Supporting Women-Led Innovations in Farming and rural Territories

Women, in all of their diversity, play a central role in agriculture and food systems in rural areas. Their knowledge, skills, labour and leadership, however, are frequently invisible and undervalued. At present, the European agricultural sector is characterized by high levels of inequality. Women remain under-represented in agricultural associations and, as a result, their perspectives and rights are not reflected in policies, programmes and legal frameworks. The exclusion of women working on family farms from social security schemes and the low levels of female farm ownership are indicative of persistent structural inequalities in rural areas. SWIFT’s overall objective is to foster transitions towards sustainable, balanced and inclusive development of rural areas in Europe by favouring the deployment of women-led innovations acting for change in agriculture, promoting gender equality in rural areas from an intersectional, feminist and human rights-based perspective, and facilitating a change of framing in agriculture to address the social realities that perpetuate inequalities. SWIFT focuses on grassroots innovations in rural areas that are led by women and aim at overcoming the barriers women and other social groups find in agriculture while building sustainable food systems. We focus on those innovations because they fulfil the main objectives of SWIFT: firstly, making visible women actions in rural areas that contribute to enhancing territorial cohesion and enabling a just and sustainable transition of food systems and rural areas that leave no-one behind; secondly, those bottom-up community-led innovations empower women to develop, test and upscale solutions that address their challenges in locally adapted ways in agriculture; thirdly, through the analysis of those innovations we can provide empirical evidence that contribute to change current framings of food and explore tools and ways to support new policy responses. SWIFT will go beyond the state of the art both in developing new theoretical frameworks, participatory methodologies co-designed with stakeholders and also practical tools that can facilitate gender mainstreaming in agricultural and rural policies that foster a transition towards sustainable, just and inclusive development of rural areas in Europe.