How can locally collected data strengthen evidence-based advocacy for community institutions and empower women to hold governments accountable? How can social and digital innovations be used and upscaled to ensure access to justice? And how can governments build on and integrate local innovations and women’s perspectives to craft gender-sensitive responses that protect women’s rights?

TMG Research and its partners in Kenya and South Africa take up these questions at the sixty-eighth session of the Commission on the Status of Women on March 12, 2024.

We provide key insights into how grassroots action and digital tools can strengthen community organizations and state institutions in the plight to address food insecurity and gender inequality. We likewise share key findings on how data and policy work in mutually reinforcing ways to strengthen institutions across multiple levels. And finally, we demonstrate how grassroots action and government accountability can be linked.

We've gathered a diverse selection of speakers spanning different geographical regions, policy arenas and urban and rural contexts to bring about a multidimensional view.

Key projects discussed

Harnessing digital tools for women’s land rights in Kenya

With pressure on land mounting due to climate change and a related upsurge in land intensive measures, such as carbon markets, violations of women’s tenure rights are increasing. In the absence of protection mechanisms, insecure land tenure and forcible evictions frequently result in food insecurity and gender-based violence.

In Kenya, TMG Research and its partners developed Haki Ardhi, a decentralized rights reporting tool that enables women to report land tenure rights infringements to local, community-based support actors, as well as a national umbrella organization that provides women legal support. This tool enables these organizations to build a coherent database with evidence of rights violations, which becomes a decisive starting point to advocate for state institutions to develop effective responses to protect women’s rights.

Data reveals the invisible dimensions of polycrises in South Africa

In South Africa, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the fact that the constitutional mandate ofstate entities torealize the Right to Food is not supported bypolicy or budget allocations.

To fill this gap, community kitchens – run by women who volunteer their time and money – met the food needs of their communities in informal and low-income areas of Cape Town by cooking and distributing thousands of meals per week. But the community kitchens were not only a place to eat. They also served as safe havens for people escaping rising gender-based violence.

TMG Research is piloting a project that supports community kitchens in becoming transformative spaces by working with women to co-design and implement six new models – such as utilising greenhouses, bulk purchases and obtaining government funding – that bolster food security and address the intertwined challenge of gender-based violence.

In addition and alongside our partner FACT, we used the community kitchens in Cape Town as a springboard to collect and process data on food insecurity and coping strategies from members of the kitchen and the neighbourhoods they serve. So far, we used KoBo Collect to carry out two rounds of interviews for more than 2,000 low-income households, resulting in the collection of over 4,000 data sets that speak to the diverse needs of different demographics.

We use this data to build on community food dialogues and strengthen both community and state institutions in their work to address the multifaced challenges of polycrises. By embracing an approach that prioritizes community-driven knowledge, we help make visible the hidden but critical challenges communities face in their fight to cope with hunger and a cascade of other challenges.