Nourishing the Nexus: A Feminist Analysis of Gender, Nutrition and Agri-food Development Policies and Practices

This article applies feminist critiques to investigate how agri-food and nutritional development policy and interventions address gender inequality. Based on the analysis presented of global policies and examples of project experiences from Haiti, Benin, Ghana, and Tanzania, we find that the widespread emphasis on gender equality in policy and practice generally ascribes to a gender narrative that includes static, homogenized conceptualizations of food provisioning and marketing. These narratives tend to translate to interventions that instrumentalize women’s labor by funding their income generating activities and care responsibilities for other benefits like household food and nutrition security without addressing underlying structures that cause their vulnerability, such as disproportionate work burdens, land access challenges, among many others. We argue that policy and interventions must prioritize locally contextualized social norms and environmental conditions, and consider further the way wider policies and development assistance shape social dynamics to address the structural causes of gender and intersecting inequalities.