Several governmental and non-governmental organizations, UN agencies, international organizations, civil society and research organizations are currently engaged in addressing gender and social inclusion issues in Ethiopia’s agriculture sector. However, there is still
limited coordination and collaboration between these stakeholders, which results in duplication of effort, fragmentation of resources, and the use of various approaches and methodologies. In the light of this, RAISE-FS conducted a scoping study to map good practices, platforms and approaches that can be applied to the agricultural sector.
Gender
The study found a number of innovative practices, approaches, tools and platforms that the
different organizations have put in place to ensure gender-responsive interventions in the agriculture sector. Some of the gender and social inclusion mainstreaming tools include
gender and social inclusion policy, gender mainstreaming strategy, gender equality framework and gender analysis. These gender and social inclusion (GESI) tools provide guidance on how to adequately mainstream gender and social inclusion at the design,
implementation, monitoring and evaluation stages of programming. On the other hand,
several organizations make use of different participatory household methodologies that
focus on transforming gender relations. Some of these methodologies include the rapid
care analysis, social analysis and action tool, asset-based community development tool and transformative household methodology. The organizations reiterated that the approaches have brought inspiring changes in gender mainstreaming as well as transforming gender
relations. However, there is inadequate evidence base that demonstrates the effectiveness,
scalability and impact of these tools.
Youth
The Ethiopian government is encouraging youth-focused programming in order to reduce the youth unemployment. Due to this, the issues of youth empowerment have gained
increasing attention. The study identified a range of initiatives focusing on the social and economic empowerment of youth. Some of these include, enterprise development and credit
provision, skill building, ensuring youth participation and representation. The study also found that most of the youth focused interventions failed to be context-fit and demand
driven, and did not address the root causes for the problem of youth unemployment.
In summary, the lessons that were distilled from the past activities of other stakeholders
to inform future actions and interventions include:
- Addressing the issues of women and youth requires coherence of intervention at many levels and across many sectors
- Sociocultural constraints on women and youth are strong and thus it is necessary to work on shifting gender-based power relations to meet required goals.
- A demand-led approach is essential to enhance ownership by responding to the real needs of women and youth.
- Institutionalization of gender and social inclusion is am mainstay for organizational
Lessons drawn from this study provide insights in identifying potential entry points further highlighting RAISE-FS commitment to ensuring the inclusion of women, youth and other marginalized social groups in working across sectors to
enhance all outcomes of food systems.
Going forward, lessons drawn from this study provide insights in identifying potential
entry points further highlighting SWR-Ethiopia’s commitment to ensure the inclusion of women, youth and other marginalized social groups in working across sectors to enhance all outcomes of food systems.
RAISE-FS 