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Rooted in Equity: How Agroforestry Can Empower Women and Strengthen Rural Economies
- agranelli3
- Jun 24
- 5 min read
Agroforestry can be a powerful driver of social and economic transformation. Our new article explores why making agroforestry gender-responsive is critical for strengthening rural economies, empowering women, and building climate resilience across Mesoamerica and beyond.
Gender-Responsive Agroforestry: Why It Matters
Agroforestry—integrating trees, crops, and livestock on the same land—offers one of the most promising pathways toward sustainable land management, it holds tremendous potential to address the climate, biodiversity, and food security crises all at once as it improves soil health, boosts biodiversity, sequesters carbon emissions, and diversifies rural livelihoods. However, agroforestry's true potential extends beyond environmental and economic benefits. It holds the power to advance gender equity, an essential but often overlooked dimension of sustainable development.
Agroforestry's true potential extends beyond environmental and economic benefits.
Across rural and Indigenous communities in Mesoamerica and beyond, women play essential yet largely underrecognized roles in managing forest landscapes and sustaining household economies. Recognizing and elevating their contributions can help unlock agroforestry's promise, but it requires making agroforestry systems more inclusive and gender-responsive. By doing so, we can create ripple effects, strengthening women's livelihoods, community resilience, and ecosystem health.
Breaking Down Barriers to Women's Participation
Women constitute nearly half of the agricultural labor force in low-income countries, as farmers, agricultural workers, food processors, traders, entrepreneurs, and community leaders, women contribute significantly to strengthen social cohesion, economic recovery, and sustainable land management, as a matter of fact gender equality and women's empowerment are crucial aspecting of ending hunger, malnutrition, and poverty. Empowering women farmers could lift millions out of poverty and strengthen community resilience. Closing productivity and wage gaps could yield enormous benefits, including increasing global GDP by nearly USD 1 trillion and reducing food insecurity for 45 million people.
However, despite their vital roles, women face numerous interconnected barriers that limit their participation in agriculture and rural economies. They often face disproportionate unpaid labor burdens and have limited access to secure land tenure, credit, markets, extension services, technical support, climate information, digital tools, soil health services, and decision-making spaces. At the same time, female-headed households lose more income to climate change effects, like heat and flooding, widening the gender gap in rural economies.
The COVID-19 pandemic and other global crises have further exposed and deepened these inequalities, hindering women's potential and undermining agricultural productivity and rural development.
Recognizing and valuing women's unpaid and own-use production work is necessary for equitable participation.
Another persistent challenge in advancing gender-responsive agriculture is the lack of sex-disaggregated data: most agricultural and environmental data collection still overlooks the realities of women's roles in land ownership, decision-making, financial access, and digital inclusion. Closing these data gaps is essential for designing effective policies, monitoring progress, and ensuring that women's contributions are fully recognized and supported.
In addition, women's heavy workloads—including unpaid caregiving, food processing, and gathering fuel or water for household use—must be acknowledged and addressed. Recognizing and valuing women's unpaid and own-use production work is necessary for equitable participation since those responsibilities often limit women's capacity to engage in agroforestry activities, training programs, or leadership roles.
Debunking Myths About Women in Agriculture
Persistent myths continue to undermine women's roles in agriculture. The assumption that women are only housewives and men are the sole users of forest products ignores the fact that women are often the primary collectors of fuelwood, wild foods, and fodder, fails to recognize their central role as food producers and resource managers, and overlooks the reality that many households are headed by women making independent decisions. Finally, the notion of women as passive community members fails to acknowledge their leadership in organizing and driving community-based environmental action.
Reinforcing Women's Traditional and Leadership Roles
Women are not just participants. They are leaders, innovators, and custodians of biodiversity, and their traditional knowledge of ecosystems, forest management, and food systems makes them key actors in sustaining soil ecosystem services. EcoLogic has seen how supporting women's leadership transforms community-based restoration efforts in Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.
Women have always worked the land, but having access to this kind of training gives us more tools to lead, teach others, and make sure our families and communities grow stronger, too.
For instance, in Machaquilá II, Guatemala, our team is helping community members grow and take care of fruit trees and native species, such as Inga edulis and mahogany. During a recent training, María and Dominga, daughters of local farmer Don Pedro Jolomná, stood out for their leadership and skills. Although the training was directed only at landholders, María and Dominga joined their father in the field and practiced pruning techniques, gaining a deeper understanding of the importance of maintaining a healthy tree structure for long-term productivity.
The workshop quickly became a learning and empowering experience. “Learning these techniques gives us more confidence to take care of the land and support our family,” María shared. “Women have always worked the land, but having access to this kind of training gives us more tools to lead, teach others, and make sure our families and communities grow stronger, too.”
Strengthening Institutional Accountability and Gender Mainstreaming
Inclusive policies must address intersecting inequalities that limit women's participation in agrifood systems. Achieving gender-responsive agroforestry requires structural change to ensure women have secure land rights, equitable access to resources and markets, and meaningful participation in governance. Supporting women's cooperatives, promoting labor-saving technologies, and expanding access to social protection measures—such as financial services, life skills training, and safe spaces for women's leadership development—can strengthen agroforestry efforts, build economic resilience and help reduce women's exposure to gender-based violence, which often increases during crises when unpaid labor and household stress rise.
Gender-responsive agroforestry cannot succeed without strong organizational commitment and clear accountability.
Gender-responsive agroforestry cannot succeed without strong organizational commitment and clear accountability. International and local organizations and institutions involved in agroforestry activities must be trained and held accountable for delivering gender-equitable results by creating dedicated resources, building institutional capacities, and embedding gender expertise at every level of decision-making and implementation. By doing so, stakeholders can ensure that gender-responsive agroforestry moves beyond isolated projects and becomes a core principle of sustainable rural development.
Image credit: Lucy Calderón
Moreover, truly inclusive agroforestry policies and programs must recognize that inequalities are rarely limited to gender alone; they are often compounded by other social factors such as age, ethnicity, disability, and class. Applying an intersectional lens can help ensure that agroforestry interventions challenge multiple and overlapping power imbalances, creating more equitable outcomes for all marginalized groups.
Toward a Shared Commitment to Gender-Responsive Agroforestry
The path forward is clear. Building resilient landscapes and communities requires gender-responsive agroforestry that recognizes women's rights and leadership. Stakeholders must work together to support women's access to land, resources, and decision-making; invest in gender-transformative programs; promote policies that deliver practical equity; and partner with organizations like EcoLogic to scale impact and amplify women's leadership, building stronger, more equitable communities and healthier forests.
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