Washington, DC
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: It’s so wonderful to be here. I have had the chance to live and work at the Ronald Reagan Building for two years and I have never discovered this auditorium before. So – and I’m hooked, this is beautiful.
Beth [Bechdol], I just want to echo and underscore what you said about the increasingly strong partnership between USAID and FAO and I think it should only get stronger, only needs to get stronger. Thank you for your partnership and your incredibly important leadership at this time, of all times – when the world is facing such acute food security challenges.
I want to thank Jen Klein, my partner in combating all bad things in the world but empowering women – she’s a tremendous force, as all of you know, from the White House. Under Secretary Xochitl Torres Small for demonstrating the U.S. government’s commitment to supporting women in agriculture could not be, again, more thrilled with the partnership that USAID, everyday, with our colleague at USDA.
And Lauren [Phillips], that’s quite a formidable lay down – you’ve given us a large number of homework assignments, it seems. And I think, you know the foundation for this report is data – it’s facts, and that’s what I find so compelling about the approach that you all have taken and it allows us – this data – is, I think, is motivating. Many – you can see people here, including myself, just taking down notes. Some of the broad contours are familiar, if disappointing but I had not heard, for example, the heat stroke stat before – I’m going to be using that one. And somehow there’s a metaphor in that, as well. But it’s not just motivating because we see the distance that we have to still travel – but I think what is so important about the rigor you all have brought is the disaggregation of the problem into its component parts and that disaggregation and, again, that empirical foundation allows us, then, it will really inform our approach to the tool kit and our mobilization of other actors, we hope, in service of the objective you have drawn our attention to. So, thank you, I think on behalf of everyone here and on behalf of everyone out in the world who is grappling with food insecurity or seeking to address challenges related to female disempowerment, the rights of women and girls and the need, again, to expand agricultural productivity – the two go hand in hand.
In 2011, then-Director General Jacques Diouf launched the Food and Agriculture Organization’s previous report on women in agriculture – laying a foundation for the report we are discussing today. That report’s findings were very clear: closing the gender gap in agriculture was going to be key to ending global hunger.
At the time, the gender gap in crop yields between women and men was as high as 30 percent – which Diouf attributed to a lack of access to land, credit, seeds, and equipment. As he put it, “They use fewer inputs, so they produce less. It’s that simple.”
At USAID and beyond, we have worked hard to expand access to those inputs – to distribute new seeds, to share new technologies, and to bring financial services and mobile internet to women across Africa, Asia, and South America.
Together, there’s no question and I think you’ve just heard or gotten a taste of – we’ve made some progress. We narrowed the gender gap in access to mobile internet in low- and middle-income countries by 36 percent, and to bank accounts by a third.
But, needless to say, that progress hasn’t been enough. The gender gap in farm productivity in low- and middle-income countries remains 24 percent. Women’s access to irrigation, livestock and land ownership, and advisory and educational services has barely budged in the intervening years.
That plateau is due in part to immense global challenges that have dramatically changed women’s ability to pay for new seeds or technologies, or to work at all. Women disproportionately bear the brunt of climate and economic shocks, like the sixth straight season of drought in the Horn of Africa, or like spiking fertilizer prices exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. As global levels of conflict and instability rise, gender-based violence, child marriage, hunger, and poverty can prevent women from participating in, or benefiting from, agricultural and food sector work. As we have heard, women still largely lack the seeds, the technologies, and the financial resources they need.
These challenges require us to adjust our approach. And if we are to see real progress, we do have to double down on our efforts to address systemic barriers – the laws that prevent women from owning land or opening bank accounts, or the norms that dictate that it is women who must care for children and homes. It’s the most difficult element of our work – and at times the hardest to measure, the direct impact between some normative change or some legal change – but it is, arguably, the most essential and the most effective. As the report shows, if just half of small-scale farmers benefited from our most successful interventions that are focused on empowering women, 58 more million people would see their incomes grow – and an additional 235 million people would be more resilient to disaster. And we know that disaster is more likely to befall these communities more and more in the years ahead. So, the importance of interventions aimed at resilience can not be overstated.
Today, I’m pleased to launch a new USAID commitment, Generating Resilience and Opportunities for Women, Generating Resilience and Opportunities for women, guess the acronym – GROW. So, GROW. USAID, through this program GROW, is going to work with Congress to double our funding to women across agricultural and food systems to $335 million.
With this money, we are going to help women build resilience to economic shocks that may make seeds and fertilizer unaffordable – not just what has been experienced or is still being experienced but knowing that these kinds of shocks may be with us again and again in the years ahead – climate shocks that could destroy harvests and fields. Again, we see it happening now, we can expect it happening more and more in the future unless and until we can build, together, that resilience. We will support women to take on economic roles off the farm, like starting their own businesses selling seeds or selling produce. And we will work to direct resources to women in humanitarian crisis zones, whose needs are too often overlooked.
We will expand and scale existing efforts in each of these focus areas. In Nepal, we are installing and testing more than 1,600 sustainable irrigation systems, and training women on how best to use and maintain them. In Bangladesh, we are helping 4,500 local governments digitize applications for trade licenses, this eliminates the need for women to travel to register small businesses and lowers the barrier to entry. And just last year, we worked with the State Department to direct more funding to address gender-based violence earlier in our response to humanitarian crises – providing psychosocial support to survivors, and expanding protection services for all women.
GROW will also give us the resources to address the inequitable norms and laws that prevent women from fully participating in, or equally benefiting from, agricultural and food work. And it will build on long-standing work by Feed the Future, our whole-of government approach to fighting hunger, which was launched back in 2009.
In Tanzania, where national laws protect women’s land rights but local laws can be less clear, USAID worked with local leadership to clarify and document women’s land ownership, while also educating village leaders and residents about their land rights. Between 2015 and 2021, land ownership among women in these communities nearly doubled, and this approach has now served as a model for other organizations, like the Jane Goodall Institute.
GROW is going to help us expand and scale programs like these in other countries and communities. And we will do so not just through our own funding, but also through our partnerships with governments, critically; with the private sector; with research organizations – I’m so glad to see Cary Fowler here who has been such a champion of deepening our research foundation in so many of these domains, and with the women leaders who are calling for change in communities around the world.
Others, again, have to join us in addressing these systemic barriers. Partner governments will need, in fact, to revise laws that may prevent women from making decisions on farms and in communities. And this is where the partnership between the State Department and USAID is so critical because the diplomacy around those laws and those norms is every bit as important as the programmatic support that we provide to advocates, the technical assistance we provide to governments, and the programs themselves.
Humanitarian actors should direct more resources to women-led organizations who are working to protect women and girls from violence in crisis zones, and should expand access to food and agricultural assistance.
And other donors, notwithstanding we know the scarce resources right now and all the demand of those resources, this is a great investment – other donors should support women-led efforts to address cultural norms and traditions that keep them underpaid and out of decision-making roles in their communities.
There are hundreds of millions of women who are ready, willing, and able to help us end hunger – if only we dismantle the barriers standing in their way.
Thank you so much and thank you again for this great report. Thank you.