January 2016: Researchers of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have published a paper summarizing methods to analyze gender-differentiated impacts of climate-smart agriculture (CSA). The paper, titled ‘Gender Integration into Climate-smart Agriculture: Tools for Data Collection and Analysis for Policy Research,’ aims to enhance the understanding of gender-related determinants of outcomes and facilitate the development of effective interventions that improve gender equality.

The introduction explains how the impact of adaptation responses can vary depending on the sex of decision-maker and gender composition of households, for example because women and men have different degrees of vulnerability and different access to resources, such as physical labor. Furthermore cultural norms can lead to an uneven distribution of benefits between women and men. Gender-sensitive indicators are therefore required to assess outcomes with regard to the three pillars of CSA, namely adaptation, food security and mitigation.

The subsequent section introduces quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods of gender analysis in CSA, followed by a section on data collection tools at different levels.

The paper concludes that both quantitative and qualitative methods are useful to understand gender-differentiated responses. It argues that household-level studies should be sex-disaggregated, include questions on constraints faced by women, and allow the understanding of dynamic processes inside the household. It also calls for community-level data to be gender-informative to cover possible gaps on household-level data. [Publication: Gender Integration into Climate-smart Agriculture: Tools for Data Collection and Analysis for Policy Research] [FAO Climate Change Webpage]