Barriers to resilience: The impact of gender inequality on food security. CONCERN Worldwide 2015

In 2013 and 2014, Concern Worldwide explored how a range of factors may enhance or diminish community resilience in West Darfur, Sudan, and Sila, Chad. This paper demonstrates the links between gender and risks to food security, and shows how gender-based vulnerability is manifested across four key areas of household and community life. Drawing on Concern’s wider programmatic experience, this paper also provides examples from Niger, Ethiopia and Tanzania of promising practice in addressing gender inequality and proposes a series of recommendations, addressed to players with direct influence on resilience programmes and policies. These include governments of food insecure countries, policy makers at country and international levels, and humanitarian, international development and donor communities.