Prosperity Begins With Food Security
Globally more than 1.2 billion people do not get enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs. Under-nutrition and starvation can lead to illness, stunt child development, and even cause death. Without sufficient energy from food, adults struggle to work and children struggle to learn. Poor households experiencing a decline in productivity due to inadequate nutrition or illness find it even harder to achieve the income gains needed to break the cycle of poverty.
iDE understands that food availability is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for household food security; (poor) consumers also need (economic) access to that food. How accessible food is for a household depends upon a household's ability to purchase it. Most poor households spend more than half of their income on food. Higher food prices mean more income will be diverted from other household expenses, including education and healthcare, in order to meet household food consumption needs.
Population growth and lagging agricultural production pose significant challenges to food security, affecting both food availability and affordability. Climate change threatens to reduce agricultural productivity and, consequently, food availability but results in the direct loss of employment and/or income. Reduced agricultural production means higher prices.
Agricultural-led growth can improve global food security and promote prosperity. Most of the world's poor live in rural areas and struggle to survive on subsistence-based agriculture, producing low-value food crops on very small plots of land. Affordable access to water enables these poor farmers to increase agricultural production and invest in higher-value crops. Unleashing the potential of smallholder farmers to produce and sell food not only increases the well-being of the farmers' households but creates a more resilient and abundant global food supply as well. Assured rights of land tenure are necessary if smallholders are going to invest in their farms for the future, as opposed to mining them for short term purposes.
Highlights of iDE's Global Experience
Recognizing women farmers as a significant market segment, iDE ensures that women farmers are as likely as male farmers to benefit from program interventions. iDE selects agricultural value chains in which women can actively participate. Currently, we are partnering with women's unions in central Vietnam to provide technical advice to ethnic-minority Katu women engaged in pig-raising, which is predominantly "women's work." By selecting the pork value chain and partnering with women's unions, iDE guaranteed that program interventions would primarily target women.
In Nepal, under the USAID-funded Marketing, Production, and Services Project (MAPS), iDE implemented a women's microenterprise development program to provide female household heads—many of whom had lost husbands to the war or migrated to find work—with income opportunities. By combining numeracy and literacy skills development with market opportunities, more women were inclined to enter business for themselves.
iDE designs micro irrigation technologies that meet the needs of women farmers. The Rural Prosperity Initiative, a multi-country program funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is conducting gender-specific Voice of Customer surveys to determine the necessity and value of gender-appropriate micro irrigation technology designs and/or adaptations. Furthermore, to increase women's access to these technologies, iDE uses rural marketing strategies that appeal to women, and promotes products and services in places that are easily accessible to women.
Internal Policies
Whenever possible, iDE hires female program staff as way to overcome some of the gender barriers that may arise when working with female clients. Also, by recruiting female staff, iDE demonstrates to client households the importance of giving girls and women educational and productive opportunities.
In Ethiopia, to attract and retain female staff, iDE created female-focused job announcements and more attractive employment arrangements, including good benefits and not requiring female field officers to ride motorbikes. Today, the proportion of female staff holding key positions within iDE Ethiopia is over 30 percent.
iDE's Gender Statement
It is iDE's fundamental belief that all poor people have the right to a secure livelihood, and that both men and women play vital, yet often different, roles in the pursuit of secure livelihoods for their families.
iDE helps poor families generate additional income by increasing access to affordable micro irrigation technologies and market opportunities. We follow a market-based approach, treating smallholder farmers, whether male or female, as customers rather than charity recipients.
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