autonomisation économique des femmes

Women and girls work incredibly hard to care for others. Not only is this work unpaid, but it's often not seen as real work at all. If we valued care work the same as other work, it would be worth nearly $11 trillion US dollars a year. But its true value is much greater. To fight inequality and beat poverty, we must make care count.

Asgedech Wolde Tensay won the 2015 Female Food Heroes award in Ethiopia for her exemplary efforts to increase productivity in her farm by using new technologies. Born and raised in a small village far from the capital Addis Ababa, she dreamed of a very different life to the one she is living now.

Carolina Chelele won Season 5 of Female Food Heroes in Tanzania and has become a community leader. Now that she's a winner, the mother of four and the sole provider for her household educates family members and other people in her village about different farming methods.

Monica Maigari is a smallholder farmer and teacher from Madakiya, Nigeria. In 2014, her accomplishments as a farmer and women’s advocate won her recognition as an Oxfam Female Food Hero. Since then, she has deepened her local community involvement while sharing her expertise with influential audiences.

On a planet with enough food for everyone, 821 million people – one in nine – go hungry day after day, year after year. It doesn't have to be this way. The Female Food Heroes competition is an innovative Oxfam project which shows how local women farmers can help end world hunger.

Oxfam conducted research on government and donor investments in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania. It found that governments and donors are failing to provide women farmers with relevant and adequate support for farming and adapting to climate change.

Women farmers play a central role in small-scale agriculture. But they are held back by barriers that prevent them from feeding their families and reinvesting in their livelihoods. A real support would protect their rights, boost their productivity and unleash their potential to fight hunger, poverty and climate change.

Rwandan women head close to a third of agricultural households and provide almost two thirds of the labour on family farms. Despite this, they have very little control over the sale of cash crops. With the support of Oxfam, the women members of the Tuzamurane cooperative grow and sell pineapples together and are no longer trapped in a low income cycle.

Despite some important progress in recent years, in no country have women achieved economic equality with men, and women are still more likely than men to live in poverty. Gender inequality in work costs women in developing countries $9 trillion a year – a sum which would provide a massive boost to the global economy.

Women’s economic empowerment could reduce poverty for everyone. In order to achieve it, we need to first fix the current broken economic model which is undermining gender equality and causing extreme economic inequality.