That's a very good question.
I think that the focus on women and children in the SDGs can always be deepened. I think it needs to keep going further to understand the shifts and changes at the community level. From our experience with the CHANGE project in northern Ghana, where we've been working for a number of years and where we knew that women were engaged in agriculture, it was very much at the direction of their husbands to a great extent in the communities where we were working.
When we set a goal of 40% women's participation, we were told, “That's very aggressive, good luck with that“. The fact that we have almost doubled that and have released.... It's the community that's facilitated it by helping create leadership and opportunity in the community and by having a certain percentage of women lead farmer-based organizations, for example, when they never did before. It has helped to give them profile and confidence that they are able to do this work.
Through CHANGE, we've worked with Farm Radio International. The great work of Farm Radio International has helped us use women's voices to take those messages out to women who are in more remote communities. I think women learning from women, as some of my colleagues have mentioned, and communities learning from each other is the most powerful learning. It's also important to take into account the domestic changes that can happen with men in the community. If women take on more agricultural responsibilities, but the men don't pick up the domestic responsibilities, that is not so great for the women.
It's important that we have sensitization for the men about the contributions that women are making to economic development, to social development, and to child development. It's not just about women working; there's the role of women in the community that we very much need to pay attention to because that's the environment the child will grow up into. I think we can continue to keep pushing for more focus on women and children in the SDGs.