Blog Women and girls are at the heart of fostering better agrifood systems for all
This International Women’s Day, The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT is proud to stand with women and girls in the ongoing global effort toward building more sustainable and equitable food systems.
Gender equality has never been more important. Thirty years after the Beijing Declaration, a landmark United Nations resolution to promote gender equality, progress on women’s rights and empowerment has been uneven, and gains made toward gender equality remain fragile.
Bold, imaginative and evidence-driven commitment to equitable food systems is more critical now than ever before as climate change, conflict, and biodiversity loss place urgent pressure on our agrifood landscapes. The Alliance is working at the vanguard of this movement through its strong focus on gender, youth, and social inclusion.
The 2025 International Women’s Day theme “For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.” emphasizes the critical need to recognize and amplify the needs, priorities, strengths, and achievements of women of all ages, geographies, and backgrounds. Centering women and girls as protagonists in their own empowerment processes is an essential human right by its own merit, but is also critical to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. This imperative is also central to the work we do at the Alliance, as safeguarding and regenerating biodiversity depends on the knowledge and empowerment of diverse stakeholders.
This work requires a holistic and multi-pronged approach to embedding gender considerations at all levels and scales of agrifood systems, across the full length of agrifood value chains, and in diverse global geographies. The Alliance is contributing to this effort by developing tools, frameworks, and methodologies to increase women’s inclusion and agency in agrifood value chains and landscapes through a wide variety of entry points.
From how we work, to what we do
This starts with how we approach our own research. Adopting a gender-transformative lens on our work makes our research processes part of tackling the norms and institutions that reproduce inequality between different marginalized groups. Alliance researchers have developed a new manual that helps gender researchers who want to make the processes of their research more reflexive, critical and gender transformative.
The Alliance also provides empirically-driven guidance and recommendations to the highest levels of agrifood systems including policy-makers, investors, and funders. A new guide on gender lens investing walks investors through how to achieve both financial returns and positive social outcomes. At the policy level, we recently introduced a standard for gender responsive and inclusive landscape restoration based on experiences from eight countries in central America and the Caribbean to formulate and assess restoration efforts that contribute to human wellbeing and women’s empowerment.
New work aimed at leveraging voluntary sustainability systems for greater gender equality and women’s empowerment in value chains has yielded a toolkit for practical application of these concepts, a methodology to target private sector investments in gender equality and social inclusion in agrifood supply chains, and a reflective tool for practitioners. Critically, these are all based on strong empirical foundations.
At the ground level of agrifood systems, a new toolkit for extension agents and providers of technical assistance gives guidance on how to apply a gender-responsive and intersectional approach to their work and interactions with communities, based on the experiences and challenges of teams in Latin America.
These outputs are just the latest publications under what continues to be a strong and future-leaning gender and social inclusion focus. Through these approaches and continued partnerships with organizations championing women and girls around the world, we are committed to moving the needle toward gender equality within and beyond agrifood systems for this and future generations.
Explore more about our gender research
