Summary (English)

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has started a policy-oriented research programme on Social Protection and Rural Women’s Economic Empowerment which aims to:

• gain a better understanding of how social protection policies and programmes can promote rural women’s empowerment as a strategy for rural poverty reduction;
• identify good practices in social protection policies and programmes to ensure that both women and men have access to social protection benefits; and
• identify good practices in the design and implementation of social protection programmes that reduce gender inequalities in rural areas and promote rural women’s economic empowerment.

The research is undertaken under the From Protection to Production (PtoP) programme based at FAO which carries out impact evaluations of cash transfers in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as policy research and support on social protection and agriculture. The project is a collaborative effort between FAO, UNICEF Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office and the governments of Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The PtoP programme is also part of the larger Transfer Project in which FAO has joined UNICEF, Save the Children UK and the University of North Carolina in supporting the design, implementation and impact evaluation of cash transfers in sub-Saharan Africa.

The present report summarizes findings of the first PtoP case study on rural women’s economic empowerment and focuses on the public works component of Rwanda’s Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme (VUP) – the Government of Rwanda’s flagship programme for poverty reduction providing countrywide social protection. The research was based on a mixed method approach comprising in-depth qualitative methods and quantitative surveys conducted in Rwanda during the autumn of 2014