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Women play an important but often unrecognized role in the safe production of milk and milk products, particularly in Ethiopia. Dairy products can be contaminated with biological chemical, and physical hazards. This article reviews literature on the microbiological and/or gendered aspects of milk handling in Ethiopia. Thirty-four articles were reviewed, many of which solely focused on either specific animal and/or foodborne hazards in milk processing or the role of gender in the dairy value chain. Contaminated farm environments put women at higher risk of exposure to milk borne, waterborne, and/or animal borne pathogens. Because of their primary role in animal husbandry, health, and milking, women play a crucial part in ensuring the safety of milk and milk products. To reduce foodborne disease and improve overall family health, there is a need to combine food safety research with gender sensitive interventions in Ethiopia.

Using the Community Capitals Framework, this article explores the factors enhancing or constraining women’s access to, and control over, the resources required to participate in, and benefit from, small ruminant value chain activities. This is associated with the relationship of women and men to stocks of capitals: social, financial, human, natural, political, cultural, and physical, and how the relationship between various capitals is managed. Our data were collected using semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions in six woredas (districts) in different parts of Ethiopia. Our findings show that men and women are constrained by similar capitals, but women are more constrained by lower levels of the seven capitals. The sheep value chain has more opportunities for women. It is important to strengthen women’s access to, and management of, all these capitals to become more effective managers of small ruminants. This demands behavioral change and working to challenge gender norms.

The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) has been in use since 2012 and is widely recognized as one of the most rigorous tools to measure women's empowerment as a direct or indirect result of interventions from development projects. Changes to the WEAI have been ongoing and recent adaptations include measuring effects of interventions to improve livestock value chains on women's empowerment, as well as livestock related research. A multidisciplinary team of researchers at ILRI and Emory University developed the Women's Empowerment in Livestock Index (WELI), a new index to assess the empowerment of women in the livestock sector. While the WELI has been piloted in both Honduras and Tanzania, this article provides details on the latter case only. Currently, the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Livestock Systems has employed the Abbreviated-Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) to examine female decision-making in various projects from animal care knowledge and practices to feeding practices for children. Additionally, the development of the Project-Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index, currently in pilot testing, may allow for more insight into scaling existing projects. This article will discuss the adaptation and use of the WEAI for livestock research in Tanzania and Uganda, as well as future uses for contextually measuring women livestock producers' empowerment.

It is widely recognized that women are significant actors in crop-livestock, pastoralist and fish systems. However, too little is known about agricultural development projects which deliberately work towards gender equity in livestock and fish value chains. Research insights into gender roles and responsibilities along fish and livestock chains on how gender relations at household and community level may affect women and men's access to resources for livestock production, and their relative benefits from value chain development, are often weakly integrated into development planning and practice. More profoundly, inequalities tend to reproduce inequalities. These are crippling for the individuals involved as well as for the achievement of development outcomes. In order to redress the balance a number of research and development partners are working to develop analytic frameworks and implementation guidelines to enable gender equity in livestock and fish value chains. This paper examines recent and on-going work to develop tools for effective gender analyses in value chains and how these are being fed into project design. Case studies are taken from Zambia, Kenya and Egypt.

Productive resources are essential to the livelihoods and food security of the world’s rural poor. Gender-equal ownership of resources is considered key to increasing agricultural productivity, equity, and food security. However, there has not been much research about local understandings of ownership particularly in the Global South. In addition, research is also lacking about how concepts of ownership affect food security at the household level. This paper discusses the variability of local understanding of ownership by showing seven domains resource ownership was associated with by a small cohort of respondents. It shows the flexibility of systems governing resource entitlements among the studied communities and their impact on food security. It shows that, irrespective of these understandings and systems, resource arrangements favored men. The authors argue that an understanding of local meanings of ownership might reveal important and unnoticed aspects of resource allocation, as well as provide guidance for initiatives that seek to provide locally relevant approaches to improving gender equity.