The Gender and Breeding Working Group of the CGIAR Gender and Agriculture Research Network announces a Gender, Breeding and Genomics workshop

Workshop Goal

The goal is to increase the relevance and benefits of plant and animal breeding to poor rural women producers in low-income countries, especially Africa. To this end, the workshop is designed to produce a synthesis of past success and promising novel approaches for incorporating gender considerations into the development of improved crop varieties and animal breeds.

The workshop aims to identify the essential, “must have” ingredients of successful, gender- responsive breeding initiatives and to explore implications of the revolution in genomics for new opportunities and entry points in the breeding research cycle for effective integration of gender.  This topic will be addressed across crop, livestock and fish breeding: see the workshop’s open call for case studies section for more detail on content.

Objectives

1. Identify implications of the revolution in genomics for new opportunities and new entry points in the breeding research cycle for effective integration of gender;
2. Analyse the types of research needed for breeding programs to define and address a target population of gender-differentiated beneficiaries as well as to target biophysical environments;
3. Identify ways to improve gender-responsiveness and impact by sharing and harmonizing  methods and approaches across commodities and regions;
4. Learn from and build on successful cases;
5. Identify gaps in the way in which Universities prepare breeders and social scientists to work together to ameliorate difficulties in properly addressing end user needs.

Outputs

Conclusions, recommendations and lessons from case studies  will be disseminated across and beyond the CGIAR system and its partners to breeders, social scientists and others responsible for the overall management of breeding programs and/or involved in trait characterization and prioritization. The Gender and Breeding Group will subsequently synthesize the results of the workshop in the form of a White Paper with recommendations.

Participants

This will include researchers, marketing experts and managers from diverse social and biophysical research fields and disciplines and a variety of international and national public and private sector Institutions. Participants will either present case studies of different aspects of experience with integrating gender into breeding or keynote talks de