Action on the global food crisis is sorely needed, but the UK and world governments risk overlooking innovative solutions by failing to centre women’s rights organisations.
CARE International UK has responded to today’s announcement by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) at the start of the Global Partnerships Conference in London.
Dorothy Sang, Head of Advocacy and Policy at CARE International UK said:
“The Government’s efforts to unlock new money for urgent global challenges is welcome – we now need to work together to make sure that money reaches the women who understand their communities and can create sustainable change.
“Ministers are right to raise the alarm about the coming food crisis, but they need to think more radically. Like so many global challenges, food insecurity is a deeply gendered crisis: CARE’s work has consistently found that countries with higher gender inequality face worse hunger and safety situations, while in moments of crisis women still eat last and least. Yet the solutions raised so far risk repeating failures of the past by continuing to overlook the expertise of women’s rights organisations in building community resilience and responding to emergencies.
“After promises that gender equality would run throughout this Conference and FCDO’s new approach to partnerships, women’s rights organisations shouldn’t be consigned to the margins.
“This conference is rightly looking at different ways to work together to drive peace, resilience and justice on a global scale. But without the right voices in the room, the billions raised could struggle to deliver the transformative change we need. There must be room in the tent to both raise finances at scale while also putting the experiences and expertise of women at the centre of solutions that last.”
Media Enquiries
Please direct press enquiries or interview requests to press.uk@careinternational.org or contact Omer Hamid on +44 (0)7772047292.
Notes to Editors
- CARE International UK is part of the global CARE confederation that works to save lives, defeat poverty and achieve social justice.
- Recent CARE reports have called for action for women and girls in hunger crisis including in Sudan and Gaza. We have also published research which found that 150 million more women go hungry than men and established the link between gender inequality and food insecurity.
- When the world faced its last global emergency (Covid-19), less than a quarter of the world’s national disaster committees included women. That gap matters. The types of innovative finance tools being discussed today, like disaster risk financing and parametric insurance hold real promise, mobilising funds before disaster strikes, enabling faster, more equitable responses
