 Hello everybody and welcome to our AgriTech Talk, an initiative of the Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia, led to inspire us all to think tech on designing and implementing our projects and programs across the region in less than 20 minutes a month. Today is special as we want to commemorate International Women's Day by bringing on the spotlight at once, the rural, the gender and the digital. Also in the line with this year's Commission on the Status of Women. My name is Veronica Sherra and I'm the Digital Agriculture Analyst and today's host. Our special guest is Nicole Warnsworth, Program Director at Kosovo Women's Network, who will tell us about the recent gender assessment which she conducted in Kosovo in collaboration with FAL. Nicole, welcome and thanks for joining us. Great to be here today. Thank you. I have four questions for you today and now I will launch a timer for 20 minutes, sorry, 12 minutes, and we need to get these questions answered before the timer ends. And in the last minutes we'll take a couple of questions from the audience so dear participants please use the chat to write down your questions and comments. My colleague Ida will monitor the chat. And timer starts running now, Nicole, shall we begin? Yeah. So my first question is, could you please tell us about yourself a little bit, how long have you been in gender mainstreaming? And then, could you share a couple of words about this research project that you conducted in Kosovo? What was it about, what were the objectives and the methods? So I am a sociologist and political science in practice and I've been working on gender mainstreaming and gender analysis for about 20 years, mostly focused in Kosovo but also in the western Balkan region where we've done a number of gender analyses in different sectors. I work with the Kosovo Women's Network. We are a multi-ethnic network of about 190 women's rights organizations throughout Kosovo and cooperating with others in the region and internationally. We were founded in 1996 actually as a rural women's network and have formalized in 2003. Economic empowerment is key to our strategy, inclusive of rural women who are among our members and integrating attention to gender equality in laws and in policies and programs including agriculture and digitalization is very important to us, particularly as part of Kosovo's EU accession process. So to fulfill our strategy, we've been working on gender and digitalization analysis to inform all sectors and one of those being agriculture, using a model that we have developed together with UNDP and based on their inclusive digital transformation model where we hope to integrate attention to gender equality and we really hope that this can serve as an example and a model for other countries in the western Balkans and beyond because we really couldn't find money examples when we set out to do this research. And we hope it will help others to do gender analysis and inform a more gender inclusive digital transformations. Thank you Nicole. So very interesting to learn a little bit about your experience and we look forward to read more this analysis actually. And now, because we want our participants today to understand how to make digital interventions more inclusive and responsive so can we start by actually explaining what is gender inclusive or gender responsive intervention. And based on your experience, could you provide some practical recommendations for us when designing projects and programs across the region and including in the Balkans. Sure, I know all of us when we go to design our programs we often hear well this programs on agriculture this programs on digitalization this programs for everyone. There's no difference by gender because it's for everyone. And this is what we would tend to call a gender neutral approach to a policy or a program. The problem is that this type of approach may actually contribute to reinforcing the status quo and reinforcing gender inequalities that already exist within a given society. That's why we have this gender equality continuum, where we try to reflect that we don't want a gender neutral or negative approach, but rather we're all seeking for more gender responsive or gender transformative approaches. That means we're trying to address the fundamental inequalities that exist among women and men and diverse women and men through our programming. And how do we do that well I'm sure you're familiar with the project cycle and project cycle management, and we kind of follow that and see how we can integrate a gender perspective into it. So, as with any intervention, we have to start off with analysis, we have to start off with gender analysis at the beginning of any project or to inform any law or policy, because we first need to understand what is different among women and men and their needs. So, specific to gender responsive digital transformation, we've been working with this model that UNDP created, but integrating gender into it. What is that? Well, availability, access, adoption, awareness, and protection are all cross cutting themes across the dimensions that have been identified for digital transformation, including infrastructure, government, regulation, business, and of course, most importantly, people. So for each of these dimensions, we have to think how does it differ for women and men. For example, in terms of accessibility, what time do women and men have that gives them access to participate in digitalization. What access do they have to education, to knowledge opportunities, to finance for investing in digital transformations, and how does their location at home or near or far from these opportunities affect their access to infrastructure, or participation in government and education making, or cybersecurity, for example. So for each aspect of digital transformation, we try to look at how women and men might experience that differently by looking at issues of availability, access, and adoption. And beyond that, we also try to think about intersectionality. Well, what's that? I think of it as a road sign of different roads coming and intersecting with each other. We can't think only about women and men because women and men are very diverse. We have to think about ethnicity. We have to think about location, rural or urban. We have to think about disability, language, ethnicity. So all of these issues also impact how different women and men have access to digitalization and to the benefits of different programs. One thing we saw from our research, and I'm very interesting, was women with disabilities in rural areas actually had a lot of opportunity for engaging more with digital transformations in rural agricultural businesses because they have more time to spend on their phones. So it's interesting also to look at these different intersections of inequality as well or potential inequality. So after we do our gender analysis, the first step up there in project cycle, we use that analysis to identify where there are inequalities. And then within our project, and this is the important next step, we have to move beyond just doing the situation analysis to address how different perspectives, results and indicators changes in gender quality so that we can measure them. And it's very important that we integrate these within our intervention logics and projects so that we can actually then measure later the changes. In implementation phase, it's important also to consult with women's rights groups and gender experts to get their inputs when you face challenges on how to reach diverse women and men. Of course there's monitoring and evaluation and evaluating what impact we have had using our indicators on gender equality as part of our programs. And this of course completes the cycle and helps us see where in terms of gender analysis, we can further integrate attention to gender equality. Thank you Nicole, very interesting, very interesting to see how much this cycle corresponds to actually the project cycle and how important it is to implement it in projects. So I understand that you started that in Kosovo you started with the first step right with the analysis. So I would be really curious to know what did the survey in Kosovo show and how did you interpret the results. Sure, so together with FAO, we have led as the Kosovo Women's Network Kosovo gender profile on agriculture and rural livelihoods agenda assessment last year it's in its final review I hope it will be published in the next month and you'll all be able to read it. This was done because of a request coming from our Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Rural Development, as well as based on needs from the European Union to inform their work and of course FAO's own strategies. It also came at a time when the government needed it to inform its laws and policies that are being revised, both on agriculture and rural livelihoods but also on digitalization and we really hope that the recommendations coming out of it would inform these new policies and laws as in Kosovo at least we have to have gender analysis done based on law in order to inform laws and policies and no such analysis existed so we set out using FAO's methodology for country gender assessments to do this. This included a literature review gender analysis of all the laws and policies relating to the sector, looking at existing reports and statistics and so far as they were available. We sent data requests to the government local and central level especially looking at subsidies, as well as women's participation in governance and in providing some ventures and services. We then did a Kosovo wide representative household sample using random sampling of 810 rural households, where we surveyed both women 400 and men 410 of working age that's ages 18 to 64 years. And we also conducted 10 focus groups with women and men of Albanian Serbian and Bosnian ethnic communities, as well as 35 semi structured interviews with key informants, including rural women farmers business associations government officials at local and central level civil society organizations and digitalization experts. So we compiled all of this ends maybe now I'll share a few of our findings. In Kosovo women and men have pretty equal access when it comes to both Internet at around 99% and ICT tools like especially smart phones they're very widespread and used we didn't find inequalities in in their ownership or usage. What we found is that rural women and men don't really tend to use their phones for agriculture or business. They use their phones more for communication and social media and keeping in touch with friends. So, we really could see, as you can see from this slide that very few rural women and men use technology for agriculture. And I think the slides shows one of the main challenges that women and men said they faced is that they lack knowledge and information on how to use ICT, including how to use it for accessing public services for accessing government subsidies for researching new agricultural methods for getting information on prices or weather for marketing their products online for business networking, or for expanding their agricultural activities. There are things they didn't even use or consider using their smartphones for. And one of the challenges that we found that was really a difference between women and men because until now they were pretty similar is on time use. If we look at how women and men spend their time in Kosovo and in fact in many countries in our region, women spend a lot more time doing caregiving work than do men, as this slide is illustrates. Given women's also comparatively lower levels of education, they're limited time because of their care responsibilities, their poor access to finances because of gender norms on who owns property and who has money in the family. And social norms, women had even less access to using ICT for their economic activities than did men. We also found that women's minimal participation in business related networking, even before digital transformations also affected the extent to which they use digital tools for networking for business. Women just didn't have business networks like men did, and they didn't have the time to invest in creating them that men did because of their care roles and other roles within the family. I feel the main challenge seemed to be access to information about the opportunities available to them and how to use it. And we saw a lot of readiness from both women and men on what they could do to learn more about how they could use their digital tools to develop their agricultural businesses. And I think what we found and what we're recommending is we really need to think about women and men's differences in time and in location when we set up these types of outreach efforts, so that we see how to provide childcare, how to have them at a time of a day when women can attend and how to have them in locations that women can access given their comparative less access for example to private vehicles. Thank you, Nicole. So I see that some of the results are cross cutting across the region and some of the things that you're saying for instance access to technology or how farmers or people women and men use the technology is similar across the region. So I would really love to ask you, you know what are the implications, political implications for promoting the digitalization inclusive digitalization in rural areas. Well the first as I mentioned was gender analysis has to be done in order to inform laws and policies and this gender analysis we do hope will inform the new agricultural strategy for Kosovo and the digital agenda. And that women's groups need to be involved in these processes and gender experts to inform the drafting of laws policies and the development programs, so that we can ensure that they meet women and men's diverse needs. It was also very clear that the government needs to continue its efforts related to development in terms of affordability and accessibility of childcare, elderly care and care for persons with disabilities because this is the main reason we have based on research in Kosovo why women don't have time to engage in learning and digitalization and using it for agriculture work. We need to see more affirmative measures used by the government and by donors in how and when they are giving funding to ensure that they these funds for developing digitalization and agricultural reach women, and also for providing advisory services that can reach out to rural areas, more often to go door to door and reach out to women to inform them about what's available to them, but also these types of advisory services to be more available coming from women, considering social cultural norms sometimes it's better if women can access women in rural areas to inform them about the opportunities available to them. There's a lot of work that needs to be done in raising awareness about technology and how it can be used, including through municipal advisory services and outreach and the specific targeting of rural women through these outreach efforts. We also found this interesting finding I mentioned earlier about young women and women with disabilities who have really been neglected when it comes to business agriculture participation in family economies. And there's a lot of opportunity there because it's young women and women with disabilities who are both the most marginalized highest unemployment rates, but also are the most often on their phones and have the most opportunities to actually spend time to learn and engage and help their families in developing their marketing developing their networks and developing their businesses online. So these are a few of our recommendations I hope that they are useful to others and look forward to any questions. Thank you, Nicole was very interesting to learn from you. Yes, indeed. It's time to get some questions from the audience. I thought you've been monitoring the chat. Could you please tell us what our colleagues curious about. Yes, Nicole. Thank you for this informative responses we have received two questions from our audience. I'll read out one of them considering our time constraint. So the question goes, for which specific challenges. Do you think we should be better prepared when mainstreaming gender in projects and programs. Sure, three of the main challenges we faced the first is lack of data. So for this you really need to budget for collecting data of course household surveys can be the most ideal when done properly but sometimes just speaking with people focus groups discussions with women's rights groups or associate farmers associations that are working in the area can help you gather a lot of information for little money and that's the second challenge we always hear we don't have money for some huge research project it's try to do small things if you don't have the budget and then budget for it in the future, have smaller meetings again with women's rights groups with women's farmers associations with rural women and talk to them and get their input on what are their challenges and this is not extremely resource heavy and can be very enlightening on what are their greatest challenges so that you can try to incorporate address of those challenges into your programming. The third we always have, but there's no political will from our partners, the government is our main stakeholder and they don't care they say what does gender have to do with digital what does gender have to do with agriculture. Well, I think here we all have a responsibility in our work to really raise their awareness of what it has to do and the number one, you can't leave out half the population it's not good for the economy data shows us that you need to engage the entire population if you really want to have economic development and to leave no one behind and to engage the unique things that women can bring to the table that maybe haven't been considered and could actually be contributing more to the development of businesses. It always needs some arguments for those meetings but I think that we can if we want to convince them of the also economic benefits of engaging women more. Thank you Nicole. Amazing, we made it in 20 minutes. It was really great to learn from you about the gender responsive digital interventions and I think you highlighted so many important points today. Gladly we'll have the recording to share with even more of our colleagues so thank you very much was really pleasure to have you today. So pleasure and please freely share my email Nicole at women's network.org I'm happy with sharing our methodology or research and responding to further questions because I know the time was short.