1.
Poverty, food security and nutrition –
linking SDGs through women
agricultural workers
Haris Gazdar
Seminar on Sustainable Development
Goals, 18 November 2017, AKU,
Karachi

2.
Poverty, food security and nutrition
• Steady decline in money-metric
poverty rates (SDGs 1.1 and 1.2)
• But slow/stagnant trends in hunger,
food security, nutrition (SDGs 2.1,
2.2), despite progress in agriculture
(SDG 2.3)
• Promising progress in social
protection (SDG 1.3)
Goal 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere
1.1 Eradicate extreme (money metric) poverty
1.2 Reduce by half the proportion in poverty in
all its dimensions according to national
definitions
1.3 Social protection systems
Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security, improved nutrition; sustainable agriculture
2.1 Ensure access by all to safe, nutritious and sufficient food
2.2 End stunting and wasting, nutritional needs of pregnant and lactating women
2.3 Double agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers….women
…including through secure and equal access to land, markets and opportunities

3.
Women’s agricultural work and nutrition
• Positive: women’s consumption choices pro-
nutrition
• Negative: women’ energy requirements unmet
• Intrahousehold distribution, getting behind SDG 1.1
• Negative: work-care time trade-off
• Burden of unpaid care/domestic work (SDG 5.4)
• Women’s Work and Nutrition (WWN) Survey
• Qualitative research in Punjab and Sindh
• Representative sample of irrigated rural areas of
Sindh
• Relationship between women’s (agricultural work)
and their nutrition and the nutrition of their children
Goal 5:Achieve gender equality
and empower all women and
girls
5.4 Recognize and value unpaid
care and domestic work
through the provision of public
services, infrastructure and
social protection policies and
the promotion of shared
responsibility within the
household and the family as
nationally appropriate

4.
Research findings
• High level of gender specialisation of agricultural work
• Women’s work: Livestock, weeding, cotton/vegetable harvest
• Women and men’s work: wheat, rice harvesting
• Much higher rates of women’s work participation than
measured in national data
• Asking about ’work’ versus ‘activities’
• National data:‘contributory family help’
• Correlation between women’s work in intensive
agricultural activities and malnutrition
• Women who worked in cotton-harvesting had significantly
lower BMI than others (SDG 2.1)
• When they worked during pregnancy their new-borns were
significantly more likely to be smaller (stunting SDG 2.2)

5.
Discussion
• Harsh trade-off
• Good nutrition needs resources and time
• Families desperately trying to provide both
• Price paid by women – and through them by children
• Recognition is key to start redressing
• Gender inequality and poor outcomes
• Low-wage, unpaid work not just poor outcomes for women, but for all
• Recognition will be resisted, but has potential benefits for all
• Analytical frameworks
• Time and effort – not just land – as key economic resource, particularly of women
• Growth strategy cannot take for granted these will be valued

6.
Implications
• Data
• Measure women’s ‘economic’ contribution properly even if
no consensus on unpaid care/domestic work
• National policies/programmes
• Recognise, protect, promote rights of women workers –
important not only for women, but for nutrition
• Global system
• See clearer links, negative as well as positive, between
different development goals (e.g SDGs 1, 2 and 5) – SDG 1
improved, not so SDG 2, partly because of issues in SDG 5
remaining unaddressed
• Be explicit about time and labour being economic
resources (e.g. in SDG 1.4, 5A), and about who gets value
from agricultural productivity (SDG 2.3)
5.A Undertake reforms
to give women equal
rights to economic
resources, as well as
access to ownership and
control over land and
other forms of property,
financial services,
inheritance and natural
resources, in accordance
with national laws
5.4 Recognize and value
unpaid care and
domestic work…..