Agriculture is currently facing many challenges such as decreased productivity and limited market access to sell produce. This is making it difficult for the sector to serve as a primary source of income for Egypt’s increasingly unemployed population.

While gender equality in Guatemala has improved in recent years, male hegemony still strongly characterizes the culture, particularly in rural areas.

An FAO program in Yemen is helping farmers take advantage of dam water to improve sustainability, while simultaneously giving women more opportunities to participate in the country’s conservative decision-making process.

Kopalapillai Theivarmallar makes her living from fish-smoking in Sri Lanka. Using the traditional fish-smoking method can cause health hazards from smoke inhalation.

With this project, Climate Change Adaptation in Agriculture, FAO and the Global Environment Facility are helping hundreds of women farmers, like Laxmi, to improve their yields and incomes.

In Guatemala, young women and men often hold precarious jobs in the informal rural economy, earning half of the minimum national wage. Increasingly, they try to migrate to urban areas or abroad as a last desperate resort for making a living.

“It is up to us, the women, to find money to feed the family at this time of the year,” explains Sanihan, who lives in the village of Baramadougou, in Mali, with thirteen other members of her family.

On average, women make up about 50 percent of the agricultural labour force in sub-Saharan Africa. However, they are often disadvantaged in their access to productive resources, markets and market information, financial services, technology, training, and

The workshop aimed to raise awareness of the importance of management for adaptation and the sustainable use of natural resources. It also sought to facilitate the critical analysis of women´s role in decision-making.

Around 900 vulnerable women, including from women headed households, are being assisted through an FAO initiative to improve household nutrition and rebuild livelihoods in vulnerable communities.

Across rural Lebanon, FAO is helping women dairy producers and processors to improve standards, diversify output and increase income.

There are nearly 75 000 South Sudanese refugees registered in the provinces of Ituri and Haut-Uélé in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Ms Vieng says she can now call herself a mushroom farmer. Smiling, she holds up one of the bags she learned to prepare during her training on mushroom cultivation, a flush of mushrooms growing from it.

An FAO programme is helping 750 vulnerable households across 36 villages in the Kayes region of Mali. The 18-month programme combines unconditional cash transfers with in-kind livestock inputs such as goats and animal feed.

Growing traditional vegetables like the African eggplant, or gorongo, is helping a group of farmers who were displaced by Boko Haram to regain and improve their livelihoods, food security, and nutrition — along with their smiles.

A set of three videos explores how FAO projects in rural Afghanistan are helping rural farmers — and women in particular — to help themselves.

Gul Baro Bibi looks at her vegetable produce with relief. Her face glows with a sense of achievement as she watches her okra and bottle gourd ready to be harvested.

For 25-year-old Fathia Moafaa, every day is a struggle to make ends meet.

Nejiha is a beneficiary of FAO's "Productive Transfers / CASH +" project in the wilaya of Gorgol, in southern Mauritania. The project, funded by Finland, aims to strengthen the resilience of vulnerable populations in Mauritania and Mali.

“It is a terrifying reality that women in South Sudan have little to no rights,” explains Abdal Monium Osman, FAO Head of Programmes in South Sudan.