Women are the Early Warning: Food Insecurity and Gender in the Dry Corridor of Honduras

It’s often said that women eat last and least. But all too often we lack the timely and actionable data we need to close the gender hunger gap. To remedy this, CARE in Honduras combined the global standards of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) and our Rapid Gender Analysis toolkit to demonstrate the potential of a gender-responsive early warning system.

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The policy brief includes the key findings from our study which covered three departments in the Dry Corridor: Choluteca, Francisco Morazán, and El Paraíso. We found that since women are experiencing hunger earlier and at more severe levels than men, early warning systems that don’t collect gender-disaggregated data are missing vital signs of crisis.

On average, the number of women experiencing crisis-level food insecurity in the areas we studied is 6 times higher than the number of men.
92% of women said that they don’t have enough savings to cover one month of spending, compared to 62% of men.
In qualitative interviews, women explained that even when they had opportunities to earn income, getting a job often meant leaving children at home alone, where they feared they would be at risk of abuse or violence.

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