Introducing the CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research
Today, on International Women’s Day, the CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research is publicly launched. It aims to increase the visibility, impact and knowledge sharing of gender research undertaken across the CGIAR. The Food & Business Knowledge Platform (F&BKP) is cooperating with the CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research to ensure that lessons are shared more broadly amongst Dutch agriculture and food researchers and practitioners. Please follow this link to access the rich resource base of the CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research.
The CGIAR gender research platform will look strategically at the gender dimensions of research on agriculture and natural resource management undertaken across the 12 CGIAR Research Programs. It will identify gaps, assess cross-CGIAR gender research priorities and synthesize lessons. To build on specific gender research undertaken by each of the CGIAR institutes, system-wide collaboration adds relevance particularly when it comes to identifying challenges and researchable questions that cut across different agri-food systems, commodities and themes. The website of the CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research collects lessons and tools from the different CGIAR research programs that are shared under Resources. You can also find the gender strategies from the different programs, past webinar recordings, examples of sex-disaggregated surveys, a map of gender studies across the CGIAR and be informed as to upcoming events.
From Network to Collaborative Platform
Recognizing that gender inequality fundamentally constrains the ability to achieve major strategic results in the CGIAR Research Programmes (CRPs), CGIAR established a network of gender experts across the CRPs in 2011. During its first phase, the “CGIAR Gender and Agriculture Research Network” gathered over 240 members: the gender research coordinators of all CGIAR research programs and Centers, and gender teams, biophysical scientists interested in integrating gender into their research, and a broader public interested in gender dynamics in agriculture and natural resource management.
In the current second phase, this network has evolved into the more research-focused Collaborative Platform for Gender Research, which includes a website, webinars, quarterly newsletters, an annual capacity development workshop and an annual scientific conference. The CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research is housed in the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions and Markets but serves all CGIAR research programs. The Platform Coordinator, Ms. Rhiannon Pyburn is based at the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in Amsterdam.
At the final annual Gender Network meeting at CIAT in Cali, Colombia in November 2016, Gender Research Coordinators and Center representatives distilled four cross-CRP research priorities, which will be further developed this year. These research priorities are:
- Gender, landscapes and rural transformation;
- Gendered consequences of agricultural research for development (AR4D) efforts;
- Gender, technologies, and institutions;
- Joint ownership and decision-making.
Partnership CGIAR-NL and F&BKP
In the context of the collaborative partnership between the Netherlands and the CGIAR, facilitated through the F&BKP, an opportunity has been identified to strengthen the linkages between this CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research and Dutch scientists, practitioners and policy makers. Dutch stakeholders can benefit from the knowledge available in the CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research to strengthen their own practice and policies at the interface of gender and Food and Nutrition Security (FNS). The F&BKP will work together with the Platform to ensure lessons are shared within the F&BKP and continue to explore opportunities for collaboration.
For more publications on Gender in FNS, also visit the F&BKP Knowledge Portal
