Livestock have strong empowerment potential, particularly for women. They offer millions of women in the Global South the opportunity to provide protein-rich foods for home consumption and sale. Livestock provide women with income and opportunities to expand their livelihood portfolios and can strengthen women’s decision-making power. Fully realizing livestock’s empowerment potential for women is necessary for sustainable livestock development. It requires, though, that gender-equitable dynamics and norms are supported in rural communities. We draw on 73 village cases from 13 countries to explore women’s experiences with livestock-based livelihoods and technological innovations. Our analysis follows a gender empowerment framework comprised of four interdependent domains—recognition of women as livestock keepers, access to resources, access to opportunities, and decision making as a cross-cutting domain—which must come together if women are to become empowered through livestock. We find improved livestock breeds and associated innovations, such as fodder choppers or training, to provide significant benefits to women who can access these. This, nonetheless, has accentuated women’s double burdens. Another challenge is that even as women may be recognized in their community as livestock keepers, this recognition is much less common among external institutions. We present a case where this institutional recognition is forthcoming and illuminate the synergetic and empowering pathways unleashed by this as well as the barriers that remain.

A clear consensus has emerged that innovations are important for adapting to drought and overcoming other biophysical limitations in smallholder farming systems; however, women are notably marginalized from agricultural innovations. We examine whether and how gendered roles and responsibilities shape the adoption and usage of improved wheat varieties and simultaneously uncover opportunities to address and lessen gender-based differences in agricultural innovations. The field data were collected using snowball sampling from seven communities (three in Morocco and four in Uzbekistan) among 574 farmers (half men and half women) of different generations, genders, social statuses, and social classes. Our findings demonstrate how the complex interactions of biophysical constraints, intra-household (spousal and kinship) relations, and the broader macro-level political economy of agriculture converge to influence different identities of women and men farmers' wheat production and processing practices. We argue that without focusing on the socio-cultural factors affecting agriculture, new seed varieties alone cannot address the multifaceted problems confronting farmers in all parts of the world.

The Middle East and North Africa region has the lowest level of women’s land ownership in the world, yet little research has explored the barriers and opportunities women face in land ownership in the region. This paper identifies patterns, opportunities, and constraints of ownership of land and other assets (houses, livestock, poultry, and gold) by women and men in the Old and New Lands of Egypt. Based on a survey complemented with qualitative interviews, the study finds that both women and men viewed land and houses as the most economically and socially important assets, but they differed in what assets they considered to be valuable for women. The findings highlight the importance of implementing policies that optimize women’s property ownership, even if they own non-land assets. The study concludes that while legal and economic interventions aid in accomplishing gender-equity goals, consciousness-raising initiatives are as crucial as pro-women policy reforms. HIGHLIGHTS

This paper examines how rural transformation in Uzbekistan alters gender norms and roles and, consequently, affects women's involvement in agriculture. We focus on the role that contextual factors, particularly kinship relations, government goals, and institutional structures each contribute to rural transformation and male out-migration, and how these, in turn, increase women's work in wheat production and processing. The wheat is the most important crop in the country which has the highest area coverage (35%) in Uzbekistan. We begin by highlighting the post-Soviet transition in Uzbekistan and its effects on the agricultural sector, including how households respond to opportunities for innovation. We then move to a discussion of our methodological approach drawing on insights from the GENNOVATE project, a collaborative initiative across 11 CGIAR centres that explored the relationship between changing gender norms in relation to women's roles in agricultural production and processing. Next, we examine an understudied topic in migration research i.e., how the transformation of agriculture contributes to increased dependence on unpaid female agricultural labour. We conclude with an analysis of how the feminization of agriculture alters household relations and women's participation in the public sphere. Significantly, we close with a reflection on what these changes mean for gender and innovation studies.