October 28, 2025

Women farmers feed millions. Imagine what they could do with equal resources

topic:	Women's rights
located:	Rwanda, Bangladesh, Mexico
by:	Surita Sandosham

Around a third of both women and men make a living worldwide by growing, processing and distributing the food we eat.

But this changes significantly in the Global South, where as much as 70 per cent of women work in the agrifood sector compared to less than 50 per cent of men.

And most of these women across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia do this essential work of feeding their families, communities and economies with less land, finance, equipment and training than men.

Not only is the gender gap in agriculture fundamentally unfair, it also deprives the world of additional food supplies that could help lift 45 million people out of food insecurity. Women already play an outsized role in agrifood systems in developing countries, but they could grow, process and sell even more food if they had access to equal resources.

This extraordinary untapped potential is one of the reasons why 2026 has been named by the UN as the International Year of the Woman Farmer.

The evidence is clear: closing both the gender gap and the wage gap in jobs across the agrifood sector would be enough to increase global GDP by one per cent and reduce global food insecurity by about two percentage points. This represents a crucial opportunity for improvement at a time when countries like Nigeria, Haiti and Nepal are gripped by food insecurity.

The impact of women’s empowerment within agriculture is borne out by Heifer International’s experience of working on the ground. Collective action, led by rural communities, is one of the most powerful interventions to ensure solutions are both inclusive and sustainable over time.

In Bangladesh, almost 15,000 women have benefitted from support to form self-help groups, cooperatives and savings schemes alongside training and access to technology like solar-powered irrigation pumps. While the women-led cooperatives exported around eight metric tons of vegetables in 2024/25, sales are forecast to reach 20 million tons next year.

In Mexico, Heifer partnered with W.K. Kellogg Foundation and Indigenous women in Quintana Roo and Yucatán to establish the Kikibá collective to help meet the demand for ethically produced, cage-free eggs and increase the women’s earning potential. By providing a flock of 50 hens, training and market access to each member, the project enabled women to increase their family income by an average of 22 per cent.

And in Rwanda, rural women formed a group to save up to invest in their farms. From just 20 cents each a week, the group was able to save enough to start a business selling chicken feed, later establishing a Livestock Farmer Field School and doubling milk production.

Each of these interventions recognized the gender-specific challenges holding back both women and productivity, and addressed them with a combination of finance, training, farm inputs and market linkages.

Given the disproportionate number of women in agrifood systems across developing countries, a gender lens is critical to sustainable agricultural development and food systems. This is why gatherings such as CGIAR’s recent Gender in Food, Land and Water Systems Conference 2025 are so important to help advance the agenda for the International Year of the Woman Farmer.

But while a growing body of research and evidence demonstrates the importance of women’s empowerment in agricultural development, more gender-sensitive policies and initiatives are needed to close the gender gap. This includes provisions that increase women’s access to funding, and incentives that support public-private partnerships to maximise investment and training opportunities for women.

Proven interventions exist to reduce gender inequality and improve productivity, food security and sustainable development.

Heifer stands ready to share its insights with partners around the world to help scale up efforts to empower women farmers with gender-sensitive finance, resources, support and training.

The future of global food security lies in farmers’ hands - and women can only fulfil this potential when they no longer have one hand tied behind their backs.

Surita Sandosham is the President and CEO of Heifer International.

Image by Rutpratheep Nilpechr.