Women and youth do not access the technology and farming practices that underpin climate-smart agriculture to the same extent as men.

There are a number of reasons that limit women’s inclusion, including access to resources, women’s representation in agricultural research, access to information, control over labour allocations as well as gender norms.

This AICCRA team works to identify and customize packages of CSA technologies and practices that are ‘gender-smart’ and help to promote greater inclusion of women and other marginalised social groups.

In AICCRA focus countries the team works with national public sector institutions, the private sector, NGOs, farmer groups, cooperatives, unions, women and youth organizations together with regional agricultural research networks to find ‘best-bet’ CSA packages and target them to women and youth through assessment of their gender and inclusivity.

Through dialogues with policymakers, implementation managers and field workers, the team assesses how ‘gender-smart’ such ‘climate-smart’ agricultural innovations are, helping to drive new and better targeted investments, finding new ways to deliver these innovations on a scale needed to meet the climate and food security challenges faced in Africa.

The AICCRA Gender and Social Inclusion Workshops of June 2021 brought together government institutions, local banks, microfinance institutions, development agencies and farmers organisations to identify the most promising mechanisms to accelerate the adoption of climate information services and climate-smart agriculture by women and young people engaged in smallholder farming.