Climate vulnerability and structural gender inequality reinforce each other in Southeast Asian smallholder agriculture, generating measurable welfare, and productivity losses.
Standard household-level interventions fail because they ignore documented intra-household resource misallocation. Male- and female-managed plots within the same household receive unequal inputs despite identical shock exposure.
Three forms of agricultural innovation, i.e., biological, digital, and financial, offer evidence-based pathways to address both constraints simultaneously.
Immediate actions include increasing public agricultural research and development investment in women’s crops, expanding price-information technology to female smallholders, and disbursing agricultural subsidies directly into women’s mobile money accounts.
Medium-term reforms require formalizing women’s land tenure rights and incorporating gender markers into regional climate finance.