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This article highlights why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has focused on financial inclusion to advance women's economic empowerment and drive progress on gender equality. It highlights key lessons from financial inclusion-related projects the foundation has supported within the \"Putting Women and Girls at the Center of Development (WGCD) Grand Challenge\" in 2015. The article also shares the logic and research informing the foundation's strategy to close the gender gap in financial inclusion - a key pillar of its strategy on women's economic empowerment - and improve the lives and livelihoods of millions of women around the world.

This article introduces an edited collection on gender and financial inclusion that sets out to provide insights and evidence that enable practitioners to better reach women with digital financial services. The collection brings together four articles on financial inclusion that discuss a diverse range of interventions and experiences and explore the opportunities for and challenges to meaningful financial inclusion for women and non-literate and non-numerate populations. These articles interrogate the methods used to reach last mile communities and highlight the need for holistic, multi-layered programming that supports social norm change and addresses the particular constraints faced by members of these communities.

This article examines the impact of the federal government of Nigeria's growth enhancement support scheme (GESS) on responsible use of crop protection products (CPPs) in rural Nigeria. Results from the logistic regressions show that GESS significantly impact on farmers' access to CPPs but does not significantly impact on farmers' knowledge and skill of CPP application, and that in several cases misuse has led to deterioration of soil fertility. Findings suggests that embracing information on recommended CPPs, dose rates, dilutions, timing, frequency of applications, and precautions should form the foundation of GESS activity on CPPs in sub-Saharan Africa.

Energy poverty is a major challenge in the developing world, with an estimated 1.2 billion people lacking household electricity. Although energy poverty affects both men and women, the burden of household energy supply disproportionately affects women in low-income countries in the developing world. This article examines the impact of a women-oriented solar lighting social enterprise, Solar Sister, in Tanzania for both solar entrepreneurs and customers, demonstrating that solar lanterns positively impact household savings, health, education and women's economic productivity and empowerment. Our study argues that Solar Sister's approach is successful because of its explicit gender lens. Providing energy access to women translates to a pro-woman, pro-child, and pro-family development intervention.

Land-use planning, although a mechanism for development, can also generate insecurity during its implementation. This article argues that tenure security and land-use planning should not be implemented in isolation from each other. It posits that land-use planning - rather than restricting the security of people's tenure - has the potential to serve as a means of securing tenure. The article explores tenure (in)security elements in land-use planning as a crucial challenge in the urban town of Gelan Sidama Awash, Ethiopia. Using data collected through stakeholders' interviews, it uncovers their tenure security challenges, and outlines a set of measures for enhancing tenure security through land-use planning.

One focus of agricultural development is climate smart agricultural technologies and practices (CSA). Development practitioners invest in scaling these to have wider impact. Ineffective targeting stymies CSA's contribution to poverty reduction by excluding many of the poor and/or including those for whom agriculture is not a pathway out of poverty. This viewpoint proposes the need to recognise differentiated livelihood pathways within smallholder agriculture, linked to farmers' differential capacity to engage in climate risk management. A farmer and livelihoods typology provides a framework to improved targeting of CSA and to identifying where alternative interventions, such as social protection, are more appropriate.

Understanding and accounting for the heterogeneity of small farmers is critical for informing development pathways to improve the performance of smallholder irrigation. Using multivariate analysis, this study sought to develop farmer typologies in and around irrigation schemes and used these to inform strategies for on-farm entrepreneurship development. The research uniquely integrates psychological capital in defining farmer typologies, to capture individual features of each farmer, otherwise missed by the generic sustainable livelihoods framework literature. The study affirms the need to focus on psychological capital and concludes that heterogeneity among small-scale irrigators should be accounted for in future agricultural and rural development programmes.

Through an analysis of Ghana's Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme, this article examines the extent to which national governments have embraced the rights-based approach to social assistance. Based on interviews with beneficiary households and policymakers at national and sub-national levels, it finds that although official policy documents depict the LEAP in rights-based terms, beneficiaries see it as a charitable programme. The article concludes that if the LEAP is to play a stronger role in promoting citizenship rights in Ghana, it is important to strengthen district level structures to investigate and redress beneficiaries' complaints in a timely manner.

This article presents a review of seven guides for gender-equitable value chain development (VCD). The guides advocate persuasively the integration of gender into VCD programming and raise important issues for designing more inclusive interventions. However, gaps persist in their coverage of gender-based constraints in collective enterprises, the influence of norms on gender relations, and processes to transform inequitable relations through VCD. Guidance for field implementation and links to complementary value chain tools are also limited. The article identifies opportunities for conceptual and methodological innovation to address the varying roles, needs, and aspirations of women and men in VCD.

Rural Kenyan households have different aspirations and income portfolio strategies, including agricultural intensification and income diversification. This article reports on a study that interviewed 624 households to explore rural aspirations and derive lessons for agricultural technology development and transfer. Though few households specialised in farming, many households self-identified as farmers and aspired to increase their agricultural income. Despite the prevalence of agricultural aspirations, few aspired for their children to have a future in farming. Combining aspirations with potential to invest, the article provides suggestions for targeting agricultural interventions. We need to start listening better to those people we call \"farmers\" to develop and offer innovations that meet their realities.