Photo & story: Gender Lens

NAIROBI, 2014 

“I have many camera lenses, but don’t have a gender lens. Where can I buy a gender lens?” This might be one of the naïve queries that was received in context to the announcement of the CGIAR international photo and story competition on Forests-Agriculture Interface through a Gender Lens 2014. The twist of this competition was to capture a photo from gender perspective and to write a short story about the photograph.
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“Public partnership is critical on issues such as gender and diversity in agriculture and natural resource management. Photography is an excellent low-cost communication technique to showcase people’s perspective”, justifies Dr. Purabi Bose of CIAT for initiating open-to-all international photo with a story competition.

About 280 individual entries were received from 31 countries across globe. The contributors of individual entries were diverse from students to researchers, photographers, farmers, policy makers, private sectors and home makers. The international selection committee included a gender expert, academician, human right activist, creative artist, forest-agroforestry scientist, photographer, and student intern.

In total 40 photos and stories were selected and published in an open access e-book Landscaping Actually: From Forests to Farms though a Gender Lens
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The three winners – David Tarrason (Spain), Rutuja Patil (India) and Icaro Cooke (Brazil) – received fellowship from the CGIAR Research Program Forests, Trees and Agroforestry Integrating Gender of CIAT, Colombia to participate in a two-day CGIAR Gender Integration in the Research Cycle workshop in Nairobi, November 2014. The winners shared their communication knowledge with the workshop participants about ‘using’ and/or ‘seeing’ landscape through a gender lens.
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Resilience at the Margin
Andean women define the social rules that govern the local market in Peru. 
How does the market work for these Quechua women? Highland Puna farmers trade surplus production of meat and wool in exchange for Andean crops. Quechua women are mainly in charge of the barter markets, controlling diversity of seeds and nutritional security. ​
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Fish, Family and Food Security​
Men, women and children actively participate in fishing activity in  Malkangiri region in Odisha, India. 
As fishing can be an expensive, the smallholder farmers collaborate to fish in this rainfed area. In some families only men fish while in other families  it is women’s role to fish while their men just drink. ​



Hands of Hope
The rough hands of Luizao from the Northwestern Mato Graso province of Brazilian Amazon offers the precious seeds of Cacao. 
The wrinkles of Luizao’s hand explains his strong connection with the land, a connection that pushed him to reforest vast area of damaged Amazonia.

This blog was written by Purabi Bose with inputs from Savyasachi who is CIAT’s FTA Gender Communication Intern and Student of Shristi School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India and the three winners of the competition – David Tarrason, Rutuja Patil and Icaro Cooke.
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