Our International Women's Day campaign this year has featured a lot of data about expanding gender gaps in food security, access to land, employment, political engagement and many more fields. Yet our work with diverse research partners and community-led organizations in Africa and Asia demonstrates that amid multiple global crises, women are not only quicker to find innovative solutions, but are achieving results despite encountering social, economic and political barriers that undermine their agency and limit their impact.

It is therefore fitting that two German ministries, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the Federal Foreign Office (AA) have unveiled their new international cooperation strategies - The Strategy for a Feminist Development Policy and the Feminist Foreign Policy Strategy respectively - both with with a strong focus on gender equity and women's empowerment. As co-implementers of several BMZ-funded projects in several African countries, our partners will be closely involved in "road-testing" this new approach across several programme clusters: land governance, food systems transformation, soil restoration and ecosystem-based adaptation, and food-sensitive planning approaches in low-income and informal urban contexts.

These are the highlights of our work as featured in the one-week campaign:

Day 1: Together with the RainForest Foundation UK and Kenya Land Alliance, we are co-designing the Haki Ardhi (Rights4Land) tool - a mobile-based app to support community-level reporting of women's land rights violations in Kenya. Read more

Day 2: Insights on how women-led initiatives to cope with growing hunger and other impacts of global crises from the recent Urban Food Futures policy workshop in Cape Town. Read more

Day 3: A practical example of how to navigate our online #Rights4Land tool, co-developed with the Danish Institute for Human Rights and the Malawi Human Rights Commission, to identify binding legal instruments that can be applied to specific cases of women's land rights violations. Read the blog: Women's land rights ARE human rights

Day 4: Recap of our successful collaboration with partner GRAF in Burkina Faso to negotiate for women's access to family land, providing the basis for improving their socio-economic situation. Learn more

Day 5: Building on the community-based land lease guidelines model - a social innovation initiated by our partner, Shibuye Community Health Workers in western Kenya, we are exploring opportunities to expand access to farm-based livelihood opportunities for young women and men through securing their land tenure rights. Learn more

Day 6: Introducing the transdicsciplinary 'Governance of Food Systems Transformation' research project, which focuses on how to tackle the politics of food systems at national and international levels in order to initiate and sustain the necessary transformations. Visit the project page.

Day 7: On Local and Regional Governments Day at the 67th session of the UN Committee on the Status of Women (CSW67), Caroline Peters from Callas Foundation, a member of our partner, Food Agency Cape Town, presented insights on the role of women's social networks in informal and low-income urban settlements in crisis coping mechanisms. Read the blog: Kitchens, gender and unlearning feminism