The following statement was submitted to the United Nations Secretary-General ahead of the seventieth session of the Commission on the Status of Women. The Hunger Project has been in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council since 1985.
The Hunger Project, an international non-governmental organization with the bold vision of a world without hunger, welcomes the focus of the Commission on the Status of Women’s 70th session on access to justice for all women and girls. We emphasize that without justice, there can be no end to hunger. Hunger is both a symptom and a driver of injustice. It is a profound barrier to women’s and girls’ ability to claim their rights, access legal protections, and participate fully in public life. When women and girls are denied adequate food and nutrition, their ability to participate in education, decision-making, and justice systems is severely undermined. Therefore we need to facilitate individual and collective action to transform the systems of inequity that create hunger and cause it to persist. Rural and indigenous women and girls face particularly severe barriers. They produce much of the world’s food, yet they are disproportionately affected by hunger and poverty. Geographic isolation, lack of legal literacy, and limited access to institutions often prevent rural and indigenous women from seeking justice. Court systems are frequently too distant, too costly, or too biased to provide remedies. At the same time, structural discrimination, such as exclusion from education, credit, and digital technology, further silences their voices in decision-making.
Access to land, resources, and technology is a cornerstone of justice and equality for rural and indigenous women. Yet in many countries, discriminatory land tenure laws and customary practices deny women secure ownership or inheritance rights. Widows and daughters are frequently dispossessed, while women farmers lack legal recognition as landholders despite being the backbone of agricultural production. The gender digital divide further compounds these inequalities, as limited connectivity and digital literacy exclude women and girls from vital information about rights, markets, and justice mechanisms. Without secure land rights and access to technology, women cannot achieve food security, economic independence, or equal standing before the law.
Indigenous women and girls face intersecting forms of discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, geography, and poverty. They experience higher levels of hunger and malnutrition, compounded by marginalization in both formal and customary justice systems. Their collective and customary land rights are often disregarded or inadequately protected, leaving communities vulnerable to displacement and resource exploitation. Language barriers, cultural discrimination, and geographic isolation, along with limited digital access and connectivity, further restrict indigenous women’s access to courts, redress mechanisms, and information about their rights. For indigenous women, lack of justice in land, resource, and technology access perpetuates cycles of hunger, violence, and exclusion.
Rural and indigenous women must enjoy equal rights in land, food security, health, education, and participation in public life. Yet progress remains slow, and rural and indigenous women and girls continue to face exclusion that undermines both justice and sustainable development.
Through The Hunger Project’s work in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, we have seen that when women serve as leaders in local councils, food security outcomes improve for entire communities. Women’s participation in decision-making also increases accountability in justice systems and strengthens protection against violence. Yet violence against women, including sexual violence, domestic abuse, and land-related violence, remains a pervasive barrier. For many women, hunger-driven economic dependency on perpetrators prevents them from seeking justice. Evidence also shows that food insecurity increases risks of early and forced marriage, exclusion from education, and gender-based violence. Technology can be a powerful tool for empowerment, providing women and girls with information, networks, and legal awareness, but digital spaces can also reinforce inequalities and expose women to new forms of harm when the gender digital divide and online violence are not addressed. Effective measures to eliminate violence must therefore be integrated with strategies to secure food, land, digital access and economic autonomy.
As emphasized by CEDAW, the Beijing Platform for Action and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, justice and equality are inseparable from women’s economic, social, and cultural rights. SDG 5 and SDG 2 must be pursued together, as progress on one cannot be achieved without the other. CEDAW General Recommendation 34 on the rights of rural women and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples provide clear guidance for eliminating discrimination and advancing justice for the women and girls most affected by hunger and exclusion.
The Hunger Project works through holistic, community-led strategies that prioritize women’s leadership. By investing in women as key change agents, we catalyze shifts in governance, health, and food systems that promote justice and equality. This includes:
(i) Strengthening women’s leadership in village councils and decision-making structures, ensuring their voices shape policies on food, land, and resource rights.
(ii) Promoting inclusive and equitable systems that dismantle discriminatory norms and practices limiting women’s access to land, credit, and digital technology, and closing the gender digital divide..
(iii) Addressing structural barriers such as illiteracy, unpaid care burdens, and gender-based violence, including technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), which intersect with hunger to silence women’s participation.
(iv) Supporting rural and indigenous women to claim rights to land, resources, and participation in justice systems.
(v) Engaging men and boys to transform harmful social norms and foster shared responsibility for equality.
To ensure access to justice for all women and girls and achieve gender equality, The Hunger Project calls upon Member States and the international community to:
(i) Recognize hunger as a justice issue. Integrate food and nutrition security into strategies for promoting women’s rights and access to justice, acknowledging hunger as both a cause and consequence of systemic inequities.
(ii) Guarantee women the right to land, education, resources and digital inclusion. Eliminate discriminatory laws and practices that undermine women’s rights to own, inherit, and control land, and prioritize the rights of rural, indigenous, and marginalized women.
(iii) Invest in rural, indigenous and marginalized women’s leadership at all levels of governance. Ensure women are equitably represented in local councils, customary decision-making bodies, and public institutions. Provide training, digital literacy, legal literacy, and resources tailored to rural and indigenous contexts.
(iv) Guarantee access to essential services. Ensure women and girls have access to nutrition, health care, safe digital spaces, and protection from violence, while advancing long-term structural reforms to dismantle systemic barriers.
(v) Ensure inclusive and participatory justice systems. Expand mobile courts, paralegal programs, technology-enabled legal services to make justice accessible to rural, indigenous, and marginalized women and girls.
(vi) Adopt a rights-based, intersectional approach to policy and practice. Address how hunger intersects with gender, age, ethnicity, disability, and geography, and implement international commitments including CEDAW and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
(vii) Allocate sufficient resources. Integrate hunger eradication into gender equality and justice strategies and ensure financing for programs that address both simultaneously.
(viii) Support community-based women’s organizations. Invest in women’s groups, especially those led by rural and indigenous women, as essential partners in implementing and monitoring commitments.
In conclusion, a world without hunger is a world where women and girls can fully exercise their rights, access justice, and participate equally in shaping their communities and societies. Rural and indigenous women, in particular, must be at the center of this transformation. Ensuring access to justice for women and girls, therefore, demands dismantling the systems that perpetuate both hunger and gender inequality. The Hunger Project calls upon the Commission on the Status of Women to affirm that justice cannot be achieved without ending hunger, and that the empowerment of women and girls, especially rural and indigenous, is essential to building a world of dignity, equality, and food security for all.
Photo Credit: Benin 2025 © The Hunger Project