Reorienting the private sector to enable climate-smart agricultural solutions to address gender inequalities

This project takes a private-sector-led approach to addressing the dual challenge of making food security climate-smart and mainstreaming gender considerations while transitioning to a low-carbon economy at scale. It considers how to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on gender inequalities in four East African countries, namely Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda, which continue to struggle with recurrent droughts, floods, and erratic rain patterns that impact crop production and lead to food insecurity. The project will focus on women-led private sector enterprises that focus on the link between agriculture/food systems and climate change. It will identify sectors which have large participation from women as customers, beneficiaries, or value-chain partners and support interventions that ease access to farm inputs and credit for women, mainstream women across key roles in farm employment, and simplify access to markets. The lessons from this project will be used to provide evidence about which set of private-sector interventions matter in which contexts and how effective they are, thus informing policymakers and other stakeholders as to which interventions should be taken to scale.