Rural Women's Economic Empowerment

Welcome to the Rural Women's Economic Empowerment page! 

One of the major highlights of this space will be the sharing of experiences by practitioners working on the Joint Programme on “Accelerating Progress towards the Economic Empowerment of Rural Women,” a pilot programme jointly implemented by UN-Women, WFP, IFAD and FAO. Furthermore, we collaborate with many partners to explore the universe of rural women all over the world and create an engendered rural development agenda, with a dedicated look at creating gender-responsive policies for developing countries. The discourse and resources generated on this forum will help to add rigor to policy-making and advocacy processes in diverse contexts.

The partnership between UN Women, FAO, IFAD and WFP is expected to generate synergies that capitalize on each agency’s mandate, comparative advantage and institutional strength to generate more lasting and wider scale results. The Joint Programme RWEE aims to promote rural women’s economic empowerment in the seven participating countries through securing rural women’s livelihoods and rights in the context of sustainable development and the post-MDGs agenda.

The programme is designed around the following four outcome areas:

Outcome 1: Improved food and nutrition security, deals with increasing the productive potential of women smallholder farmers.

Outcome 2: Rural women’s increased income to secure their livelihoods focuses on supporting rural women’s livelihood strategies, enhancing their income opportunities along the food value chain, supporting women-led entrepreneurship and promoting their linkages to high value markets. 

Outcome 3: Rural women’s enhanced leadership and participation in their communities and in rural institutions, and in shaping laws, policies and programmes promotes their agency in producer organizations and local governance.

Outcome 4: Gender responsive policy environments for the economic empowerment of rural women catalyzes legislative and policy reforms for the effective enforcement of rural women’s land rights and their access to decent wage employment and social protection, and infrastructure.