Patti Kristjanson, leader of the CGIAR Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security theme on Linking Knowledge with Action, presented CCAFS' Intermediate Development Outcome on gender at an International Fund for Agricultural Development East and Southern Africa regional Knowledge Management and Capacity Building Forum, 16-18 October 2013 in Nairobi, Kenya.

1. CCAFS: The gender outcome challenge
Patti Kristjanson
Linking Knowledge with Action Research Theme Leader
October, 2013

2. CCAFS’s Gender Outcome
CCAFS’s gender Intermediate
Development Outcome (IDO)
is based on diverse research
results showing that when
communities increase the
equity and participation of
groups vulnerable to
exclusion from the
development
process, particularly
women, overall food
security, poverty and health
improve

3. CCAFS Gender Theory of Change
Assumptions:
– Women as a group are vulnerable to climate change
– Women are powerful agents of change, and often
have unrealized solutions for adaptation and
mitigation
– Gender norms do change, and can change quickly; this
is key part of the ‘transformative change’ we support
– Targeting women and other vulnerable groups in
agricultural development increases the likelihood of
achieving not just our gender IDO, but the others also
– In fact, gender norms must be addressed in order to
achieve the outcomes CCAFS is seeking

4. CCAFS Big
Outcomes
Flagships (What?)
Climate-smart
practices
Climate info
services &
Climateinformed
safety nets
Low Emissions
Agricultural
Development
Policies and
Institutions for
resilient food
systems
Partnerships and strategies to achieve
outcomes (how & with whom?)
Inclusive local forward planning
(e.g. using climate analogues)
Action research with NGO’s taking
gender transformative actions
(e.g. CARE, PROLINNOVA)
Equitable partic. research with met
services and NARES
Co-strategy development with food
aid community (e.g. WFP)
Learning re: inst’s with local partners
(PES and LED strategies)
Strategic partnerships (e.g. FAO) &
comms efforts re: LED/mitigation by &
for women
Learning alliances/platforms
Agricultural business ‘hubs’
Policy champions & capacity in foresight
analyses
Strengthening reg/nat’l farmers orgs
voice in CCAFS policies
Outcome Pathway
(Overarching)
Gender dissag.
data &
analyses, gend
er-cc tools &
local partner
capacity
strengthening,
innovative
approaches participatory
video,
TV, Radio
Mobiles, integr
. tools, open
access K
sharing,
Foresight/scen
arios analyses
co-devel. with
PPP’s
Increased
access to and
control over
productive
assets, inputs
, information,
food and
markets;
strengthened
participation
in decisionmaking
processes
Gender
Outcome
(IDO)
Empowerment
of women and
marginalised
groups

5. Research implications
• Conducting research on whether
increased levels of access, control and
participation leads to improved climate
change adaptation and mitigation is
not the priority! We already know that
it does.
• We need hypothesis-driven research
focused on how best to increase the
equity and participation of vulnerable
groups in a changing climate so as to
achieve widespread smallholder
adaptation and mitigation that
positively influences overall food
security, poverty, health and natural
resources.

6. Our strategies are the key
Overall Strategy:
– In order to achieve the greatest impact, we need to
take what we’ve learned from documentation and
diagnostic research, and use it to formulate research
aimed at informing, catalyzing and targeting
adaptation and mitigation solutions to women and
other vulnerable groups
– When we identify and ‘co-create’ successful options
and climate change solutions together with partners
with a will and proven capacity for gender and social
differentiation, we will achieve scale

7. Changing the way we do business in
CCAFS
Traditional research question: How can we increase maize
production in drought prone areas?
– Outputs: Improved drought-tolerant maize variety(ies), best
management practices, training, technology transfer,
distribution
Building on this, we can ask: How can we target these outputs
to vulnerable groups so we achieve the greatest impact?
• Management: What practices are best suited for supporting women
who produce this variety?
• Training: What training and extension packages are most effective for
women producing this variety?
• Technology transfer: How can our research partners, especially NARS,
best target their outputs to women?
• Distribution: What products through which distribution networks, are
best suited to the needs of women?

8. New business model research question
But, we are then still being largely ‘Supply-Driven’
If we start by working with vulnerable groups (with
local partners), we ask different questions:
• What are your capacities, needs and demands?
(e.g. what seed characteristics meet your
adaptation and mitigation needs?) – here, we are
testing new crowdsourcing approaches
• What strategies, tools and approaches will help
us better meet those needs?

9. What is needed in order to follow the
new business model?
• Very diverse research teams (many institutions;
farmers, practitioners as researchers too!)
• A systems focus within a geographic area (this
could be local, national, regional, global)
• The right local partners (K users), with whom you
identify the research questions, partnership
engagement, capacity
strengthening, communication and M&E-related
strategies for achieving joint outcomes

10. So what are we already doing? e.g. genderfocused strategies in East Africa
• Participatory Action Research in our sites with
women’s & mixed groups from around 10 villages
working together under new umbrella institutions (e.g.
FOKO in Nyando)
• Partnering with NGO’s and programs applying gendersensitive approaches: (e.g. CARE, World
Neighbours, Vi Agroforestry, IFAD, IDRC, USAID, etc.)
• Including local gender experts (e.g. Universities, NARS)
• Targeting commodities desired/controlled by women:
bees, goats, sheep, poultry, beans, horticulture, agrofo
restry

11. Gender-focused strategies in EA, Cont’d
• Evaluation of varieties disaggregated by gender
• Household & intra-hh gender-disaggregated tools &
data analyses
• Qualitative gender-focused participatory
approaches
• Gender strategies for farmer-to-farmer exchanges,
participatory farmer videos
• Mobile phone- based agricultural services tested
with female and male farmers
• Farm reality TV show (‘shamba shape-up’) targeting
EA women, men and youths and highlighting climate
resilient agricultural and NRM practices

12. Focus of CCAFS gender-related
research (many CG centers)
There are 5 main areas this research has been
focusing on:
• roles in decision-making
• climate perceptions
• risk and vulnerability
• adaptation and adoption
• access to technology and information
Goal in 2014: overall synthesis of the findings of all
these studies

13. Participatory gender CC approaches
• FAO/CCAFS jointly developed
participatory gender tools that
were implemented in CCAFS sites
in Uganda, Ghana and Bangladesh
• CCAFS Gender & Social Learning
expert has been refining and
testing these methods and
materials to be more useful to our
development partners

14. Capacity Strengthening
• Training of gender partners (plus AWARD trainers) from
all 5 regions and joint action planning, in Oct at ICRAF
in Nairobi
• ICRAF – recent gender methods training in SE Asia
• CIFOR – manual on incorporating gender in proposals
• ILRI – ‘Closing the gender gap in agriculture:
A trainer’s manual’
‘Closing the gender gap in agriculture... could increase yields on farms
by 20–30% which... could raise total agricultural output in developing
countries by 2.5–4% which... could reduce the number of hungry people
in the world by 12–17%.’ State of Food and Agriculture (FAO 2011)

15. CCAFS Gender-related Resources
www.ccafs.cgiar.org/gender