Sustainable and Resilient Value Chains: Gender Equality
This report explores how voluntary sustainability standards (VSSs) and private sector actors can advance gender equality and women's economic empowerment in global agricultural supply chains.
Key Messages
-
Non-discrimination requirements and equal rights provisions are now widely embedded in certification systems and adopted by the private sector. However, these measures often focus on compliance and risk mitigation rather than addressing the underlying structures that perpetuate inequality.
-
Private sector action is strong on prevention and risk recognition, but transformative, structural approaches remain rare—mostly concentrated among smaller, mission-driven companies. These approaches offer greater potential to address the root causes of inequality.
-
Requirements addressing care-related policies and upgrading the wages and status of work traditionally performed by women are the least covered categories across the VSSs examined. This points to a gap between non-discrimination and the transformative changes needed for economic empowerment.
-
No single actor or instrument can deliver women’s economic empowerment alone—and women producers themselves are central actors in this process, not passive recipients.
Gender inequality remains a sustainability challenge in global agricultural value chains. Women contribute substantially to agricultural production yet continue to face barriers in access to land, finance, training, leadership positions, decent work, and decision-making power.
Through a four-phase framework (Plan/Prepare, Respond, Recover, and Adapt), this report assesses the role of selected VSSs and private sector companies across five commodities in supporting women's economic empowerment. It also explores how their approaches can be combined to advance broader sustainability and resilience objectives.
The framework offers a way to understand how these actors engage with gender-related risks by
- planning and preparing to identify and prevent gender inequalities through risk assessments and gender policies before harm or exclusion occurs,
- responding with timely corrective action to harms and rights violations that drive women’s economic exclusion,
- recovering by restoring women’s economic positions, participation, and assets following exclusion or harm, and
- adapting by embedding long-term structural changes that prevent exclusion from recurring.
The report provides recommendations for organizations and companies to strengthen measures across the framework and further advance gender equality and women's economic empowerment within global value chains.
Participating experts
You might also be interested in
Sustainable and Resilient Value Chains: Deforestation
This report examines how voluntary sustainability standards and private sector actors can prevent, respond to, recover from, and adapt to deforestation risks in global value chains.
Smallholders and the European Union Deforestation Regulation
This report examines smallholders’ compliance challenges related to the European Union Deforestation Regulation and identifies pathways to support their continued inclusion in deforestation-free supply chains.
How a National Organic Strategy is Connecting Malagasy Farming to the World
New initiatives are helping smallholder farmers in Madagascar to achieve the scale and integrity required to get their foot in the door in international organic markets.
Voluntary Sustainability Standards and Export Promotion
How integrating voluntary sustainability standards into export measures can help producers adopt better practices and access key markets.