ROME, Italy, 11 October 2012 – A new collaboration between UN Women and the Rome-based UN agencies focuses on pooling best practices to accelerate women's economic empowerment. As the co-lead agency for Ethiopia, IFAD will be sharing and expanding some of its most successful approaches and innovations to help women gain more equal standing at home and in the community.
Economic empowerment for women means three things: more money, more status and more decision-making power. With up to 45 per cent of the poorest women in developing countries exercising no control over their income, economic empowerment is a crucial first step towards greater equality.
A new joint initiative for women's empowerment brings together the expertise and innovations of UN Women and the three Rome-based UN agencies: the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
The joint programme, entitled ‘Accelerating Progress toward the Economic Empowerment of Rural Women', will be implemented in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Nepal, Niger and Rwanda.
As the co-lead agency for Ethiopia, IFAD will oversee collaboration between the four agencies in-country, working in partnership with the government. The activities in Ethiopia will be in line with the special focus of Ethiopia's Growth and Transformation Plan (2010-2015) on promoting greater gender empowerment and equity, as well as the current joint initiative under the United Nations Development Assistance Framework with the government.
"With this partnership we are bringing together the strengths and experience of each agency so that we can generate faster, broader and more durable changes for rural women and their families," says Clare Bishop-Sambrook, IFAD Senior Technical Adviser on Gender.
"Our focus is particularly on improving women's access to resources, their status and rights both in the home and in the community, and promoting their leadership roles. We'll be collaborating through knowledge exchange, advocacy, policy dialogue and joint practical initiatives on the ground."
Complementing each other's work
IFAD has been working in Ethiopia since 1980. The country has the largest IFAD loan and grant portfolio in the East and Southern Africa region at US$387.9 million. IFAD-funded projects directly benefit more than 10 million households throughout the country, with activities that range from raising productivity for smallholder farmers and pastoral communities, to small-scale irrigation development, natural resource management and improving the access of poor rural people to financial services. The newly launched joint programme presents an opportunity to develop synergies through ongoing initiatives with the other Rome-based agencies, UN Women and the government.
There are many areas of complementarity between the four agencies in Ethiopia where gender is concerned.
The IFAD-funded Rural Financial Intermediation Programme introduced rural savings and credit cooperatives (RUSACCOs), a key source of finance for poor smallholder farmers, with a high success rate among rural women and their enterprises. Through its food security and nutrition programme, FAO also establishes RUSACCOs, with a particular emphasis on targeting women, and has reached a participation rate of about 58 per cent in target areas. The programme promotes the production and marketing of fuel-saving stoves, as well as poultry and other small livestock.
WFP initiatives – the Purchase for Progress (P4P) and Purchase from Africans for Africa programme – are promoting food and nutrition security for women smallholder farmers and their families by helping them participate in agricultural markets, generate income, and improve skills, knowledge and access to credit. Collaboration through the joint programme will allow farmers participating in IFAD-supported programmes access to the same food markets set up by WFP. This will benefit two initiatives in particular: the new second phase of the Rural Financial Intermediation Programme and the ongoing Agricultural Marketing Improvement Programme. By the same token, P4P participants will have the opportunity to join the RUSACCOs set up by IFAD and FAO.
UN Women collaborates with FAO and WFP under the Household Asset Building Programme to provide support for women. It works with other UN and international organizations in Ethiopia, creating new opportunities to support gender equality, strengthen women's voices, participation and leadership, and end violence against women and girls.
Through the joint programme, the four agencies will work with the same target group of rural women and men in selected areas. The participants will gain new skills to boost their incomes, and benefit from access to markets, inputs and credit through the rural credit and savings system.
"There will be challenges to face in working together," says Bishop-Sambrook. "But the great advantage we have in Ethiopia is that we have already spontaneously begun to collaborate and share best practices between agencies."
The joint programme kicks off with a series of planning workshops in each of the seven countries participating in the programme, to be held between October and December. These meetings will bring together key stakeholders, including rural women and men, farmers' organizations, government officials and implementing partners. Each agency will offer its innovations and areas of complementarity, and workshop participants will decide on the final choice of activities to be included in the joint initiative.
Securing land rights for women
One innovation that IFAD has introduced recently in Ethiopia is helping to create greater equality for women and reduce their vulnerability.
A community-based natural resource management project has introduced land certificates as a way of securing equal rights to land for all. The project, implemented within the Lake Tana watershed in central Ethiopia, introduces sustainable community-owned resource management – especially soil and water conservation – as well as new skills for diversified livelihood options. The land certificates have been introduced as part of the project's goal to include disadvantaged groups such as women, landless and young people in the community discourse on resource management.
Traditionally in Ethiopia, ownership of land is granted only to men. This means that a married or divorced woman, a widow or single woman heading a household has no effective independent rights to land. Ethiopia's laws state otherwise, but traditional practices often prevail. Now land certification is changing that. Households run by women no longer run the risk of losing what is rightfully theirs to the claims of male tenants or relatives. Women heading households can now fully assert their right to use and transfer a landholding through heredity, donation or rent.
Yekoye Asfaw, married with two children, is one of the women in the Amhara region who has benefited from the land registration and certification procedure. She and her husband now have a booklet declaring joint ownership of their land. Over 50 per cent of women heading households in the target area have received land certificates.
Like other women who have received documentation asserting their rights as landholders, she feels secure and confident in the knowledge that the land also belongs to her.
"Since we received the land certification, we have had no land-related disputes," she says. "With my name next to my husband's and our photographs, plus the names of our neighbours, I have confidence that my husband and I are rightful landowners. I can now make decisions equally with my husband on issues to do with our land and other home matters."
Rural communities, and women in particular, are benefiting from secure land tenure. When women and men know that they are not going to lose their land, they are more likely to manage it sustainably and apply costly or labour-intensive techniques to improve its productivity. Land certification has undoubtedly created a more favourable environment for these long-term investments. And the investments are paying back through income improvements and more resilient livelihoods.
With her newly affirmed sense of ownership, Asfaw has constructed small earth embankments or bunds that will help protect her land from soil erosion.
Contributing to community issues
In Ethiopia, women are still under-represented when it comes to making decisions about the management of resources – water and land – that are essential to livelihoods. Reaching women and mobilizing them to participate in development initiatives is always a challenge. As a result of multiple cultural restrictions and also simple logistics, women are either not allowed or not available to participate in this kind of initiative, being otherwise engaged with their household and livelihood tasks. But with the project's help, their number is growing.
Asfaw has become a member of the land administration committee at the kebele or village level. She and two other women committee members assist other women who are seeking justice over land disputes. There had been some concern that men would object to this move for greater equality, but this has not been Asfaw's experience.
"If anything, things are easier now between me and my husband," says Asfaw. "He feels positive about the joint titling of our land rights, and he believes that together we can strengthen our economic standing."
At present, at least three of the seven members of each land administration and watershed committee are women.
"We want to see more women participating in watershed committees and committees for land administration and use," says Robson Mutandi, IFAD Country Programme Director for Ethiopia. "And women themselves are expressing their desire to receive training and take on more roles in decision-making bodies at local level. It takes time to shift cultural norms that prevent women from taking on these roles, but we are working on opening this dialogue for women."