CARE's Strategy: Food, Water & Climate Change

CARE’s 2020 Food and Nutrition Security (FNS) Strategy recognizes gender inequalities and climate change as major contributors to rising food and nutrition insecurity, which exacerbates poverty, vulnerability and injustice. The strategy sets out to reach 50 million poor and vulnerable people and increase their food and nutrition security and their resilience to climate change by 2020.

As farmers, caregivers and producers, women play a key role in feeding the world. Yet, they have unequal access to the resources, services and assets that could increase their yields, incomes and caregiving skills. CARE’s FNS strategy seeks to work with women, girls, men and boys to free women’s potential to benefit society as a whole. CARE works to build food systems that are sustainable, productive, equitable and resilient (SuPER). CARE works through the following four technical pathways to build SuPER food systems, and each technical pathway incorporates gender:

Nutrition

CARE will focus on reducing the impact of malnutrition on women, infants and children, recognizing that positive nutritional status require food security, climate change resilience, livelihoods, health, care practices and gender equality. This includes work to address gender and power inequalities that affect the nutritional status of women, girls, boys and men.

Sustainable economies

CARE will support income and employment generation, including helping women to make use of markets in order to increase food and nutrition security and better withstand crises. CARE will help vulnerable people build assets, acquire skills, access markets, and develop coping mechanisms to respond to shocks. This will encompass inclusive value chain approaches that incorporate resilience to climate change and strengthen the role of women in the value chain. This also includes promoting access to inclusive financial services to catalyze sustainable economic participation for women and men.

Agriculture systems

CARE will work to strengthen sustainable, climate-resilient smallholder agriculture systems to improve food and nutrition security for producers, workers and consumers – male and female, urban and rural.  CARE will promote sustainable and nutrition-sensitive intensification that increases agricultural yields, builds adaptive capacity in the face of climate change (and increasingly frequent shocks), and preserves and enhances ecosystems.

Humanitarian action

Recognizing that gender issues both exacerbate and are exacerbated by humanitarian crises, CARE promotes changes to deep gender biases that affect food security across humanitarian activities. CARE will respond to emergencies with quality food and nutrition security interventions that meet the needs of women, girls, men and boys – and contribute to sustainable recovery that builds community resilience to risks such as conflict or climate change.