CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish - Gender strategy

Livestock and Fish Gender StrategyIncreased consumption of milk, meat, fish and eggs by the poor, and particularly by children, is a means of preventing under-nutrition and achieving nutritional security, with concomitant benefits to consumers’ health and productivity. Increased smallholder production of fish and livestock products to fulfill increasing demand is a means through which to improve the income and livelihood security of smallholder producers and other actors along the value chain. To increase production, the productivity, equity and inclusiveness of livestock and aquaculture value chains need to improve, informed by careful analysis of bottlenecks at micro, meso and macro levels and research and action to address these constraints. Given both women’s existing levels of participation in these chains and the constraints under which they participate, understanding and responding appropriately to the social and economic contexts within which women engage in livestock and aquaculture production, processing and/or sales are central to achieving the CRP’s goals of poverty reduction and food and nutrition security. As such, CRP 3.7’s gender strategy includes approaches that start from a careful understanding of these contexts, and either 1) work within these contexts to improve how women are included, or 2) seek to improve the equity of the social and institutional environments in which value chains function to enhance the range and quality of choices and outcomes poor women and men have within them. As such the strategy operates along a continuum of gender integration approaches, from the accommodating to the transformative, and will contribute to understanding under what conditions each approach has the potential to advance chain performance and the outcomes of poor women and other marginalized groups