Around the world, women in 155 countries face legal restrictions on the economic opportunities available to them, according to the recent World Bank Group's report Women, Business and the Law 2016, which highlights the challenges women face in the global economy and underscores the need for legal reform.

Despite advances in global gender equality, "we are still failing rural women, particularly women farmers", write Jacqui Ashby and Jennifer Twyman.

As is often the case, failure is rooted in missing information. We are failing rural women farmers by not empowering them to improve the wrong data which we use to describe their situations, the authors write. As a result, the knowledge we need in order to boost food supplies in changing climates is much less complete than it could be. 

Women make up over half the world's population, and yet represent a staggering 70 percent of the world's poor. According to United Nations Women, known as UN Women, the majority of the 1.5 billion people living on less than $1 per day are women.

In southern Ghana, women are connected to the land in different ways from one another. This diversity translates into a suite of vulnerabilities to climate change, and a need for fine-tuned strategies that accommodate the range of women in a community.

Source: Journal of Gender, Agriculture and Food Security

Written by Regina Laub and Susan Kaaria, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations