Today, March 8th, we celebrate International
Women's Day; this year’s theme
is Empower Rural Women - End
Hunger and Poverty.
Climate change has a significant
impact on the health and nutrition security of millions of people, and affects women
and children living in developing countries, particularly those living in rural
areas. At the same time rural women
play a critical role in adapting to climate change, enhancing agricultural and
rural development, improving food and nutrition security and contributing to
the reduction of poverty levels in their communities.
Women comprise 43 percent of
agricultural labor in developing countries. While women produce 60-80% of the
food consumed at the household level in developing countries and 60% of the chronically
hungry are women and children. This is
in part due to a lack of economic and land rights for women to access land,
credit, seeds, fertilizers etc. Women
also face challenges related to key aspects related to nutrition security such
as limited household food access, education on and access to maternal and child
care and health care.
Rural women have less access to
health care services (including maternal health), information related to
prevention of negative health outcomes(e.g. HIV/AIDS transmission) and adequate
water and sanitation; rural children are twice as likely to be malnourish
as urban children. Malnourished rural girls become malnourished rural mothers
and this impacts their chances for a long and healthy life (there is a 40% more
under five mortality in rural than in urban settings), and impacts mental and
physical development, future productivity and livelihoods.
According to the
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), by giving women equal access to productive
agricultural resources – land, inputs, training, credit – women’s farm productivity
would increase by 20-30%, countries’ total agricultural output would increase by 2.5-4.0% and 100-150
million fewer people would be hungry. A
recent report from CARE in Bangladesh showed that women that participate in
empowerment interventions to fight sexual harassment were less likely to have
stunted children than woman that receive only direct nutrition interventions. This
reinforces the fact that in order to address the impacts of climate
change on health and nutrition security it is critical to invest on women
empowerment and transformative leadership.
The World Health Organization (WHO), has
recently called for philanthropists and country leaders to commit more money to
improving health services for rural women. UN Women believes that rural women
can more readily fulfill their roles in building a better society if their
reproductive health is improved. Investments
in the health and education of women and girls and in programs that support
their empowerment, economic improvement and engagement on climate adaptation
decision making, benefit everyone.
The Center of Public Health and Climate
Change at the Public Health Institute (PHI) is working to enhance
women’s leadership to address the challenges of climate change to health
and nutrition security and to integrate health and food and nutrition security
and gender equality as key pillars of climate resilient sustainable
development.
