Gender Equality Mainstreaming Digest – July 2020 Issue
Here are the highlights of this month’s Gender Equality Mainstreaming Digest! Click HERE for the full version.
Rudbeckia. Photo courtesy of D. Ceplis.
Highlights:
Opportunities and Upcoming Events:
Many events are being cancelled or re-scheduled at the last minute due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Please check each organization’s website or its social media site for up to date information.
The 2020 Influential Women in Canadian Agriculture will be sharing their stories on a podcast series:
- Peggy Brekveld, dairy farmer and agvocate, Ontario
- Barbara Cade-Menun, research scientist, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Saskatchewan
- Kristen Phillips, owner-operator of WP Acres Ltd. and general manager of Manitoba Ag Days, Manitoba
- Karen Schuett, CEO and co-founder of Livestock Water Recycling, Alberta
- Karen Schwean-Lardner, associate professor, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan
- Laura Van Eerd, professor, University of Guelph Ridgetown Campus, Ontario
Each woman will share her story and passion on the AgAnnex Talks podcast series. The first episode will be available on June 15, 2020.
This Month’s News:
2020 Influential Women in Canadian Agriculture
This spring, the agricultural magazines at Annex Business Media launched Influential Women in Canadian Agriculture (IWCA), a recognition program designed to honor, highlight and celebrate the work women are doing across Canada’s agriculture industry. FarmFemmes was pleased to nominate Kristen Phillips and could not be happier that she was selected as one of the inaugural six women chosen as Influential Women in Canadian Agriculture.
The 2020 Influential Women in Canadian Agriculture are:
- Peggy Brekveld, dairy farmer and agvocate, Ontario
- Barbara Cade-Menun, research scientist, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Saskatchewan
- Kristen Phillips, owner-operator of WP Acres Ltd. and general manager of Manitoba Ag Days, Manitoba
- Karen Schuett, CEO and co-founder of Livestock Water Recycling, Alberta
- Karen Schwean-Lardner, associate professor, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan
- Laura Van Eerd, professor, University of Guelph Ridgetown Campus, Ontario
Each woman will share her story and passion on the AgAnnex Talks podcast series. The first episode will be available on June 15th and Kristen’s episode will be available on August 24th at https://agannex-talks.captivate.fm/.
2020 Honorary Patron Award by Dietitians of Canada
Ellen Pruden, Director of Canola Eat Well has dedicated the last twenty years of her career to nurture and grow not only her bustling family, but also craft and create a playbook of agricultural engagement by way of Canola Eat Well and its extended food family. Ellen has just been announced as the recipient for the distinguished 2020 Honorary Patron Award by Dietitians of Canada in recognition of her contributions to the Canadian food community. Nominated by Registered Dietitians, the award is in gratitude for her devotion to helping engage all Canadians to get to know Canadian agriculture and ultimately, eat well.
Leading researchers across health, nutrition and agriculture have launched a new COVID-19 hub to consolidate existing scientific evidence and support response, recovery and resilience measures in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The CGIAR COVID-19 Hub, coordinated by CGIAR, the world’s largest publicly funded agricultural research network, in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), will bring together the latest science on agriculture and health to inform a research-based response to the pandemic.
The Hub will compile relevant work from across the CGIAR system and partners around the world as well as share future breakthroughs and identify opportunities for new research.
Around two-thirds of CGIAR’s existing research portfolio is already directly relevant to tackling the coronavirus outbreak. The work of most immediate relevance encompasses four research pillars: (1) food systems, (2) One Health (the human-animal-environment health interface), (3) inclusive public programs for food security and nutrition and (4) policies and investments for crisis response, economic recovery and improved future resilience.
How Female Farmers Are Changing the Field
Women have been contributing to American agriculture (often invisibly) for centuries. Now, they are stepping into the profession’s spotlight in a new way. When the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC) surveyed more than 3,500 farmers under 40 in 2017, 60 percent of the farmer respondents were women.
Audra Mulkern started the Female Farmer Project to call attention to how women were missing from agricultural narratives. “What have we missed because we haven’t heard women’s voices? What lessons did we not learn? What knowledge is missing?” Mulkern is working on a documentary, Women’s Work, that she says will write women back into agriculture history—from Native American women cultivating crops to African women brought to the US as slaves hiding seeds in their hair to modern women planting and harvesting.
Katelyn Massy created the online community Women Who Farm to connect women in agriculture and provide educational resources. “It’s so necessary that we celebrate women in agriculture so that other women believe that it’s possible for them to even get into it,” she says.
Reports Publications and Resources:
Report to Parliament on the Government of Canada’s International Assistance 2018-2019
See key sections of the report including:
Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy
One of the Policy’s key commitments was to allocate, by 2021-2022, no less than 95% of Canada’s bilateral international development assistance investments toward initiatives that either target or integrate gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls; of which 15% specifically target these goals.
Canada is already making important progress toward these commitments. In 2018-2019, over 99.9% of Global Affairs Canada’s newly approved bilateral international development assistance either targeted or integrated gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, with 22.2% specifically targeting these goals. These new investments raised Canada’s overall percentage of gender equality targeted or integrated bilateral international development assistance disbursements to 94.9% in 2018-2019, of which 6.2% specifically targeted gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.
Action area: Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls
Within this specific action area, Canada advances gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls across three pathways:
- addressing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), including child, early and forced marriages, and female genital mutilation/cutting.
- supporting and strengthening women’s organizations and movements that advance women’s rights, gender equality, and the empowerment of women and girls; and
- supporting evidence-based policymaking and program delivery for gender equality.
Through a survey of 45 Canadian civil society organizations (CSOs) and key informant interviews, this study examined how CSOs are addressing gender inequality and more specifically, the progress CSOs have made as a result of the development and launch of the FIAP in 2017.
The study showed that overall, Canadian CSOs claim to have made significant progress towards meeting gender equality objectives in certain areas such as policy development, monitoring and evaluation and program development. At the same time, the study revealed the need for further investments to align with the goals of the FIAP such as specific skills development required by staff to design, implement and evaluate projects, secure financial and social resources that contribute to both organizational and programmatic mechanisms in support of feminist development, and ongoing knowledge sharing across CSO networks in order to collectively strengthen overall sectoral responses to gender inequality under the direction of the FIAP.
This research report from International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) explores different organisational structures and social and cultural services from a gender-equality and women’s empowerment perspective. More specifically, it examines how access to social and cultural services can facilitate women’s participation in economic and political life. The producer organisation business model provides advantages in creating job opportunities and access to markets for women, positive spill-over effects in both household and group businesses, and access to social services such as vocational trainings, childcare and maternity leave – all of which support women to participate in the labour market on a more equal footing with men.
Key recommendations
The findings in this research report provide examples of how frameworks and actions can explicitly support women’s entrepreneurship. It shows the many benefits of women’s peer-to-peer learning – facilitating partnerships with other women’s organisations and entrepreneurs that provide business coaching and mentorship support. Such peer-to-peer interactions help raise awareness of the contributions these businesses make in terms of tax revenue, social stability and even peace building.
All case studies provide examples of FFPO social and cultural services such as village savings schemes, investments in utilities, and daycare centres and culturally appropriate homecare and childcare to support families to cater for the needs of their children and elderly. They illustrate the need to:
- Design research to understand factors that influence trade-offs in gender roles: understanding how underpinning structures of power influence women’s and men’s opportunities and capabilities differently is crucial. The focus should be on identifying conditions and services that can lead to mutually reinforcing empowerment for both women and men.
- Design FFPO business incubation that gives adequate attention to social and cultural service needs: it is important to build awareness of how accommodating non-market-oriented livelihood activities provide crucial economic support to households. These activities should be key to an overall approach for strengthening gender-equitable livelihoods.
- Invest in FFPO financial-management processes for raising capital and allocating resources: the ability that FFPOs have to mobilise collective financial resources, if well managed, can lead to affordable FFPO provision of social and cultural services. These will improve welfare and motivate entrepreneurship for both men and women.
- Work in collaboration with women’s networks and organisations: peer-to-peer women’s networks and organisations have an in-depth understanding of gender related issues and can help challenge structural gender inequalities that exist at the level of the family, the business and the nation state.