Photo credit: CIAT/Neil Palmer.

Last week, while leaders of CGIAR research program were meeting with donors and partners in Montpellier, France, to discuss progress and directions for their programs, gender specialists in agricultural research for development were also meeting in this Mediterranean coastal city. The gender experts came from the CGIAR Consortium, centres and programs, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the World Bank and universities. They described their successes and challenges in setting a tighter focus on gender equity, shared useful methods and proposed minimum standards for high-quality research in gender and agriculture.

Among the achievements the assembled gender experts described are:

• including women’s preferences for rice varieties and traits in breeding trials leading to the production of new rice varieties in the Philippines
  by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)
• mainstreaming gender in collaborative forest management to give women and other marginalized groups opportunities to drive change in Uganda
  by…