The Living Income Community of Practice and the Anker Research Institute have published a joint briefing paper on The Importance of Gender Equality for Living Incomes in Smallholder Farming Communities (October 2025). The report surfaces the links between gender and living income in smallholder farming communities and provides a detailed action plan to implementing gender- transformative living income programmes.
Human Level’s Take:
Gender equality is not a separate issue to living income: it is central to closing the living-income gap.
Women are equal participants in food production and farming households. However, they are often not considered as such by living income interventions because they are often not registered farmers, they are not often paid for their work, and they have more limited access to land, farming resources and decision-making spaces.
Moving from gender-blind to a gender-responsive and transformative approach to living income is needed. Firstly, to positively impact the rights of women and girls. In addition, to prevent further discrimination negative impacts. And, importantly, to help companies achieve more cost-effective living income actions and resilient supply chains. Gender equality is a strategic lever in living income work.
To begin making this change, companies can, among other actions: (1) identify and assess gender-specific challenges and inequalities in their supply chains, (2) recognise and measure the value of women’s unpaid work and integrate these into cost and income modelling and (3) track progress by capturing gender-disaggregated results.
Applying a gender lens offers the opportunity to spot specific opportunities for intervention to strengthen both farmer and worker rights, advance supply chain resilience, and design more effective sustainability strategies across sectors.
Summary:
Why consider gender when working on living income? The paper argues that identifying gender-specific constraints should be part of any effort to increase incomes among farming households. Firstly, because productivity and incomes for women in agriculture are systematically lower than those of men. However, living income interventions and programmes often ignore gender dynamics and inequalities – risking causing further unintended impacts on women and girls. Additionally, the researchers argue, it simply makes business sense. Gender-responsive programmes are more effective. Addressing gender inequalities can then help build productive, resilient farming households and, by extension, productive and resilient supply chains because women are often contributing to producing the crops and generating household incomes. The goal, instead, should be to advance decent livelihoods for all family members and to identify how doing so for women differs from doing it for men.
What this means for living income interventions and programmes. The paper presents a proposal for how to adapt living income approaches to incorporate gender perspectives. First, it requires adapting the concepts, measurements and intervention approaches used for living income initiatives – specifically, by redefining income to include unpaid activities often carried out by women. Secondly, it requires assessing how gender impacts what is considered income: exploring how women and men contribute to the farm work, identifying gender-specific opportunities and challenges for earning living income, and assessing how and why they have unequal access to land and farming resources – as well as how decisions are made. Finally, the information gathered can be used to design, implement and track progress of living income interventions that recognise existing inequalities, segment interventions and data based on these differences, and value and improve incomes for both women and men’s work.
Companies pathway from a gender-blind to a gender-transformative approach to living income. The report describes specific actions that companies can take to move away from gender-blind approaches to living income. First, companies can become gender-aware by, among others: (1) partnering with organizations with gender expertise, (2) using available public resources to understand the gender context in sourcing locations, (3) promoting access to farming inputs and finance for women farmers, (4) ensuring unpaid family workers and wage workers are included in trainings provided on good agricultural practices and (5) using gender-disaggregated data to measure effectiveness of living income interventions. Once aware, companies can become gender-responsive, they can (among other actions): (1) develop a gender strategy that covers living income programme, (2) conduct full assessment of gender-related risks including potential negative impacts of living income interventions, (3) design living income interventions based on gender analysis and in dialogue with women, men, girls and boys, (4) support gender mainstreaming in producer organizations and promote women’s participation and leadership and (5) engage with men, women and communities to tackle harmful gender norms and stereotypes and enable more equal gender roles and relations in households. Finally, for gender transformative actions, companies can: (1) support the development of sector-wide gender-transformative living income strategies – as is happening in the International Coffee Organization (ICO) Coffee Public-Private Task Force, (2) include the value of currently unpaid work in costs of production and pricing systems, (3) enable access to labour-saving technologies and childcare services, and (4) enable access to social security and health insurance schemes – among other actions and examples listed in the report.
