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Rural development
Fostering gender equality
Traditionally, it is women in developing countries who bear the brunt of the responsibility for food, from production to preparation and marketing. In rural regions they usually face this task alone, as the men often go to the cities to look for work. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), women produce more than half of all the world's food, and in Africa the figure could be as high as 80 per cent.
Yet, although women produce most of the food, they own only a small percentage of the land and hold fewer than two per cent of land rights around the globe. It is their husbands or male relatives who own the land or the land use rights.
Even where women have been granted an independent right to land under the state legal system, they often cannot enforce to that right in the traditional legal systems that generally apply in the rural regions in which they live. Women are also often discriminated against when it comes to access to education or loans.
For successful rural development, there must then be changes in gender roles, allocation of duties and responsibilities. If rural development measures are to be effective in the long term, women must be involved to a great extent.
Equal rights, equal obligations, equal opportunities and equal power for women and men is a fundamental principle of German development cooperation. Gender equality is a cross-cutting issue that is taken into account in all areas of German development cooperation.
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