Earlier this month, the Global Center for Gender Equality (GCfGE) joined over 80 global leaders in agriculture, gender, and development at the Agricultural Development Women’s Empowerment Convening, hosted by the Gates Foundation in London. The event brought together partners advancing gender equality across food systems, offering a timely moment to reflect on progress, share insights, and strategize on how to sustain and scale impact.

The convening came at a critical time. As aid budgets tighten and political will fluctuates, many gender equality programs face reduced funding or de-prioritization. These shifts threaten to erode decades of investment—just as evidence grows that gender equality is not only essential to democratic values and human rights, but also a key driver of economic growth, food security and climate resilience.

GCfGE was proud to contribute to these important conversations. Executive Director, Abigail Donner, spoke on the Weaving Change: Celebrating Partner Journeys plenary, sharing lessons from our work embedding gender into systems, strategies, and institutional performance. Senior Research Advisor, Dr. Elizabeth Katz, moderated the session Holistic Approaches to Empowerment, convening cross-sector experts to explore how gender-transformative agricultural efforts intersect with challenges in education, nutrition and financial inclusion.

What’s Next: Three Takeaways from the Convening

1. Institutionalizing gender is essential for sustainability

A recurring theme across the convening was the fragility of gender equity efforts when they depend solely on individual champions. When gender work is siloed, it’s often the first to be cut when budgets and resources shrink. True institutionalization requires formal systems: integration into KPIs, performance management, leadership incentives, and cross-team accountability.

Abigail Donner emphasized that a powerful lever for institutionalizing gender equality is making it a management priority by embedding gender KPIs into organizational performance systems. She highlighted the importance of funding cross-functional teams for implementation and aligning leadership incentives with gender equity outcomes to turn values into measurable results. Panelists underscored the need to shift the mindsets of those in power and that gender equity must be woven into policies, budgets, and management priorities, not left to isolated roles or gender champions.

Participants highlighted the importance of tracking how women’s economic empowerment funding is allocated, ensuring it aligns with strategic priorities rather than symbolic commitments. Organizations like the CGIAR Gender Impact Platform and African Women in Agricultural Research and Development shared how they’ve embedded gender across their operations, from setting performance metrics to redesigning training programs and engaging senior leadership. These efforts illustrate what it takes to move beyond individual empowerment to sustained, systems-level change.

At GCfGE, we help organizations institutionalize gender through concrete, scalable strategies. Our Public Leadership for Gender Equality (PL4GE) program is equipping senior public leaders in Ethiopia and South Africa to recognize how power and systems perpetuate inequality, and to lead change from within.

2. People-centered interventions drive deeper impact

Gender inequality in agriculture is shaped not only by access to land or tools, but by entrenched social norms across education, nutrition, finance, and other sectors. This was the focus of Holistic Approaches to Empowerment: Learning from Adjacent Sectors, the session moderated by GCfGE’s Dr. Elizabeth Katz. With over two decades of experience in gender and intrahousehold economics, Katz led a conversation with experts in nutrition, financial inclusion, and education to explore what happens when development efforts begin with the whole person, not just a product or service.

Speakers highlighted how effective interventions begin with people’s lived realities, not just with a product or service.

In Côte d’Ivoire, the Wi-Agri platform combines digital tools with tailored community training to help women cashew farmers overcome social and financial barriers.
In Nepal, cash transfers paired with women’s groups increased pregnant women’s share of nutrient-rich foods by shifting household decision-making power, particularly in contexts where mothers-in-law control food allocation.
In Nigeria, programs supported by the Malala Fund focus on keeping girls in school during critical secondary years, when dropout rates spike due to child marriage, cost, or pregnancy.

A recurring insight was the transformative potential of investing in young women. Young women are an expanding share of wage-based agribusiness workers across Africa and Asia (FAO, 2023), yet face high mobility restrictions, care burdens, sexual harassment, and restrictive gender norms (Phelps, 2024). When supported, they drive intergenerational improvements in nutrition, education, agricultural productivity and community leadership.

At GCfGE, we help our partners design and implement solutions that begin with people’s realities and work at the intersection of technology, behavior and social structures. For agriculture, this includes embedding gender strategies into product innovation pipelines, extension services and social behavior change efforts. As emphasized in Katz’s recent publication on gender integration in genetically modified crop development, inclusive innovation requires deliberate action – from early-stage research to launch and beyond (Katz, 2024). Whether through digital platforms or nutrition programs, we work to ensure agricultural innovations are designed to be technically sound, socially responsive and equitably scaled.

3. The business case is strong, but we need better tools to communicate and design for it

Across sessions, participants emphasized that closing gender gaps is not only the right thing to do, but it’s also beneficial for agribusiness and national economies. Closing gender gaps in agrifood systems could raise global GDP by nearly $1 trillion and reduce food insecurity for 45 million people. In low- and middle-income countries, closing entrepreneurship gaps could unlock $5–6 trillion in economic gains, with women-led firms generating significantly more jobs for women than men-led firms.

To scale inclusive business models, gender experts must sharpen how we communicate value and align design with the goals of investors, governments, and businesses. That means linking gender inclusion to core outcomes like productivity, sales and resilience; modeling returns (e.g., women’s earnings, GDP impact); and understanding the priorities of market actors.

Various panels discussed investments that demonstrated how inclusive business models can advance women’s economic empowerment across agricultural value chains. These models often combine access to finance, technical assistance, and market linkages with efforts to shift social norms and improve gender dynamics at the household and community levels.

Successful approaches have included co-designing services with private sector actors to better meet women’s needs, piloting innovative delivery models such as contract farming or fee-based services, and strengthening women’s capacity through training and peer support. Community structures, such as savings groups, farmer field schools, and dialogue forums, have played a crucial role in supporting women’s agency and shifting perceptions around income control and entrepreneurship.

At GCfGE, we help our partners develop inclusive business models that expand women’s access to agricultural services and value chains – from irrigation and digital finance to extension and AI-driven advisory. We focus on understanding what drives private sector action, identifying entry points for scale and co-creating solutions that deliver value for both companies and women clients.

GCfGE: Meeting the Moment

In a time of shrinking aid, donors, governments, and agribusinesses face tough choices. The Agricultural Development Women’s Empowerment Convening reaffirmed that gender equality is not just a moral imperative but a strategic necessity. It demands institutional commitment, people-centered approaches and stronger tools to demonstrate impact and value.

To make this case and deliver on its promise, we must:

Institutionalizing gender, through KPIs, leadership incentives, etc., is essential for sustainability.
Interventions must start with people, not just products, and reflect the social norms, needs, and realities that shape the experiences of women and men.
The business case for inclusion is strong, but we must communicate the value more effectively and design solutions that align with the goals of governments and the private sector.

At GCfGE, we are committed to helping our partners meet this moment. We bring deep technical expertise, practical tools, and an evidence-driven approach to move from commitment to implementation, ensuring that gender equality remains central to resilient, inclusive development.

To explore partnership or support, contact info@gcfge.org.

References

FAO. 2023. The status of women in agrifood systems. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/cc5343en

Katz, E. (2024). Gender integration of agricultural innovation: implications for the genetically modified crop product development pipeline. GM Crops & Food, 15(1), 400-410.

Phelps, S. (2024). Gender Equality and Youth Inclusion in Agriculture: findings from CABI gender research. CABI. https://www.cabi.org/wp-content/uploads/CABI-Gender-Analysis-findings-2024-July.pdf

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