources and organizing women into their own food microenterprises. Skills in farm planning, farm management, marketing, and supply chains can build climate resilience while improving yields and incomes of small producers. Agriculture is a family occupation, so activities and policies for informal workers must consider the “family as a unit”. Asset creation fights poverty— access to integrated technical, financial and other services improves social security and long term stability of the family as well as mitigating food security.

• Integrating women’s participation and visibility at all stages in the food supply chain makes the food system equitable and efficient from a gender perspective. Women’s traditional agro-skills such as seed preservation and use of farm bunds (dykes) helps preserve biodiversity and soil health. Promoting food processing units and organizing women workers in their own farm-to-fork social enterprises also develops leadership and entrepreneurial mindsets.

• The nexus of production-processing-distributionconsumption must promote local, decentralized food systems, ensuring employment and income security to small farmers and landless labourers, as well as urban microentrepreneurs. Government’s promotion of a Public Distribution System adhering to the 100 miles principle will improve food security and address the opening question “Why does the farmer remain hungry?”

Organization for Women in Self-Employment (WISE): Kitchen Table Talk on Asset Based Community Development Staff at WISE promote ABCD as an approach to mitigate dependency and strengthen self-reliance. In February 2022, Abebe Kefale (WISE) and Robin Neustaeter (Coady Institute) facilitated a dialogue on the challenges of humanitarian aid in communities affected by shocks.

WISE team members underlined the importance of strengthening local capacities and working toward community based solutions to shocks.

Click here for presentation.

…Why does the farmer remain hungry?

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Christian Commission for Development in Bangladesh (CCDB) Project Update CCDB has been able to expand its ENGAGE field activities in Satkhira District, located in the southwest of the country next to the world’s largest mangrove swamps. CCDB will provide training in livelihoods and political influence to the women’s groups being formed in the local communities.

Initial training in climate-smart agriculture focused on best use of garden space, how to reduce the use of chemical pesticides, new seed varieties, and fertilizers. Participants have already noted a difference in their gardens and believe that this will contribute to increased food and income for their families.

COP26 Webinar The actions needed to address the developing climate emergency and its impacts received global attention during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) held November, 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. The webinar was convened to consider how the outcomes of COP26 will inform development practice at the local level to counteract the damaging effects of climate change on communities. It had a particular focus on the role that women in the informal sector can play in mitigating and adapting to climate change as well as their vulnerability to loss and damage. The webinar featured ENGAGE organizations and their partners: Coady, SEWA, CPRP, AIDMI, and a lead negotiator for Canada at COP26.

Centre Haitien du Leadership et de l’Excellence (CLE) Program Update Despite security and weather shocks in Haiti, the team at CLE has selected a first cohort of 25 women from the southwestern region to start their social business development journeys. The first training took place in October, 2021. This group of women have been working on their business plans and took part in the 16 days of action advocating against domestic violence in their communities.

CLE continues to navigate security issues in order to support these women to receive further training and coaching.

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