Gender

The WorldFish mission is to strengthen livelihoods and enhance food and nutrition security by improving fisheries and aquaculture. We pursue this through research partnerships focused on helping those who stand to benefit the most—poor producers and consumers, women and children This strategy details the ambitious impact targets we have embraced, which are aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and charts our course to achieve them.

WorldFish has a long history of working in Africa, including in nearby Ghana and Cameroon, to strengthen the continent’s aquaculture sector by conducting research and providing training. WorldFish aims to harness this experience, combined with its expertise in fish genetics, to boost aquaculture productivity and enhance nutrition and food security in Nigeria. WorldFish will draw on its involvement and support from the African Union InterAfrican Bureau of Animal Resources to deliver this work.

Indonesia is one of the top ten aquaculture-producing countries globally. The sector makes a significant contribution to the country’s development. Women are engaged in a range of aquaculture production and value chain activities in Indonesia. In particular, women are predominate in marketing and processing. Despite this, there is currently a lack of information regarding women’s roles – and more fundamentally – the outcomes for women and factors that enable or constrain these. This represents a critical gap in the knowledge needed for effective aquaculture programmes and policies.

Bangladesh is a global leader in inland fish production and has been ranked as the fifth largest producer of aquaculture food fish in the world. The fisheries sector, including aquaculture, provides employment to 17.8 million people, out of which women constitute 1.4 million. The shrimp industry alone employs over one million people in its processing factories, out of which 88.64 percent are women. While women play a significant role in aquaculture production in Bangladesh, their contributions remain under-reported.

This factsheet contributes to FAO Organizational Strategic Objective 1 "Eradicate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition", Strategic Objective 2 "Increase and improve provision of goods and services from agriculture, forestry and fisheries in a sustainable manner", and Strategic Objective 3 "Reduce rural poverty".

This booklet present several stories of women in rural Bangladesh and Nepal who are making positive changes in their communities. The stories have been collected from a variety of projects WorldFish has been implementing over the past nine years with support from partners and donors. These inspirational women have undertaken new agriculture-aquaculture livelihood opportunities to better their lives and those of their family members. To get where they are now, these women have had to overcome many challenges.

Development policy increasingly focuses on building capacities to respond to change (adaptation), and to drive change (innovation). Few studies, however, focus specifically on the social and gender differentiation of capacities to adapt and innovate. We address this gap using a qualitative study in three communities in Solomon Islands; a developing country, where rural livelihoods and well-being are tightly tied to agriculture and fisheries. We find the five dimensions of capacity to adapt and to innovate (i.e.