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| FACTSHEET: Biodiversity for Development: The Gender Dimension |
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| Author: |
UNDP, 2005-03-01
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| Title: |
FACTSHEET: Biodiversity for Development: The Gender Dimension |
| Publisher: |
UNDP BDP Gender Unit, 2 pages
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| Type: |
Outreach
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| Country / Region: |
Global
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| Categories: |
Ecosystems,
Conservation,
Women
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| Themes/Issues: |
Biodiversity,
Gender
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| Date Posted: |
2007-01-02 |
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The loss of biodiversity has a disproportionate impact on women. The ways in which water scarcity and contamination and deforestation make women’s water and fuel gathering tasks more taxing and timeconsuming is well documented. The centrality of a healthy, biologically diverse environment to the spiritual and cultural belief systems of indigenous communities, particularly indigenous women, has also received significant attention.
Less widely understood is women’s role as custodians of plant resources and as reservoirs of traditional knowledge on edible and medicinal plants. As farmers and managers of the home, women predominate as gardeners, herbalists and gatherers of wild plants. They also have a leading role in plant breeding, conservation and domestication.
In societies that depend upon food gathering as opposed to cultivation,women provide almost 80 percent of all the wild vegetable food collected. Home gardens, which women tend, have greater species diversity than cultivated fields, and are central to the transmission of knowledge and survival skills from mothers to daughters.
The World Health Organization estimates that four out of five people in Africa use plant medicines for their primary health care needs, and herbal specialists are usually women. Rural women produce between 60 percent and 80 percent of food in developing countries, and in their role of farmers, they improve and adapt plant varieties, cultivate plants, and store and exchange seeds.
Men and women know and value different things about the natural environment. Women’s use and knowledge of biodiversity are, however, comparatively invisible. Moreover, despite their reliance on natural resources, rural women often have limited access to and control over them.
The commercial uses to which men generally put land, water, plants and animals are privileged over the domestic uses to which women commonly put such resources.
PROMOTING CONSERVATION AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT:
Women have the broadest knowledge of local plants. They are responsible for most of the conservation and management of the domesticated and wild plants that humans use, and their survival strategies are highly dependent upon biodiversity. These factors make women a key ‘entry point’ for biodiversity programming.
Yet many women’s advocates and experts argue that the Convention on Biodiversity and the Bonn Guidelines are not gender-sensitive. In addition, although many projects have addressed women’s immediate needs as users of environmental services and managers of natural resources, few environmental efforts have addressed critical underlying questions of ownership and control.
Indeed, some projects have taken an instrumentalist approach that overburdens women. Where gender has been mainstreamed, the chief reason for doing so has been to make environmental initiatives more effective and sustainable – not to promote equality. Biodiversity projects offer opportunities to empower women and improve their standing in their communities.
But to seize these opportunities, UNDP and its partners must develop more systematic strategies for bringing the voices and views of women into the creation of national strategies for sustainable development. They must help make visible women’s expertise as farmers and herbalists as well as the role they play in biodiversity management and conservation (as the Equator Initiative is doing), and ensure that women are involved in participatory resource planning. They must strengthen policy and regulatory frameworks to protect and enlarge poor women’s access to natural resources. More critically, UNDP needs to address the strategic issues of land tenure, inheritance rights and accountable, transparent local governance.
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