Socio-Economic Assessment of the Agriculture Sector and the Bioeconomy in East Africa. A Gender Focused Approach

The term “social” relates to human society and its members, social sustainability implies reducing poverty, fair distribution of benefits arising from developmental projects, and that dignity for human life is ensured, among others. The social dimension is one of the three dimensions/pillars of sustainability and needs to be combined with the assessment across the other pillars to arrive at any comprehensive sustainability assessment. Yet, social issues related specifically to gender equity and poverty, two of the Sustainable Development Goals, are still difficult to find and apply. This paper presents a desk-based assessment of social risks on selected criteria for gender and working conditions using databases in key sectors (cereals, wheat and paddy rice) considering agriculture as a sector within the bioeconomy. The selected countries are in East Africa (Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda) as these countries are signatories of the East Africa Regional Bioeconomy Strategy. The assessment shows that despite support for women in agriculture there is still a risk for gender inequality and working conditions.