The principles of equality and non-discrimination are at the heart of human rights. This includes addressing and finding solutions for deep-rooted forms of discrimination that have affected the most vulnerable people in societies, including women and girls, indigenous peoples, people of African descent, LGBTI people, migrants and people with disabilities, among others.
Equality, inclusion and non-discrimination, in other words - a human rights-based approach to development - is the best way to reduce inequalities and resume our path towards realising the 2030 Agenda - United Nations
This project explores how and why women, men and youth engage as entrepreneurs in UPA, which gendered and generational opportunities and challenges they face and how this influences their empowerment - in Kigali, Rwanda.
Agriculture in low- and middle-income countries faces considerable challenges, ranging from increased food demand to climate change impacts, with rapidly evolving scope and complexity. At the same time, the opportunities to address these challenges are significant, which brings optimism that efforts in agricultural research can succeed. One major barrier, however, threatens to inhibit the impacts of agricultural research: the low level of gender equity in low- and middle-income countries.
This project seeks to identify the pathways through which a greater engagement of marginal groups can help to revitalise collective natural resource management. Such bottom-up processes of change could be a vital part of a long-term transition towards more equal access to resources and improved food security in rural households of the Global South.
This short film (English subtitles) below takes you to the rural areas of Burkina Faso, where you will meet some women telling you about the importance of shea trees for independence and how to make shea butter.
"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home -- so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. [...] Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."
Eleanor Roosevelt
This research probes the link between gender and social inequalities, conflict, and how they affect sustainable and resilient climate development pathways. The project involves senior and junior researchers, and academic and non-academic institutions from Sweden and Kenya, Nepal and Nicaragua.
The aim of the project is to identify and describe positive and negative trajectories in (i) rural household income and gender equity, (ii) agricultural production and food security, (iii) water-balance at landscape level and downstream, (iv) carbon sequestration in biomass and soil at landscape level and (v) soil fertility and long-term sustainability of agricultural and forest production, in the Amhara region in Ethiopia.
AgriFoSe2030, Agriculture for Food Security, contributes to sustainable intensification of agriculture for increased food production on existing agricultural land; the aim is to do so by transforming practices toward more efficient use of human, financial and natural resources.
Several of the projects has a clear focus on gender equality and works to improve the independence and rights for women and young people.
Read more about all AgriFoSe-projects here
Research projects to strengthen indigenous people in Sweden and Finland
This project seeks to understand what decolonization could entail for the everyday practice of land use planning in Sami lands.
The rights of indigenous peoples in land and resource decisions have seen growing recognition in international law. To ensure implementation of the new norms, indigenous communities have called for decolonization of land use planning across sectors. Yet, policy reforms have mostly remained fragmented and piecemeal.
ReiGN is a Nordic Centre of Excellence, funded by NordForsk, that covers a wide range of expertise, spanning from genomic, evolutionary theory, life history theory, ecology, natural resource management, archaeology, anthropology, animal breeding, conservation biology, to bio-economy, governance, law and legislation. The overall aim is to understand how climate change and other processes in the Arctic will affect reindeer husbandry in Fennoscandia and how the industry can adapt to these drivers.
