Gender transformative approaches (GTAs) employ context-specific strategies to change gender norms, facilitating women’s participation in value chains in Tanzania.
Gender norms restrict women’s participation in agrifood systems. CGIAR Initiative on Gender Equality (HER+) has co-designed a widely applicable, innovative guide to identify leverage points and levers to address these restrictive gender norms. This guide has been applied to cassava, poultry and fish value chains in Nigeria and Tanzania. With civil society organizations (CSOs), such as Shujaaz, HER+ has also developed an interactive, media-based approach to address these norms in Tanzania, with community dialogues, radio programmes and social media campaigns.
Addressing gender norms
Small-scale cassava, chicken, and fish value chain activities are crucial to the Tanzanian economy, providing livelihoods and ensuring food security. The impacts of climate variability on gender dynamics often marginalize women in these sectors, due to prevailing norms and power imbalances. These norms are a barrier to gender equality, women’s empowerment and more resilient agrifood systems. Identifying and addressing these restrictive norms is extremely complex and, until recently, no tools were available to support this process.
In cooperation with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), HER+ is identifying and addressing complex gendered social norms in agri-food systems by the co-design of a new, highly innovative Guide to developing quantitative tools for measuring gender norms in agrifood systemswith researchers, local communities, and national and international NGOs for contextual analysis and solutions. The guide was developed in an iterative process including extensive stakeholder consultation and testing. It provides quantitative approaches for measuring gender norms in agrifood systems, demonstrating how implementing and research partners can apply this approach to develop context specific indicators for measuring gender norms. It contains step-by-step guidelines and templates to aid users in participatory co-design, drawing on empirical examples from piloting of the guide at workshops in Nigeria and Tanzania with diverse stakeholders from cassava, fish, and chicken agrifood systems. This 5-step process includes stakeholder consultation, questionnaire adaptation, data collection and indicator development, and a stakeholder dissemination workshop. One aspect of the processes is identifying restrictive gender norms and leverage points and levers to bring about change. The tool is broadly applicable across different agrifood contexts to inform the design of gender transformative interventions. The guide supports stakeholders in identifying leverage points to sustainably reduce normative constraints that limit women’s (and men’s) capacities to build economic resilience to climate change challenges. When applied longitudinally, the guide can help users track progress on normative change towards greater social and gender equality.
In October-December 2024, HER+, together with the CGIAR Initiative on Sustainable Animal Productivity, has been working with two local civil society organizations in Tanzania to address gender restrictive norms, putting the guide into practice. In Kigoma Region, Nyakitonto Youth for Development Tanzania (NYDT) is co-designing interventions, such as community dialogues and training sessions, for the cassava value chain. These interventions seek to reduce gender norms which restrict women’s ability to lead agricultural groups, interact with male extension agents and attend extension training, and to make decisions about major expenditures.
In Muleba District of Kagera Region, Shujaaz Inc, a network of social enterprises, is organising community dialogues, local radio programmes, a social media campaign and story telling to increase awareness of the importance of women’s mobility, ownership of productive resources and engagement in commercial poultry businesses. Broadcast in Muleba District and beyond, radio programmes feature a panel of key stakeholders, such as successful women entrepreneurs in the poultry value chain, the government livestock extension officer, community elders as custodians of norms, male actors supportive of women’s engagement in poultry enterprises, and key local service providers. The social media campaign across platforms such as Facebook and Instagram aims to engage a broader audience in discussions around gender norms in agribusiness. The campaign has two main messages, namely that it is extremely desirable for women to get involved in agribusiness and that men who support this are figureheads. A wide range of participants are being used to disseminate these messages, including young women in agribusiness, supportive local influencers and community leaders.
[The campaign] proves to be effective in encouraging young women to make moves and be financially independent because of all the stories I saw.
Rosemary Mbeya, pharmacist and chicken farmer, Tanzania.