Innovations from the Field Gender mainstreaming from the ground up for the World Food Programme

Abstract

Food and nutrition security and gender equality are closely linked and mutually constitutive. The fact that women and girls are among the most undernourished in the world and are often hardest hit by food insecurity underlines this. Women’s productive labour and unpaid care work is central to the production preparation and provision of food. Yet their ability to feed themselves and their families is persistently undermined by institutionalised gender biases in access to resources markets social services and social protection as well as socio-cultural norms which prioritise the nutrition of men and boys and limit women’s decision-making power. Acknowledging the gendered foundations of food and nutrition security the World Food Programme (WFP) announced ‘Enhanced Commitments to Women’ and began mainstreaming gender throughout its operations in the late 1990s. Since that time it has successfully targeted the specific needs of women and girls and enhanced their participation in food security programming. However it has also recognised a need to go further to address the root causes of gender-based food insecurity across the different contexts in which it operates. As part of its efforts to do so WFP has entered into a learning partnership with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). The premise for the ‘Innovations from the Field’ programme is that WFP staff and partners at the country level are often adopting innovative practices which respond to and deal effectively with local gender realities and priorities but these are rarely shared. Taking a ‘bottom-up’ learning approach to gender mainstreaming will allow successful innovations to be captured shared and embedded across the organisation. In this first phase of the programme IDS has facilitated a process of ‘participatory action learning’ in five WFP Country Offices: Guatemala Kenya Lesotho Malawi and Senegal. This has enabled staff to reflect on explore document and share good practices for gender-sensitive food security programming. It has also allowed wider reflection on current barriers to effective gender mainstreaming in WFP and how they could be overcome. This report summarises the learning so far. (excerpt)