This post is written by Sylvia Cabus, senior gender advisor, USAID’s Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Hub.

Looking back at my time as a gender advisor for Feed the Future from 2010-2015, I think fondly of all the times I consulted Agrilinks. When I started my role with the Bureau of Food Security — now the Bureau of Resilience and Food Security — there was no stand-alone page for gender issues. The number of references to "women" outnumbered those for "gender," and they were far less than the current list of 500 results that pop up when doing a keyword search for gender on the site. We have come a long way!

Over the last ten years, Agrilinks has been a useful platform and resource for promoting gender integration in agriculture and food security. Agrilinks’ flexible mandate and structure allows for innovative ways to discuss gender. For example, Agrilinks hosted a series of Twitter chats in 2013 on topics such as women in cross-border trade and women as heads of family farms that enabled much wider participation.  Agrilinks also hosts a wide and diverse range of technical resources that either focus on gender or integrate gender throughout the content. Agrilinks reinforces the importance of gender equality at the household level to truly "help farmers and their husbands."

Agrilinks serves as an archive of past events, a repository of current resources and the basis for a thriving community of practice on gender, agriculture and food security. I am glad to have been a part of Agrilinks’ first wave of gender events and products, and look forward to more collaboration in the future!