09 June 2026, Kenya: Smallholder farmers in Kenya and Ethiopia face increasing climate shocks and gender inequalities that weaken their resilience and threaten food security. The Gender Equality and Inclusion Accelerator worked with partners to co-design gender-transformative socio-technical innovation bundles GT-STIB (gender-transformative). They found that by combining social and technical innovations, smallholder farmers and their communities had greater climate resilience, more empowered women, and improved food security and diets. In 2026, several county governments, supported by the Accelerator, developed strategies and roadmaps for scaling up such interventions.
Smallholder farming systems in Kenya and Ethiopia face increasing climate shocks such as droughts and floods that undermine agricultural productivity and food security. These pressures are exacerbated by gender inequalities including social norms, which affect women’s power to make decisions, confidence to farm, and access to knowledge and training.
To address these challenges, the CGIAR Gender Equality Initiative (now part of the Gender Equality and Inclusion Accelerator) worked with partners to co-design and pilot gender-transformative socio-technical innovation bundles (GT-STIBs).
For example, in Makueni County — one of Kenya’s most drought-prone counties — CGIAR combined technical innovations including drought-tolerant maize and legume crops, better soil and water practices and climate-smart farming technologies, with social innovations. Social innovations included structured group discussions that helped households rethink gender roles, nutrition training of women and encouraging joint decision making in the household. The result was an 80 percent boost in yields along with more empowered women.
Similar interventions were implemented in Embu and Nakuru counties in Kenya and in Welmera and Ejere woredas in Ethiopia.
Rather than promoting isolated interventions and technologies, GT-STIBs deliberately ‘bundle’ technical, digital, financial, and social innovations together. GT-STIBs combine:
climate-resilient seeds, agronomic practices, and irrigation technologies
digital advisory services, credit, and market linkages
gender-transformative interventions, such as gender-sensitive nutrition training; no-till ripping, furrows, and ridges; farmer training; and capacity building that challenge restrictive norms and power relations.
This integrated approach responds to a long-standing reality in Kenyan and Ethiopian agriculture — farmers, especially women and youth, are often excluded not because solutions do not exist, but because systems are disconnected.
Women and men benefited from the GT-STBIs in different ways. Women gain improved decision-making power and greater voice in household resource allocation, while both women and men farmers benefited from an increased capacity to manage droughts and floods while improving their food security.
Farmers who adopted the innovation bundles demonstrated stronger resilience to climate shocks compared with non-adopters. For example, in Makueni County, adopters achieved significantly higher resilience scores than nonadopters, particularly in their ability to anticipate, cope with, recover from, and adapt to climate shocks. In Ethiopia, gender gaps in resilience narrowed, with women adopters slightly outperforming men adopters in overall resilience.
The innovation bundles also improved food security and diet quality. In Kenya, women adopters were more likely to have acceptable food consumption scores compared with women non-adopters, and adopters experienced lower rates of severe food insecurity. In Ethiopia, adopters reported fewer food shortages and more diverse diets. These findings highlight that improving food security requires not only higher productivity but also diversified diets and stronger household decision-making.
The gender-transformative approach shifted household dynamics toward more joint decision-making. In Kenya, higher proportions of adopters reported joint decisions on land use and savings compared with non-adopters. In Ethiopia, the share of empowered farmers increased substantially among GT-STIB adopters, with especially strong gains among women.
CGIAR and its partners supported the translation of research into outcomes through training farmers and piloting the innovation bundles. They were able to promote the benefits of GT-STIBs by comparing adopters and nonadopters across more than 1,500 households, and then sharing the evidence from this research through workshops with national and county stakeholders.
Overall, the results show that gender-transformative innovation bundles can simultaneously strengthen climate resilience, improve food security, and support women’s empowerment. Importantly, the work moves the discussion beyond identifying what works to understanding what works, for whom, and under what conditions, helping inform the scaling of inclusive and climate-resilient agricultural innovations.
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