Rural Women, Sowing a Future of Equality

They know the land like the back of their hand, but still tread an uneven path. Rural women sustain global agriculture while facing barriers that limit their potential.

About the author

Sally Jabiel

Journalist International Cooperation

Journalist specializing in International Cooperation

Peruvian. With a Masters in International Journalism from Pompeu Fabra University (Spain). Awards include the Barcelona School of Management Prize for Best Gender Project and grants from the Earth Journalism Network.

Writes about climate change, conservation and the indigenous peoples of Latin America for El País and Dialogue Earth, with a focus on solutions. Her stories can also be read in Periodistas por el planeta, France 24, Agencia EFE and Climate Tracker, among others.

She has worked in communications and ‘storytelling’ for international organizations such as the United Nations and worked on the editorial team of the Climate Migration initiative.

Meet the author

Across the world, more than 1.7 billion people live in rural areas. Rural women account for one-third of the global population and 43% of the agricultural workforce, according to UN Women.

They sow, cultivate and harvest. They tend the land, care for livestock and raise families. They know the rhythms of the climate, the hardiest seeds, and the practices that keep soil productive without depleting it.

In Latin America alone, women are responsible for 40% of food production, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Yet they face a long list of inequalities. They have less access to land, credit, technology, education, and decision-making spaces. These barriers affect not only their lives, but the future of a world that is growing hungrier by the day.

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A field of inequalities

In Saraguro, southern Ecuador, María Mercedes Quizphe is an Indigenous farmer and national coordinator of the Rural Women’s Network. She and her peers call themselves Chaski Warmikuna—”women messengers” in Kichwa—defending life by safeguarding native seeds such as corn and quinoa, but also through collective healing in the face of gender-based violence.

“Out of fear, many of my colleagues say, ‘I can’t leave my husband—I wouldn’t survive,’ but I’ve been through all that. You can get out. You can live,” Quizphe says in a report by LatFem and We Effect Latin America. “I’m not ashamed to share my story because it’s what I lived through—and what many other women still live.”

Her story is far from unique. The violence many rural women endure is one of the starkest signs of systemic inequality. In rural Latin America, only 30% of women own agricultural land, according to the International Land Coalition. And when they do, the plots are often smaller and less fertile. This pattern is echoed around the globe: fewer than 15% of all landowners worldwide are women, despite their key role in producing staple foods.

The proportion of women among agricultural landowners or those with secure tenure rights ranges widely—from 6.6% in Pakistan (2018) to 57.8% in Malawi (2020). In 14 countries, over 70% of landowners or tenure holders are men. Many of these countries are in West Africa, but the trend also appears in parts of Asia (like Pakistan) and Latin America and the Caribbean (such as Honduras and Peru).

As Open Global Rights points out, historical barriers to land, property, and business ownership persist worldwide. Until 1850, for example, married women in the United States had no legal right to own land. In Brazil, the right to land ownership was not fully recognised until the 1988 Constitution. In Nicaragua, it was only in 2010 that reforms began to ease rural women’s access to credit—finally opening the door to landownership.

The rural wage gap

Alongside structural barriers, wage gaps remain stubbornly wide. For every dollar earned by a man in agriculture, a woman earns just 82 cents, according to the FAO report The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems. That is an 18% shortfall, purely on the basis of gender.

Moreover, when crises strike, women often bear the brunt. During the COVID-19 pandemic, 63% of women working in agriculture across Latin America saw their incomes fall. And nearly half reported greater difficulty accessing banking services or credit, according to a study by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Quarantines in rural areas also exacerbated gender-based violence and deepened the burden of unpaid care work.

This reflects a subtler but equally damaging inequality: millions of women sustain agricultural systems as auxiliary family workers—a role that is rarely paid or formally recognised. This leaves them without access to social protections, agricultural extension services, training programmes, or credit. The result is a cycle of economic dependence that’s hard to break.

Globally, almost half (49%) of women in agriculture work in this type of unpaid role. Among men, that figure drops to 17%. In sub-Saharan Africa—where agriculture is often the main livelihood—35% of women in the sector are family workers.

This economic invisibility restricts women’s autonomy, limits their decision-making power in both households and communities, and further widens the gender gap in access to land and productive resources.

Sowing a more equal future

Rural women are already planting the seeds of a more equitable future. They do so every time they preserve a seed, mobilise their communities, or break the silence in the face of violence. But they cannot do it alone.

In India, SEWA unites more than 3.2 million women across 18 states, promoting microcredit, agricultural insurance, and cooperative markets. In Nepal, ActionAid Nepal supports seed banks and organic farming initiatives, generating employment for widows and marginalised women.

In Uganda, the National Association of Women’s Organisations (NAWOU) advocates for land ownership and better market access. In Kenya, the African Women Agribusiness Network (AWAN) connects women producers of fruit, coffee, and tea with international buyers. In Spain, the Spanish Network of Women in Rural Areas (REMM) champions equality on family farms and strengthens female leadership to prevent rural depopulation.

If rural women had equal access to land and resources, agricultural productivity could rise by 20–30% globally, according to the FAO. That increase could feed an additional 100 to 150 million people.

But the impact goes even further. Global GDP would rise by around 1%—nearly US$1 trillion. Food insecurity would drop by an estimated 2%, and 45 million fewer people would go hungry. Closing the gender gap is not only a matter of justice—it is a global opportunity.

Erasing gender gaps in rural areas is not a favour—it is an urgent imperative for a world that demands more food, more sustainability, and more fairness. Recognising and guaranteeing rural women the same rights, resources, and opportunities as men does more than honour their work—it multiplies the productivity of every cultivated hectare, strengthens entire communities, and nurtures a more equal future.

Where rural women sow resilience and hope today, the possibility of a more fertile and just tomorrow is already beginning to grow.