The Impact Of Covid 19 On Gender Equality And Food Security In The Arab Region With A Focus On The Sudan And Iraq

A Regional Rapid Gender Analysis (RGA) is conducted with a special focus on Iraq and the Sudan as case studies to provide information about the different needs, capacities and coping strategies of women, men, boys and girls in a crisis. Rapid Gender Analysis is built up progressively: using a range of primary and secondary information to understand gender roles and relations and how they may change during a crisis. It provides practical programming and operational recommendations to meet the different needs of women, men, boys and girls and to ensure we ‘do no harm’.? Rapid gender analysis uses the tools and approaches of gender analysis fameworks and adapts them to the shorter time-frames, rapidly changing contexts, and insecure environments that often?characterise?humanitarian interventions, to ensure that data is available to inform humanitarian response efforts and contributing to recovery and preparedness efforts.

This assessment is the result of a collaboration between the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and CARE commissioned with the intent of exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender equality and food security in Yemen using CARE's Rapid Gender Analysis (RGA) Toolkit. The collaboration builds on an innovative partnership established in 2020 between FAO, the World Food Programme (WFP) and CARE to understand the gender-differentiated impacts of COVID-19 on livelihood and food security in the Arab region, with a focus on cases in Iraq and the Sudan. With the passage of time, and due to the particularly complex situation brought on by the numerous crises affecting Yemen (armed conflict, natural disasters and an economic crisis), the study provided the opportunity to reflect on how overlapping and multiple crises generate gender-differentiated impacts on livelihood opportunities, employment, food security and protection risks. While the study methodology originally focused on the impact of COVID-19, the analysis of primary and secondary data provided an opportunity to investigate the connection between different vulnerability multipliers, particularly the ongoing conflict.

This book documents how COVID-19 impacts gender, agriculture, and food systems across the globe with on-the-ground accounts and personal reflections from scholars, practitioners, and community members. During the coronavirus pandemic with many people under lockdown, continual agricultural production and access to food remain essential. Women provide much of the formal and informal work in agriculture and food production, distribution, and preparation often under precarious conditions. A cadre of scholars and practitioners from across the globe provide their timely observations on these issues as well as more personal reflections on its impact on their lives and work. Four major themes emerge from these accounts and are interwoven throughout: the pervasiveness of food insecurity, the ubiquity of women’s care work, food justice, and policies and research that can that can result in a resilience that reimagines the future for greater gender and intersectional equality. We identify what lessons we can learn from this global pandemic about research and practices related to gender, food, and agricultural systems to strive for more equitable arrangements. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working on gender and food and agriculture during this global pandemic and beyond. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The new Regional Gender Equality Strategy and Action Plan 2024–2027 for the Near East and North Africa (NENA) region aims to ensure its applicability across the diverse and complex contexts within the NENA region. Recognizing the multifaceted nature of the region, characterized by a spectrum of situations, the strategy incorporates a precise set of indicators that extend until 2027. This extended timeframe facilitates a systematic review of the strategy, allowing for adjustments and refinements to be made, ensuring its continued relevance and effectiveness until the targeted horizon of 2030. A collaborative agreement between FAO colleagues and the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization (ITCILO) brought in experts in gender equality and results-based management to develop this strategy.

A comprehensive study of the gendered economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Middle East and North Africa.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

It is widely recognized that periods of crisis affect men and women differently, mediated by their access to resources and information, as well as social and institutional structures that may systematically disadvantage women from being able to access relief, institutional support, and rehabilitation. To capture the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, we conducted phone surveys in seven countries spread across Asia and Africa. The study was designed as a longitudinal panel study with five rounds of data collection in Ghana, Nepal, Nigeria, and Senegal, and three rounds of data collection in Kenya, Niger, and Uganda. Both men and women were administered the same survey, with some modifications made across countries to adapt to local contexts. This report gives an overview of our findings covering several topics including income loss, coping strategies, labor and time use, food and water insecurity and child education outcomes. We find widespread reports of income loss, which declined over time, but increased again as countries experienced a resurgence in COVID-19 cases and fatality. We find that households first depleted savings when faced with income loss and over time, use of savings reduced while other measures began to be adopted. Women reported greater food and water insecurity compared to men, including worrying about insufficient food and eating less than usual. This is particularly worrying since a large proportion of women also did not have adequately diverse diets. Moderate to severe water insecurity was reported in many of the countries, and as with food insecurity, women were more likely to report issues with accessing water for drinking and other household activities. In some countries, additional modules were added to capture country specific issues of policy relevance, such agriculture extension, mental health, and child marriage. The results make it clear that proactive investments will be needed, including social safety nets, favorable credit policies, nutrition and water investments, to ensure that the crisis does not further widen the gender gap in resources and achievements in rural areas of low- and middle-income countries.

The labor structure in sub-Saharan Africa is characterized by a high share of informal employment in the rural agricultural sector. The impact of COVID-19 on female employment may not appear to be large as the share of such employment is particularly high among women. Nevertheless, widespread income reduction was observed both in rural and urban households. This could worsen the opportunities for women as husbands’ control over the household resource is the norm. The paper also finds that rural children struggled to continue learning during school closures. Gender-sensitive policies are needed to narrow the gap during and post-pandemic.

The Overview presents the food security and nutrition situation in the Arab States for 2022 when the effects of the war in Ukraine and record-high food and fertilizer prices hit the region that was just recovering from the economic and social shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, hunger in the Arab States has reached its highest level since 2000. The Arab region continued to suffer from the triple burden of malnutrition: besides undernutrition, child overweight/adult obesity and micronutrient deficiencies, such as anaemia. The prevalences of overweight among children and of anaemia among women are higher than the world average. The downward trend of child stunting has slowed down, and recent high food prices might even reverse it. Furthermore, the cost of a healthy diet in the region has been increasing in recent years, and healthy diets are out of reach for almost every other person in the Arab States. The region’s deteriorating food security and nutrition situation calls for the urgent need to transform agrifood systems, making them more resilient to shocks and emerging crises, more efficient, inclusive and sustainable to reach the Sustainable Development Goal 2 targets.

This paper will briefly talk about food shortage and its contribution to food security in the Arab states. Second, it will identify the causes of this problem and discuss how the Arab governments did not engage in long term solutions and did not try to emulate successful models. Third, it will explore the Sudanese model, which was a successful one for the last thirty years. Finally, this paper will offer a suggestion as a solution to the food shortage problem. As the food shortage problem spreads in the Arab states because of shortages in food production, rising costs of agriculture raw materials, possible floods arid others, Arab policymakers can no longer ignore it. Shortages in food productions are caused by the population growth, the lack of agricultural lands in the Arab region, the increase of competition in the global markets of grains and crops. The rising costs of agriculture raw materials are caused by the tariffs and other trade barriers on these imported materials. However, the floods are part of a normal climate cycles in countries such as Egypt, Sudan, Iraq and Lebanon. As a result, the Arab policymakers need to develop strategic plans including government subsidies to resolve the problem. These plans may include the adoption of the Sudan's program, which has shown to be successful for decades.