Numerous articles and studies have demonstrated how rural women are disproportionately affected by poverty, daily burdens, gender-based violence, and socially ingrained forms of marginalization.
These outcomes occur due to a socially-created hierarchization that labels intersectional identities as inferior within a racialized, colonized, gendered, and globalizing world. Typically, rural women are engaging in unpaid, unrecognized, and gendered work which restricts them to specific spaces, jobs, and socially constructed roles deemed ‘natural’ and expected of them.
Beyond gendered expectations, rural women are also often impacted by “the effects of environmental and climate change” (UN Women 2018: np). These outcomes affect crucial resources needed for self, familial, cultural, and environmental survival.
Furthermore, due to a changing world with specific interests, struggles, and focus groups: the experiences, roles, and possibilities for rural women are concealed and rendered unimportant.
Considering these identity-based, social, and environmental exclusions emphasized by hegemonic belief systems, external priorities, and power relations, centering rural women’s experiences and roles through sustainable livelihood projects is agential and necessary. This framework focuses on their pre-existing, evolving, and future-based knowledges, as well as their essential contributions for cultural, individual, communal, and environmental survival.
These tools are informed by their socialization, traditions, abilities, and lived experiences. For example, “women have a better understanding of the nutritional and cultural needs of their family and community. They are therefore better positioned to identify the challenges and solutions needed to improve their lives and those of their families and communities in rural areas” (UN Environment Programme 2020: np). Thus, rural women can be involved in cultural revitalization projects to express one’s culture, identity, traditions, and needs. Furthermore, these projects highlight Indigenous culture and practices, centering the women’s diverse forms of expression, identity, and experiences. By including rural women in projects focused on sustainable livelihoods in public spaces, their agency and economic independence is strengthened as they gain income.
These knowledge-based practices are existent within the home and traditional roles of care, however, they extend from traditionally gendered spaces.
For example, “rural women’s contributions are also essential for conserving biodiversity as they play a leading role as ecosystem managers. They are guardians and defenders of water, seeds, forests, territories and ecosystems” (UN Environment Programme 2020: np).
Their involvement in protecting natural resources strengthens the women’s futurity and diverse needs.
This new access and visibility gained through sustainable livelihoods and its associated actions makes social, individual, familial, and environmental changes. By centering the roles and importance of rural women, this framework and actions challenge traditional gendered notions of dependence and unequal power relations within private and public spheres, relationships, and interactions. Projects focused on sustainable livelihoods center rural women as key and agential actors in making visible changes for themselves, their extended kinship relations, their income, and their society.
Glossary:
Hegemonic: Dominant and powerful belief systems and groups within society and interactions.
Socialization: Context where a person was raised and the impacts this has on their identity, relationships, and social ranking.
Agency: Independence, ability, and access in making decisions and engaging in actions for one’s identity and belief system.
To support this essential initiative.
