When Women Transform Agriculture… and Agriculture Transforms Gender Relations

19/08/2026

In Tunisia, FAO is demonstrating that strengthening the skills of rural women alone is not enough. By providing women with the means to learn, make decisions, and share their knowledge, Farmer Field Schools are becoming a powerful driver of both social and agricultural transformation.

For many years, agricultural projects measured their success by the number of women trained. Today, this approach is evolving. Training more women remains important. Enabling them to become agents of change is even more so.

This is the essence of the gender-transformative approach that FAO is progressively implementing in Tunisia through several rural development projects. Behind this sometimes technical expression lies a simple idea: creating the conditions for women to move beyond being project beneficiaries and become leaders who can influence decisions, share their knowledge, and contribute fully to the development of their communities.

Learning Together for Lasting Change

This vision comes to life through Farmer Field Schools, the practical agricultural learning approach developed by FAO in Tunisia in 2019. Here, farmers do not attend traditional classroom-based courses. Instead, they experiment, observe, analyse their practices, and collectively identify solutions adapted to their environment.

In Tunisia, this approach has gone even further. Under the Joint Programme on Rural Women’s Economic Empowerment (JPRWEE), Farmer Field Schools have been designed to respond to the realities of rural women, who often face limited access to training, productive resources, and economic opportunities.

The transformation lies not only in the content of the training, but also in the way it is designed and delivered.

What If Women Became the Trainers?

Rather than considering women as a target group, FAO has chosen to make them key drivers of change. Today, more than 70 percent of trained facilitators are women. They lead Farmer Field Schools, support other women farmers, promote innovations, and are increasingly recognized as resource persons within their communities.

This shift in role generates a much deeper impact than a simple transfer of skills. It strengthens women’s confidence, encourages their voices to be heard, and promotes their more active participation in collective agricultural decision-making.

Solutions Built with Communities

Another major innovation is that training priorities are no longer defined through a top-down approach.

Through Participatory Community Planning (PCP), women themselves identify priority topics based on the needs of their territories. The result is training that is better adapted to local realities, more strongly owned by communities, and more likely to generate lasting change.

Learning methods have also been redesigned. Visual tools, field demonstrations, peer-to-peer exchanges, and practical learning approaches enable the effective participation of all women, including those with limited literacy skills.

When Change Goes Beyond Beneficiaries

The gender-transformative approach does not stop with rural women. It also involves institutions.

By strengthening the capacities of Ministry of Agriculture staff, facilitators, and producer organizations, FAO is helping to embed this approach within national practices.

The cascade training system then allows these skills and approaches to be shared far beyond individual projects.

Results That Speak for Themselves

The experience implemented in Jendouba and Kairouan through the JPRWEE project already demonstrates this momentum.

Across the two governorates, 18 women’s professional organizations have been supported, 44 lead trainers have been mobilized, and more than 600 rural women are directly benefiting from this approach. To date, 102 training days have already been organized, with activities continuing until the end of 2026.

However, the most important result is perhaps the least visible.

When women become trainers, mentors, facilitators, or local leaders, they do not only transform their own pathways. They contribute to changing agricultural practices, strengthening community resilience, and paving the way for more inclusive agriculture.

This is precisely what FAO means by a gender-transformative approach: an approach in which agricultural development is no longer solely about increasing production, but also about creating more equitable opportunities so that women can fully exercise their role in transforming agrifood systems.

Key Messages

• Real change does not begin when women participate in projects, but when they become actors in the decisions that transform their communities.
• Investing in the leadership of rural women means investing in more resilient, inclusive, and sustainable agrifood systems.