The 16 Days of Activism to End Violence Against Women and Girls, run every year from 25 November to 10 December, serve as a crucial reminder of the urgent need to address Gender-Based Violence (GBV), particularly in rural communities affected by climate change. Recent research shows a clear link between climate change, related disasters and an increase in GBV, especially in rural settings.
These critical interlinkages are also growing in policy and programming work, such as in the UNFCCC and UNDRR Gender Action Plans that include GBV considerations. Such advancements echo with the Platform for Agricultural Risk Management’s (PARM) mandate to de-risk investments in agriculture while fostering gender equality and social inclusion, in the context of increasing climate disasters.
As we approach the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in 2025, there is a need to further increase concrete commitments and actions towards gender equality, in all its dimensions, including gender-based violence.
In this context, PARM commits to further explore and integrate these critical interconnections between GBV, Agricultural Risk Management (ARM), and climate resilience into its holistic approach in its upcoming Horizon 3 (2026-2030).
Gender-based violence in the context of agriculture and ARM
In many agricultural communities, GBV prevalence is high and likely to increase due to climate change and climate-related shocks that disproportionately impact women and girls, as well as Indigenous Peoples, in rural settings. Due to climate change, and even more in the aftermath of a disaster, women spend more time and travel longer distances to collect water, food, fuels, and other resources needed for their agricultural activities and their household. Such chores expose them to a much higher risk of GBV, such as sexual violence on the road to collect resources and coercion for sexual favors at water access points under certain controls.
Examples from PARM’s work highlight how GBV exacerbates agricultural risks and impedes efforts to reduce poverty and is also an agricultural risk per se that needs to be more strongly addressed in agricultural projects to avoid its increase. In Madagascar, for instance, PARM’s Risk Assessment Study (RAS) found that the high prevalence of GBV, namely domestic violence, affecting women in rural areas prevent them from developing further their agricultural activity. According to persisting gender norms, men perceive women’s economic independence as a threat and use domestic violence as a response to counter it. Moreover, PARM’s activities in Tunisia highlighted that, while women represent up to 80% of the workforce in the olive value chain sector, they are much less paid than men for the same work, and are even exploited. This represents a gender-based economic violence, since they are deprived from resources they should access because of their female gender. Economic violence against women, in addition to other forms of GBV that affect one in two women in Tunisia, is a major constraint to the uplifting of the potential of women and of the whole olive sector that would benefit from gender equality.
How to address GBV as an agricultural risk? PARM Gender Expert, Johana Simao has reflected on the subject and shares the way forward to addressing GBV in ARM in this paper.
Read the full paper to find out more.
