Sorca Clarke
Question:190. Deputy Sorca Clarke asked the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade the support Irish Aid provides to women’s empowerment programmes in developing countries. [62977/25]
View answerTuesday, 18 November 2025
Questions (190)
Written answers
Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is a key priority for Ireland’s foreign policy. A Better World, Ireland’s policy for international development, commits to the provision of direct funding to gender equality programmes as well as to ensuring the integration of the needs and interests of women and girls across all of our work.
Ireland has consistently been ranked among the OECD member countries with the highest share of Official Development Assistance with gender equality objectives. In addition, we fund interventions directly dedicated to supporting women’s political and economic empowerment; prioritising girls’ access to quality education; addressing gender based violence; and improving women and girls’ access to sexual and reproductive health.
In our work on women’s economic empowerment, we champion a particular focus on women’s empowerment in agriculture and food systems, recognising that although women produce up to 80% of food in developing countries, significant gender inequalities undermine their earning potential by limiting their access to land, credit, inputs and services.
Through our partnerships with organisations including the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the International Land Coalition, we work to strengthen women’s rights to inherit and own land and improve women smallholders’ access to finance through the gender-inclusive reform of financial institutions, including credit unions. Since 2024, Ireland has also partnered with the UN Joint Programme on Rural Women’s Economic Empowerment, which works to support women’s livelihoods and leadership in food systems in nine developing countries.
In addition, in 2024, we committed support to the Commit to Grow Equality Initiative established by the FAO ahead of the International Year of the Woman Farmer in 2026. The initiative works to monitor, coordinate and enhance countries’ and international organisations’ efforts to achieve gender equality in agri-food systems.
More broadly, there has been a significant increase in Ireland’s ODA designated towards women's rights organisations over the last five years. This is in line with Ireland’s commitments at the Generation Equality Forum in 2021. In 2024 we launched two new partnerships to resource women-led organisations’ engagement on climate justice and to provide rapid response grants to women human rights defenders in crisis contexts.
Ireland will continue to be to the fore in international efforts to drive gender equality and champion the rights of women and girls, in our statements and through increased investments in the implementation of our international development policy.