Rural women shaping the future: ARIA 2025 Gender Equality awards
The special awards help foster a new mindset, whereby any project is analysed in terms of how much it promotes gender equality – and vice versa, how equality can be embedded in any CAP-funded project.
ARIA 2025 Gender Equality Awards
Since 2024, the Agricultural and Rural Inspiration Awards - ARIA include a special award for Gender Equality that recognises projects led by women, as well as projects that are having a concrete positive impact on women in rural communities.
After a successful première last year, when 17 out of 24 finalists actively included women in their activities, in this year's edition, 22 out of 24 finalists included a gender equality component.
The ARIA Gender Equality award 2025 went to Changing roles, an Austrian project that is establishing new gender role models for the benefit of individuals, society and the economy.
Changing mindsets
Changing roles used LEADER funding to allow expert organisations, supported by the Local Action Group (LAG) Regionalentwicklung Vorarlberg, to join forces to offer a wide range of activities that showcase alternative gender roles and invite people to consider the potential of gender equality.
The project developed activities such as a girls' meeting place, book presentations, and a podcast that were tailored to the needs of each of the municipalities involved. Lectures, workshops and a variety of digital content created opportunities for discussion and reflection on topics such as gender equality, role models, stereotypes and diversity.
Women were the main driving force behind the development of the project and constituted the majority of its 650 participants. They took a leading role as lecturers and workshop leaders.
The project has produced a considerable amount of content that remains available beyond the project period, but, most importantly, it has increased awareness among the general population, municipalities and companies, as well as knowledge, understanding and voluntary commitment. This is key to transforming mindsets over the long term – one of the main obstacles to gender equality.
Austria is working to ‘make LEADER braver', by also including gender equality as a key target for some LAGs. A working group of the Austrian CAP Monitoring Committee is working to improve gender equality in the current implementation period, with the goal of delivering practical results that are widely applicable. We explored this in a recent LEADER newsletter edition.
- Read how Austria is 'making LEADER braver’
Cross-cutting potential
The number of projects submitted for ARIA 2025 that highlighted their contribution to gender equality illustrates the National Networks’ sensitivity to this topic. It also shows how gender equality is an important element across all the categories of the competition.
Women are often the leaders of the CAP-funded projects competing for the ARIA special award. They are farm owners, advisors, project managers, trainers, or workers employed through projects. They are innovating production processes or creating brand-new products, designing and implementing farm diversification activities, or leading change in their communities. They are often the beneficiaries of projects – as employees gaining new skills, workers finding a new job, or community members whose care work in the family context is alleviated by a new community centre.
Stressing the gender equality dimension of a project is not just an extra intellectual effort required by the National Networks to ‘prove’ something, even less a box-ticking exercise. Instead, the ARIA team at the EU CAP Network sees it as a really beneficial way to raise awareness and to foster a new mindset, whereby any project is analysed in terms of how much it helps promote gender equality – and, vice versa, how gender equality can be gradually embedded in any project as an essential element for consideration.
“The Gender equality award spotlights projects that actively include women in activities, and that promote gender equality. Women play a huge role in rural areas and agriculture, which is often invisible. This award aims to give visibility to the impact and challenges that women have in rural areas.” - Antonia Gamez Moreno, European Commission – DG AGRI
While there is still a long way to go before we reach equality, the CAP offers a variety of opportunities and inspiring projects, such as the ARIA 2025 finalists, who show how to translate them into practice.
Watch out for the upcoming work of the EU CAP Network on this topic – make sure you subscribe to our monthly newsletter (and the LEADER newsletter) and follow us on social media (@EUCAPNetwork) for timely updates.
