Global Good Practices of Rural Advisory Services: Gender and Nutrition in EAS at the 6th GFRAS Annual Meeting in Kyrgyzstan, September 14-18, 2015.
In many countries women and men are extensively involved in agriculture, whether they are smallholder crop, fruit, or livestock producers or wage or family laborers. Responsibilities include growing and processing (canning and drying) food products and distributing or marketing food products in their communities. When women as opposed to men take on these roles, who also largely responsible for family nutrition and childcare, this calls for uniquely focused extension services.
Many rural advisory services (RAS) and extension agents are asked to integrate gender and nutrition aspects into their work, but have little experience or knowledge of how to do this. The three separate activities offered by INGENAES during the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services’ (GFRAS) annual international meeting in Issyk Kul, Kyrgyzstan, provided extension and RAS professionals with practical tools and approaches to understand women and men’s unique roles and needs and to design agricultural programs that are gender-responsive and nutrition sensitive. The GFRAS (which is a global network for RAS fora) event was attended by over 150 agricultural extension and rural advisory services practitioners from all around the world.
Nargiza Ludgate from the University of Florida facilitated the first workshop on September 14th, “Integrating Gender and Nutrition into Rural Advisory Services – Learning from Good Practices”. Participants focused on examining the role RAS plays in improving rural livelihoods and the nutritional well-being of rural households through effective gender-responsive and nutrition-sensitive agricultural production programs. The workshop participants represented academia, research, government, donor agencies, and extension and RAS field practitioners from around the world.
Andrea Bohn from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (INGENAES Associate Director) facilitated the second and third workshops on September 15th and 18th on how to integrate gender within RAS and the role of extension in improving nutritional outcomes. “Challenges and Ways Forward in Integrating Gender into RAS Practice” involved a compelling discussion around gender, with participants sharing personal experiences of how they integrated these concerns into their programs and discussed challenges and ways forward to more effectively continue and expand these practices.
Finally, the third workshop, “How to Harness the Power of Extension to Improve Household and Community Nutrition Outcomes” involved stimulating dialogue on the role of agricultural extension service providers in relation to nutrition messaging, education, and advisory services. Participants provided multiple examples of nutrition messaging built into agricultural extension services programs, such as identifying entry points to instigate behavioral changes to improve nutritional habits. They also discussed negative consequences or impediments to effective nutrition messaging, such as the need for nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs to be ‘context aware’ and demand-driven.
INGENAES and GFRAS will co-host next year’s Global Symposium in Cameroon.
