AgriFin Gender Transformative Toolkit

Introduction

Over the past several years, gender inclusion has been a focal area of AgriFin’s work in developing and designing digital agriculture solutions for and with partners.

While AgriFin has had some successes in reaching women farmers, more work can be done to support partners and ecosystem players to be gender intentional and gender transformative.

Gender transformation is a key strategic theme in Mercy Corps AgriFin’s next stage of programming to overcome barriers faced by women so that women farmers can realize the benefit of digital agriculture solutions and enjoy increased productivity, higher resilience and improved incomes and livelihoods.

Purpose 

The purpose of this gender transformative toolkit is to share a collection of tools to support farmer-facing organizations to design and deliver effective and inclusive products, services, and partnerships for women smallholder farmers. 

The journey to gender transformation is long and there is no comprehensive approach for players in the digital agriculture ecosystem.

This toolkit hopes to equip our partners to apply a gender lens in their work and stakeholder interaction as well as collaborate with them through an iterative process that will see us develop and improve the toolkit with time.

Who Is This Toolkit For?

Users of this toolkit will lie on the gender transformation continuum, from being gender unintentional to gender intentional to gender transformative. We have adopted the definitions used by the Gates Gender Equality Toolbox to define the three audience categories as below:

Gender Unintentional

An organization that does not integrate a gender lens and does not target gender gaps in its strategies, investments, product design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, internal structures and organization culture.

Gender Intentional

A gender-aware organization that designs its products, service lines, and/or investments to reduce barriers in access to resources across genders or to increase the information base and awareness around gender gaps. .

Gender Transformative

An organization that aims to achieve gender empowerment and equity designs its products, service lines, and/or investments to reduce barriers to access resources but also in agency and control over resources.

The journey to gender transformation is long and there is no comprehensive approach for players in the digital agriculture ecosystem. This toolkit hopes to equip our partners to apply a gender lens in their work and stakeholder interaction as well as collaborate with them through an iterative process that will see us develop and improve the toolkit over time.

How To Use This Toolkit

To best use this toolkit we recommend users begin with an understanding of gender transformation and an assessment of their current status in the journey to be gender transformative. To do this organizations can utilize the baseline assessment and awareness tools catered to both funders and farmer facing organizations.

After developing an understanding of the current gender lens status, organizations can use the rest of the tools in a sequential or a modular fashion depending upon organization-specific needs.

Download the complete Gender Transformative Toolkit or select individual tools below.

How the Toolkit is Organized

Baseline Assessment Tools

The Baseline assessment tools will introduce users to the basic tools and concepts in the gender transformation journey and investment considerations as fund donors and receipts.

Gender Segmentation Tools

Gender Segmentation tools allow users to develop gender-inclusive customer segments.

Go-to -Market Tools

Go-to-Market tools help map customer interactions and provide a gender lens to business models.

Baseline Awareness Tools

Baseline Awareness tools offer gender-transformative examples from the digital agriculture ecosystem.

Resource-Framing Tools

Resource Framing tools offer best practices to create and allocate budgets based on gender needs.

Data Collection & Analysis tools

Data Collection & Analysis tools offer examples for best practices and indicators for collecting and analyzing sex-disaggregated data.

 

Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning Tools

Monitoring, Learning and Evaluation Tools offers best practices and indicators to assess the impact of gender-transformative activities and how to socialise learnings and impact stories.

Explore the Gender Toolkit

We hope that the contents will serve as resources for the digital agriculture community and inspire conversations and actions to develop more gender-inclusive solutions. We invite users to continuously share with us their feedback to enable constant enhancement of the toolkit.