Correcting the gender gap in agrifood systems would dramatically reduce the worldwide hunger rate, raise the incomes of hundreds of millions of people and add $1 trillion to global gross domestic product, offering one of the most effective pathways towards the common objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Some 75 percent of agricultural and rural development policy documents from 68 developing countries recognize women's roles and challenges, indicating awareness of the issue. Yet only 19 percent of these have actual policy goals related to gender, underscoring the need for more focus and commitment.

With the aim of promoting greater alignment of policy and outcomes on gender, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has launched Commit to Grow Equality (CGE), a mechanism to accelerate gender equality and women's empowerment in agrifood systems through financing, investments and partnerships by enabling a diverse range of actors to report against a strategic set of commitments.

"We have the evidence to show us how to overcome gender gaps – evidence that calls upon all of us to act, collectively and urgently," FAO Director-General QU Dongyu said at "Commit to Grow Equality: Invest in the Future of Women and Girls", a high-level action event pitching CGE during the UN General Assembly.

"Closing these gaps and empowering women and girls in agrifood systems would greatly improve economic growth, food security, access to healthy diets and resilience for women, their households and their communities, particularly in rural areas," he said.

High-level speakers at the CGE event included ministers from Ireland, Norway and Türkiye among others, some of whom announced new resource commitments to the initiative. Others included representatives from Brazil, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Zambia and other Members, as well as major UN agencies, multilateral institutions, non-governmental organizations and the private sector.

The CGE initiative, formally begun earlier this year, has attracted partners across sectors and could benefit up to 54 million women worldwide, more than one of every 10 women working in agrifood systems. To support this, an estimated $1 billion of investments will initially be aligned to CGE.

How it works

Central to the Commit to Grow Equality initiative is a Commitments Matrix, which enables stakeholders to consider and articulate the concrete commitments that can be brought to make a tangible difference in the lives of women and girls.

One of the overarching objectives is to increase the number and value of projects that are gender transformative from the design through implementation stages. Others include increasing linkages and synergies between financial commitments being made on climate change, resilience and other areas, and bolstering and expanding partnerships between the array of actors pursuing policies and investments to promote gender equality and women's empowerment in agrifood systems.

For donors and project sponsors as well as for Members, businesses, producer organizations and local authorities, the matrix puts particular emphasis on efforts to close the gender wage and productivity gaps, as well as ways to increase data, research and evidence.

Exemplary objectives include increasing commitments to direct procurement from women entrepreneurs, increasing gender parity in corporate leadership positions, provision of training for upskilling of women working in agrifood supply chains, policies and programmes to increase access to child care, credit and technology, and intensified efforts to collect sex and age-disaggregated data for farm plot sizes, ownership, revenues and the like.

How FAO is showing commitment

Director-General Qu , highlighted three high-salience and specific objectives FAO will pursue in the coming years.

First, FAO commits to track gender-transformative actions in all of its projects and assure they feature in 10 percent of them by 2030. Gender-transformative approaches show promise in changing discriminatory social norms, are cost-effective and have high returns, improving food security, nutrition and livelihood outcomes for women, households and communities.

Second, FAO commits to promoting the dissemination and uptake in 10 countries by 2026 of the Committee on World Food Security's Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women's and Girls' Empowerment, a critical tool for improving policy frameworks.

Third, FAO is committed to launching a gender domain in its statistical database, FAOSTAT, by 2026, which will make it possible for the public to access all available data on key dimensions of gender equality such as women's work, training  and asset ownership in agrifood systems as well as data on women's food security and nutrition. Such data, and easy open access to it, will generate greater visibility of the important gaps that remain in measuring and achieving progress on gender equality in the sector.

An indication of the road ahead was offered by FAO's 2023 report on The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems, which offers a series of findings such as a 24 percent productivity gap between female- and male-managed farms of the same size, that women in wage employment in agriculture earn on average 82 cents for every dollar that men earn, and that women on average work an extra hour a day to cope with climate change.

The Director-General also noted that the UN has announced that 2026 will be the International Year of the Woman Farmer and FAO looks forward to coordinating with partners to implementing related activities.