Plant breeding is experiencing a high level of novelty and innovation at a global scale, reshaping its technical possibilities, goals, and intended impact. A critical aspect of this change involves improving the usefulness of new varieties delivered by public sector breeding to specific customer groups, to achieve faster, more inclusive adoption and equitable benefit sharing in low-income, developing agriculture. The problem addressed by this Collection is that the goal of more inclusive adoption requires breeding to improve its relevance to rural women by implementing gender-intentional breeding. In the past, breeding programs often overlooked the specific preferences, roles, and responsibilities of women in agriculture, although women can be key contributors to farming and livestock management. As a result, new crop varieties or livestock breeds were not always aligned with women’s specific needs, such as ease of cultivation, processing, or storage. Poor alignment with users’ preferences and needs not only hinders the adoption of new varieties but limits their possibilities to benefit from these innovations.
There are no blueprints for gender-intentional breeding although important principles and approaches have been elaborated in the past five years. Consequently, it is important to take stock, to understand how gender-intentional breeding is developing in practice, and to create resources for learning what works and can inform future strategy. This knowledge gap can only be addressed by a thorough analysis of concrete experience in actual breeding programs. Gender-intentional breeding aims to ensure that plant breeding takes the implications of gender differences in developing agriculture into consideration in variety design, development, and deployment, including seed systems. New varieties do not need to be designed exclusively “for women” but they do need to satisfy women users as well as men users. This means breeding needs to be inclusive when addressing preferences and needs related to production, processing, marketing, and consumption. Making the transition from traditional to gender-intentional breeding requires innovation on many fronts including changes in individual perspectives on gender; transformation of disciplinary boundaries and use of interdisciplinary approaches; and structural reforms to decision-making processes and actor involvement. Novel working relationships, methods, procedures, and policies are involved. Learning by doing is a feature of this process.
Contributors to this Volume are, therefore, invited to submit Case Studies that reflect on their concrete experience with implementing gender-intentional breeding, to address these questions
• How is gender-intentional breeding being implemented?
• What approaches, practices, methods, and ways of working have been effective?
• What can we learn from practices that have not worked as well as expected?
• How can national breeding programs and NGO breeding efforts be supported to expand the implementation of gender-intentional breeding?
• What important lessons have been learned?
Case Studies will document and analyze the ups and downs of practical experience with the application of gender analysis to plant breeding to provide insights into how this effort affects breeding objectives, targets, procedures, and results. The Cases will take stock of how gender has been integrated into breeding programs at different scales, in different crops, and contrasting institutional settings. Reflection on what has been learned from past experience and what needs to be done to apply these lessons in the future will be a key feature of each Case Study, to inform strategy for further integration of gender in breeding.
To fully understand the scope of gender-intentional plant breeding, explore this collection alongside its complementary counterpart:
Gender Intentional Crop Breeding: From Integration To Institutional Innovation, which together provide a complete view of both practical case studies and theoretical insights necessary for advancing gender equity in agricultural research.