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Gender as a cross cutting issue in FAO – working towards closing the Gender Gap

Etc.

The agriculture sector is underperforming in many developing countries and one of the key reasons is that women and men are not provided the same opportunities and cannot equally benefit from sustainable development and humanitarian interventions. Governments and the international community need to work together to eliminate this “gender gap” in order to achieve a world free from hunger and malnutrition.
In 2009, as part of the follow up of the Independent External Evaluation, the FAO Conference decided that Gender will be fully integrated into the Strategic Framework and Medium Term Plan. Since then, Gender is a fundamental area of work in FAO and is tackled at two levels in the current Strategic Framework and Medium Term Plan 2014-2017: 
Within each of the five Strategic Objectives, gender specialists working with technical officers identify areas of work which require particular attention to Gender in the design and implementation, and support the formulation of policies, programmes and investments related to gender, food security and agriculture. 
The five Strategic Objectives of FAO are: 

<ol><li>Contribute to the eradication of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition;
</li><li>Increase and improve the provision of goods and services from Agriculture in a sustainable manner;
</li><li>Reduce rural poverty; 4. Enable more inclusive and efficient agricultural and food systems; and
</li><li>Increase the resilience of livelihoods to threats and crises.
</li></ol>
This has resulted in 16 Outcome level indicators in the strategic objectives that allow tracking progress on gender inequality; 17 Output level indicators and 26 qualifiers that are either gender specific or present specific dimensions that allow monitoring and tracking results in gender-sensitive areas; the inclusion of gender perspectives and approaches applied to specific activities integrated in the strategic objective work plans and projects; and the introduction of gender markers, a coding system that allows assessing the gender-sensitivity of activities or of projects. 
It is important to anchor Gender not only in an organisation results framework and by including Gender related accountabilities in senior managers performance goals but also from the organisational structure point of view: in FAO, a dedicated small Gender Unitcoordinates, ensures coherence in approaches and delivers gender-related work of the Organization aiming at reducing the existing gender gap in agriculture and food security, monitors and reports on UNSWAP and the implementation of the FAO Gender Policy, supported by a network of Gender Focal Points in all offices and strategic objective teams.
Strategic Objective Coordinators are responsible for monitoring and reporting results relative to Gender, and the Gender Unit is responsible for analysing the results data to assess progress, and identify improvements needed. FAO is now at the stage of collecting, reviewing and validating results data. It is the first time that such an articulated effort is undertaken at the corporate level, and that such wealth of information has been generated in a structured manner. The challenge is to leverage the information collected and analyze it to identify progress, good practices, learning opportunities and challenges. 
The integration of gender as a cross-cutting theme in FAO’s Strategic Framework offered the opportunity to address gender inequality issues from the early stages of the Organization’s planning process, including in the monitoring framework. The next steps in FAO will be to address gender more systematically in the work of the organization and results tracking and to develop the capacities and level of the Gender Focal Points in the network to ensure scale, quality and sustainability of the interventions and results. 
“Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance” (Kofi Annan)

<h2 id="w_external-links">External Links</h2>
<ul><li><a href="http://www.fao.org/pwb/home/en" alt="FAO Medium Term Plan and Programme of Work and Budget">FAO Medium Term Plan and Programme of Work and Budget</a>
</li></ul>

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