ABSTRACT
Despite decades of agricultural research and development efforts, the challenges of poverty and gender disparities in access to resources, markets and technologies, are still persisting. ‘This persistence highlights that existing approaches to integrating gender into agricultural research don’t go far enough. Many approaches aim to close gender gaps without understanding or addressing their causes’, Kantor (cited in Holmes 2012) explains. The persistence of poverty, hunger and gender inequality calls for a change in the way we integrate gender in agricultural research and development. This is because conventional efforts that fill gender gaps, but do not address the underlying causes of existing inequalities, are not sufficient. Accordingly, there is a call for transformative interventions that address the social norms and power relations causing disparities in access to resources. This is along with markets and technologies, innovative organizational processes and activities that ensure gender research as standard practice in agricultural research and development (WFC 2012).
