Remember: The importance of rural women
ON Saturday the United Nations celebrated the International Day of Rural Women.
According to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have gender equality and women’s empowerment at their core, and include a target to “double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, in particular women”.
As a result, he said rural women are critical to the success of almost all of the 17 SDGs.
The UN said rural women, the majority of whom depend on natural resources and agriculture for their livelihoods, make up over a quarter of the total world population; and in developing countries, rural women represent approximately 43 per cent of the agricultural labour force. They produce, process and prepare much of the food available, thereby being primarily responsible for food security.
Additionally, the UN said bearing in mind that 76 per cent of the world’s poor live in rural areas, ensuring rural women’s access to productive agricultural resources contributes to decreasing world hunger and poverty, and making rural women critical for the success of the new sustainable development agenda for 2030.
