FEMINISATION OF AGRICULTURE AND THE STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION OF RESOURCE-POOR WOMEN: A THEORETICAL META-SYNTHESIS AND GENDER-TRANSFORMATIVE FRAMEWORK
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23016807Keywords:
Agriculture, Climate Resilience, Feminisation, Food Systems, Gender Equality, Women's EmpowermentAbstract
While there is feminisation of agriculture in rural low- and middle-income economies, the feminisation process does not guarantee that women will have rights to land, status as farmers, control over agricultural production, income security, nutrition, and bargaining power. This theoretical paper builds an integrated conceptual model of factors contributing to the situation of women who do not have adequate financial resources for agricultural production. In order to understand this issue, the paper employs a structured secondary data meta-synthesis of recent academic literature, focusing on 25 peer-reviewed journal articles from the period 2021-2025 and dealing with themes of empowerment, land, nutrition, migration, technology, climate resilience, value chains, collective action, and time poverty. The synthesis shows that feminisation is not empowering and not detrimental to women. Feminisation does not depend on whether women gain more responsibility or not, but depends on how they get rights, resources, agency, services, and recognition from their institutions. This paper introduces a Feminisation–Resources–Agency–Nutrition–Resilience (FRANR) framework and an intergenerational pathway framework. Expected relationships between elements of the frameworks include that land rights, joint control, gender-responsive extension services, collective bargaining, labour-saving technologies, social protection, and nutrition-sensitive production turn additional responsibility of women into empowerment. This paper therefore comes to a conclusion that policy needs to focus less on participation and more on women's control over conservation, cultivation, consumption, commercialization, and capabilities across generations.
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