"IFAD is promoting best practices in cross-sectoral collaboration - strengthening gender equality in national biodiversity programming," said IFAD's Climate and Environment Specialist, Paxina Chileshe.
Paxina was speaking at the UN's Biodiversity Conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, at an event focusing on gender and capacity building.
"This event highlights best practice examples from different countries demonstrating cross-sectoral collaboration and programming focused on strengthening gender equality and women's empowerment in implementation of national biodiversity plans," explained Chileshe.
"In IFAD we are mainstreaming gender in 100 per cent of our projects and programmes," said Chilese. "To do this we run gender analysis in all of our projects and this in turn guides our investments to make sure we promote gender equality."
For IFAD's target audience, which is smallholder farmers in the developing world, most of the labour comes from women.
"IFAD hopes to support women claiming their rightful position as custodians of biodiversity, it is a key element for us to include gender equality in all our programmes as we also know the important role women play in preserving biodiversity."
"Regarding capacity building we reach smallholders through farmer organization and existing associations. Our Gender Action Learning System is included in our projects and through this we improve awareness and provide the skills and knowledge to achieve gender equality."
Cross-sectoral planning and work is an important part of the achievement of sustainable development objectives, as reflected in the integrated approach to the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Yet it often remains a challenging process in practice, limited by available resources, organizational structures and established ways of working.
There are repeated calls for capacity building to support country and relevant actors to better address gender considerations in biodiversity policy, planning and programming efforts, yet there are insufficient resources to address the full scope of such needs.
"One lower-cost solution is to tap into the wealth of knowledge and expertise in national gender institutions, to strengthen knowledge and understanding of counterparts working on biodiversity-related issues, to support more equitable and inclusive biodiversity outcomes."
Women have to take up their role and supporting women’s groups, in all projects we have gender data which gives us the information we need.