NCBA - National Cooperative Business Association

06/22/2021 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 06/22/2021 12:09

NCBA CLUSA’s Gender Specialist Elizabeth Salazar will lead a session on the USAID FTF Kawolor Project at the 2021 Cracking the Nut Conference

NCBA CLUSA Gender Specialist Elizabeth Salazar.

Cracking the Nut 2021: Building Resilient Food, Water, and Energy Systems by Connexus Corporation is a four half-day virtual learning event from November 15-18, 2021. This year's conference will highlight how public and private sector initiatives can create resilient systems that support rural and agricultural development and will focus on three tracks:

1. Applying technology and digital solutions

2. Leveraging private sector and multi-stakeholder investments

3. Ensuring inclusion of vulnerable populations

This year, NCBA CLUSA's Gender Specialist and Senior Program Manager Elizabeth Salazar will lead a session with Magatte Gueye, gender specialist from Helen Keller International, to highlight factors of women's empowerment that can lead to improved family nutrition. Senegal has made significant strides in promoting gender equality, yet women's lack of household-level decision-making continues to serve as an impediment for their empowerment. Meanwhile, evidence shows that ill-informed decision-making related to food provisions and dietary diversity has a negative impact on family nutrition.

The USAID Feed the Future (FTF) Senegal Kawolor project, which aims to fight malnutrition, food insecurity and poverty, has taken a multi-pronged food systems approach to address household decision-making and family nutrition. Kawolor employed quantitative and qualitative methods to explore factors of women's empowerment for better family nutrition, including leadership in the community, control over use of income, time use, and ownership of assets. Additionally, focus groups with women and men were conducted under the evaluation of a participatory gender-transformative curriculum -Nurturing Connections.

The session leaders will explore the project's approaches to engage community members, couples, women, and men on family nutrition and present quantitative and qualitative methods for evaluating these approaches.

Cracking the Nut 2021 will provide a demand‐driven, collaborative learning space where participants share experiences and best practices on innovative approaches to expand food production, manage water resources, and generate clean energy in ways that increase rural incomes and improve equitable access to sustainable sources of food, water, and energy. Early bird registration ends June 30, secure your ticket today:

Register here