Gender Strategy: Building Equitable Climate-Resilient African Bean & Insect Sectors (BRAINS)

The Building Equitable Climate-Resilient African Bean and Insect Sectors (BRAINS) is a multi-country project that spans 15 Sub-Saharan African countries. BRAINS aims to foster low-carbon, climate-resilient systems and economies in the bean, fruit trees, and insect farming sectors by (a) enhancing climate resilience more equitably among women and youth farmers and value chain actors, (b) bringing adoption of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) technologies that boost climate resilience to scale across targeted production systems, and (c) building a pipeline of enterprises that are actively investing in carbon-neutral, climate-resilient, and gender-responsive business development in line with emerging climate finance sector goals. However, across these 15 countries, gender disparities are widespread, as evidenced by a significant number of women and youth disproportionately affected by climate change (Pinho-Gomes & Woodward, 2024; Nchanji et al., 2022). Though women constitute a large proportion of the agricultural workforce, they experience limited access to land, climate-smart technology, and training. This is a common trend across several Sub-Saharan countries as traditional gender roles limit youth and women’s participation in high-value market activities and decision-making processes. For instance, the BRAINS’ qualitative study in Cameroon revealed that women predominantly handle labour-intensive activities like planting and harvesting beans yet have less control over financial decisions and market sales. Similar trends are observed in Kenya and Zambia, along with the beans, fruit trees, and insect value chains. These gendered constraints limit women farmers’ productivity and capacity to adapt to climate change (Ayanlade et al., 2023) and potentially restrict youths’ transition into agriculture (Nchanji et al., 2024). The gender strategy highlights how the BRAINS project will address these challenges to ensure equitable participation and benefits and encourage youth to transition into agriculture. This gender strategy provides a comprehensive framework to ensure gender equality is mainstreamed in the three agricultural value chains targeted by the BRAINS project, from design to implementation and sustainability. The strategy builds on the Reach-Benefit-Empower-Transform framework, the socio-technical innovation bundles approach and the youth and women quality centre (YWQC) model to ensure greater inclusion of men, women, youth, and other marginalised groups in bean, fruit trees, and insect farming value chains.