Strengthening Qinghai women farmers’ income security and resilience in a changing climate-国际生态系统管理伙伴计划

Project Brief
This project is designed to promote poverty reduction among women farmers by helping them become more economically resilient in a changing climate through improving and increasing their accessibility to climate-resilient and productive assets, finance, tools, technologies, capacities, and opportunities for moving up the value chain. The project directly addresses both China’s national poverty reduction goals as well as SDG global frameworks and principles for delivering gender equality and women’s economic empowerment in selected poverty-stricken counties in Qinghai Province.
Project Name: Strengthening Qinghai women farmers’ income security and resilience in a changing climate
Geographic coverage：Qinghai Province, China
Funding Source: UN Women, Chanel Foundation
Project Period: 2018.08-2021.04
Project Status: Ongoing
Background
Over the past three decades, China has achieved impressive economic growth and lifted millions of people out of poverty and hunger. However, this has not necessarily translated into sustainable and equitable development outcomes. The rapid economic transformation has left some segments of population behind. Women farmers are largely vulnerable as they constitute the large segment of population in the rural areas of China. They comprise approximately 60% of the agricultural labor force in China. Women farmers are most vulnerable to negative climate change impacts and that systemic biases and challenges continue to persist.
The Liupan Mountainous Area in the eastern part of Qinghai is one of the 14 priority areas of focus for poverty reduction as outlined in the China Poverty Reduction Outline 2011 – 2020. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is currently implementing a project titled “Qinghai Liupan Mountain Area Poverty Reduction Project (2015 – 2020)”. This proposed project builds on and will complement IFAD's project. The geographic location of the project will be in 3 or 4 counties selected from the 7 IFAD project counties. Both the IFAD project and the proposed project will reinforce each other in terms of results and impact for women beneficiaries.
Objective
Overall Goal: Women have income security, decent work and economic autonomy.
Outcome: More women farmers in Qinghai Province have increased income security and are more resilient in a changing climate.
Actions & Expected Outcomes
Actions
(1) For service providers: we provide ToT trainings, gender awareness trainings combined with ecological agriculture and E-commerce.
(2) For farming communities: we organize Farmers Field School (FFS) and capacity building workshop for leadership and women organization training , set up women's entrepreneurship funds and enhancing women collaboration, and provide Rural E-commerce trainings, farmer to farmer technical and culture exchanges.
(3) For policy makers: we briefed the field findings and supporting actions to local policy makers for awareness building and supporting, policy consultation and advocacy conference is organized at national level.
Expected Results
Output 1: Government and services providers, particularly at the local level, have enhanced capacity to support women farmers to access climate-smart agricultural extension, information, tools and technologies.
Output 2: Women farmers have increased access to financial and economic resources, and are able to utilize agricultural services to increase their productivity.
Output 3: Women farmers and network of women farmer organizations have increased capacity to move up the agricultural value chains.