Women are key actors in the food system. Yet, they face barriers in accessing, adopting, and benefiting from agricultural technologies, finance, and other productive resources. This has resulted in a “gender yield gap”. Empowering women and closing gender gaps in agrifood systems does not just help towards achieving Sustainable Development Goals, but also leads to better food and nutrition security at the household level and results in resilient and sustainable food systems overall. Sustainable agricultural mechanization has immense potential to benefit women smallholder farmers by relieving labor shortages, saving time, reducing drudgery, ensuring efficient use of resources, enhancing agricultural productivity, and making farming more profitable.

The 10th Regional Forum on Sustainable Agricultural Mechanization in Asia and the Pacific will be organized with the theme of ‘Gender Mainstreaming in Sustainable Agricultural Mechanization’ so to achieve the following objectives:

1) To identify the key elements, needs and essential processes to develop and scale gender-responsive technologies and programmes;

2) To promote a better understanding of the gender gaps in agricultural mechanization, and present lessons learned from various policies and programmes in region; and

3) To explore opportunities for collaboration among stakeholders for developing gender-responsive sustainable agricultural mechanization programmes.

The 10th Regional Forum on Sustainable Agricultural Mechanization in Asia and the Pacific will be co-organized by CSAM in collaboration with the Nanjing Institute of Agricultural Mechanization (NIAM) of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) of the People’s Republic of China.