Interview with Ruth Meinzen-Dick on reducing the gender asset gap through agricultural development

4 DECEMBER, 2014

Why is it important to close the gender asset gap, especially in agricultural development?

In light of the upcoming Platform Annual General Assembly on gender and food systems,  IFPRI’s senior research fellow Ruth Meinzen-Dick discusses in an in-depth interview with the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development how agricultural development projects can understand how men’s and women’s control of assets will affect project participation and outcomes.

Compared to many other development targets there was a lot of data to support that narrowing the gap between men and women in terms of control over various types of household assets substantially improved agricultural productivity, said Meinzen-Dick.

For long-term poverty reduction, and especially for breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty, gender equality is absolutely critical. Meinzen-Dick, points out that gender-focused interventions are not deterministic ‘social engineering,’ and that almost all development interventions bring about changes to the fabric of a society.

In retrospect on the…

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