ALINe is supporting the World Food Programme (WFP) in the development of the Purchase for Progress (P4P) global gender strategy. Through the P4P initiative, WFP is using its purchasing power to offer smallholder farmers opportunities to access agricultural markets, become competitive players in those markets and thus improve their livelihoods. P4P provides a particularly appropriate vehicle to economically empower female smallholder farmers, but the challenge however, remains how to most effectively achieve this goal.
WFP has identified 8 core activities that it believes to be particularly effective and beginning February 2011, ALINe will provide P4P with specific guidance on how these suggested activities can be adapted to account for local and cultural differences in the 21 pilot countries where P4P is currently being implemented and build towards a P4P global strategy. ALINe will also undertake fieldwork in Ethiopia, Mali and Guatemala, to ‘ground truth’ and contextualise key assumptions, focusing on the operational aspects of the strategy and on the impact of P4P on women's empowerment and access to markets. This work will feed into a broader scope of work that the WFP Gender Service has commissioned the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) BRIDGE Programme to carry out on its behalf, to advise on how to mainstream gender across key dimensions of WFP’s work at field level and how to build capacity of WFP staff to ensure the gender mainstreaming is effective.
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