FEED II – South Sudan

The problem

As the world’s youngest country, located in the center of sub-Saharan Africa, South Sudan faces massive challenges such as severe underdevelopment, recurring conflict, food insecurity, corruption, and poverty. Although agriculture is the second most important industry in South Sudan, providing 15% of GDP and 78% of employment, it faces several challenges, including: lack of appropriate technologies and inputs (i.e. seeds, machinery, fertilizer, etc.), insecure land rights, weak farmer associations, lack of access to improved farming techniques and knowledge, and the impacts of climate change. All of these factors have hampered agricultural development and have led to critical and life-threatening food insecurity in the country.

Furthermore, women and girls in South Sudan experience persisting gender inequality. This is interconnected to traditional and cultural gender roles, a lack of decision-making power, lack of control over resources and access to land, prevalence of sexual gender-based violence and child early forced marriage that have become normalized in the home and community, and a lack of basic literacy. These challenges are making it difficult for women to access nutritious food, become leaders in their communities, engage in income-generating activities and use positive coping strategies when a crisis hits.

What we are doing

FEED II is a follow up to the FEED I project, which was implemented between 2015-2018. FEED II seeks to build upon the success achieved in FEED I, but also to incorporate the lessons learned such as taking a more gender transformative approach and including specific targets and activities to reduce gender-based violence.

Funded by the Government of Canada, with World Vision as the lead partner and in collaboration with War Child, CARE ultimately seeks to reduce inequalities in how women and men have access to and control over food resources by:

• Enhancing women and girls’ skills and leadership in managing threats to food production such as drought, flooding and conflict
• Providing women with agricultural and business training that will help them to generate more income
• Reducing the prevalence of sexual and gender-based violence, which prevents women from participating safely in agricultural activities and becoming leaders in their communities.

Engaging men and boys to champion women and girls’ perspectives, decision-making and leadership roles and challenge harmful social norms will underpin all the activities of FEED II and will be critical to enhancing gender equality in agriculture by creating an enabling environment where women and girls can thrive.