We build, boost and transform women’s and their families’ resilience to climate change for empowering livelihoods
Poverty & Food Security
Poverty is deeply rooted in rural Sudan. Nearly 60% of the country’s population living below the national poverty line of SDG 114.8 per month (USD 0.60 or less per day) are found in the rural areas – of which over 70% are women engaging in conventional small-scale rain-fed farming.
In an ever extreme climate, these women farmers and their families face a high degree of food insecurity and income fluctuation due to their engagement in such a weather-dependent agricultural practice. This has led to increasing seasonal migration of adult men looking for work, leaving women behind at home.
Supporting 5-10 family members on average with no means of mitigating or adapting to risk and shocks, the climate change impacts on the livelihoods of women farmers in rural Sudan are deepening.
While such a context may situate women as victims, we rather see them as ‘game changer’ to build resilient livelihoods through increased agricultural productivity, food security and household income. In so doing, we support women farmers by providing a holistic package, namely climate resilient agricultural input package, hands-on training on conservation agricultural techniques, access to finance and access to market.
Most importantly, we prioritize to secure sufficient ‘time’ for women farmers to spend at home by facilitating access to productive machinery, accompanied by male drivers. Further, we train women farmer leaders to pass the knowledge and techniques onto the fellow women farmers and their families.
Income Generation & Skills Development
In alleviating poverty among marginalized women and their family, our work focuses on breaking the cycle of inter-generational poverty through resilient livelihoods by improving income security, diversifying income sources and strengthening income generation abilities.
Securing a stable and diverse source of income will not just pave the way for women in rural Sudan to up rise from the long-lasting poverty. It enables them to improve their family living conditions, such as purchasing school uniforms and textbooks to enroll children in schools and feeding them nutritious meals. It enables them to gain control over household decision making. Fighting and mitigating inter-generational poverty is thus a crucial step towards equality and social-economic justice.
To maximize such empowering impacts around income generation, we facilitate skills development opportunities for women and girls – with climate change effects in mind.
We train women farmers in conservation agricultural techniques and helped them establish market linkages with local and international buyers. We have reached out to female prisoners – one of the most marginalized and forgotten groups of people – to develop skills in eco-friendly textile and handcraft production. Further, we provide vocational training for youth in different income generation activities, including fishery and horticulture.
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