In what is proclaimed as the ‘fourth industrial revolution’, digital innovation is thought to have the potential to provide solutions to key challenges facing food production and consumption together with the support of sustainability of the underpinning support of land, and water systems. Nowhere is this more the case in less-industrialised countries, which largely have agrarian based economies.

Many policy makers and academics striving for more gender equality consider joint property rights as preferable over sole rights, since the latter often discriminate against women. Several governments in low-, middle- and high-income countries have therefore imposed joint rights through modifications of statutory law or mandatory joint property registration.

This chapter explores the impact of tariff increases on female unemployment and the agricultural sector in Malawi. Combining a standard general equilibrium model with a top-down behavioural microsimulation, the author finds that a move towards trade restrictions would destroy over 1 million jobs in the country, affecting primarily women across the labour market but more markedly in agriculture.

Pakistan is highly dependent on irrigated agriculture for employment, income generation and food security—around 90 percent of all food production relies on either surface or groundwater irrigation. The growing dependence of agriculture but also industries and the drinking water sector on groundwater has led to the overexploitation of groundwater resources and, in some areas, to the deterioration of groundwater quality. Fiscal incentives for solarization of irrigation/drinking water pumps are likely to further increase water withdrawals and make water governance more complex.

Springs are the most important source of water for the people in the mid-hills of the Himalaya. Emerging evidence shows that they are increasingly drying up, causing numerous hardships for people, with those impacts being felt more acutely by women and members of vulnerable communities like lower castes (Dalits). Climate change, land-use and land cover changes, including haphazard infrastructure (hydropower, road construction), and other socio-economic changes such as urbanization and tourism are the leading causes of the drying up of springs.

Although progress has been made in promoting gender equality in governments; gender and intersectional inequalities in national agrifood and climate policies are rarely meaningfully considered neither systematically addressed (Acosta et al.; 2019, 2020). The nexus between climate, agrifood and gender issues is relevant. Climate and gender policies often follow a top-down approach without integrating women’s and men’s knowledge, vulnerabilities and demands (Howland and Le Coq, 2022) and do not address structural causes of gender and intersectional inequalities (Huyer et al., 2020).

Water management in Egypt presents unique challenges. Being waterscarce, the country needs to use its limited freshwater reserves efficiently and effectively, particularly for irrigation, which accounts for over 70% of the total freshwater availability. Egypt has a network of irrigation canals and water-reuse drains that were built since the introduction of cotton cultivation in the colonial era to enable agricultural drainage and the reuse of water for irrigation. This facilitated expansion of the cultivated area with a view to improving food security and income.

Piloting participatory rangeland management (PRM) in Tanzania and Kenya was a 48-month EU-funded project. The project ran from December 2017 to December 2021. Its overarching goal was to improve the livelihood and nutrition status of pastoralist communities in East Africa by improving rangeland management to secure and better use rangelands and expand the role of women in selected pastoral communities in Kenya and Tanzania.

Feminist scholars and activists have drawn attention to the importance of
women’s land rights, and studies focused on irrigation have explored the gendered
relationships between land and water rights. Yet little of this work has focused
on the relationship between land and water rights for domestic and productive
purposesmore broadly.Within rural communities, women andmen have diô€€€erent
rights to both land and water.We explore these interconnected relationships using
community profiles, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews from two

Enhanced women's empowerment has been linked to improvements in various areas of women's lives, such as in creased access to resources, decision-making power, and a manageable workload. It can also have positive effects on child health out comes, including nutritional status and early childhood development. However, there can also be trade-offs for women, such as their own nutritional outcomes.

Over the past seven years (2015-2021), the Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA) and the Institut des Sciences Agronomiques du Burundi (ISABU), supported by the Swiss Agency for Cooperation and Development (SDC) and Global Affairs Canda (GAC), have empowered women to become entrepreneurs in Burundi's bean seed industry. Today, half of Burundi's decentralized bean seed producers are women, resulting in increased food and nutrition security, more bean-based products, and profitable markets for both men and women. Overall, bean production experienced a fivefold increase.

Objectives:

To promote agricultural Mechanization.
Women and youth employment.
To overcome labour constraints in mixed farming systems.