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The Power of Empowering Women in Agriculture

EMPOWERING WOMEN IN AGRICULTUREThe agricultural sector is a critical facet of Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) economy. As of 2015, women make up around 40% of the SSA’s agricultural labor force. Although their contribution is critical, due to discriminatory laws and social norms, a large gender gap within this sector continues to persist. However, many have come to realize the potential that lies behind empowering and educating female agriculture workers in Africa. By decreasing the gender gap and expanding females’ access to land and resources, these women have the potential to increase agricultural output in developing countries by between 2.5 and 4%. Organizations are prioritizing empowering women in agriculture in order to reduce poverty.

The Gender Gap

Regardless of their active role in agriculture, women own fewer assets, have less access to necessary agricultural yields and receive less education and training in these areas compared to men in Sub-Saharan Africa. The main cause of this persistent gap is established traditional gender roles. Gender roles continue to negatively impact women across Africa. Women often face more difficulties in owning land, establishing credit and gaining access to proper resources. When given the proper tools, these women could have a substantial positive effect on both the economy and SSA’s agricultural output.

The Benefits of Gender Parity in Sub-Saharan Africa

Closing the gender gap is imperative to making progress in SSA’s economy and increasing agricultural output. By empowering female agricultural workers and increasing their access to finances, land rights, resources and training, there could be a significant positive effect for the whole of Africa. Ruth Meinzen-Dick explains that in Sub-Saharan Africa, agriculture is two to four times more effective in reducing poverty than growth in other sectors. She explains further that because women are more likely than men to invest resources into meeting their children’s educational and nutritional needs, investing in women is crucial.

Making Women a Priority

Although the benefits of female empowerment are clear to see, in order to make these benefits a reality, it is imperative that programs and policies target three main factors: land rights, equal access to agricultural resources and finances and equal power in decision-making. Furthermore, as more women become educated and empowered, these investments and knowledge will not only be passed on to their children but throughout the community. As explained by Slyvia Tetteh, “When mothers are educated, they keep their education in their home and use it to educate their children. If you educate a woman, you educate her home and to some extent, the community.”

Women Who Farm Africa

Across the world, efforts are being made to educate and empower female agricultural workers in Africa. Policies and programs are all pushing to further female agricultural workers’ rights and power. A clear example of this is Women Who Farm Africa. This alliance was created in order to provide resources for women farmers to learn about agriculture through empowerment. By involving them in decision-making and access to finances, women farmers can increase their income, develop a stable rural livelihood and contribute to ensuring food security.

The Promise of Female Farmers

It is clear to see why female empowerment and closing the gender gap should take priority across Africa. Doing so would not only increase the lives and quality of living for these women but would also positively impact the agricultural output and the general state of Africa’s economy. Furthermore, this could also create more stability for the children growing up in rural communities. With the knowledge that mothers gain, this knowledge can then be passed down to their children and the rise in income can be invested in the children’s future. If properly prioritized and applied, empowering women in agriculture could break intergenerational cycles of poverty, reduce hunger and malnutrition rates and improve Africa’s economy as a whole.

– Caroline Dunn
Photo: Flickr

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Female Farmers Improve Sustainable Agriculture in Montenegro

sustainable agriculture in Montenegro

Montenegro, like many of the Western Balkan countries, relies heavily on agriculture as a source of economic productivity and is eagerly searching for ways to make its agricultural sector more competitive while preparing to contend with the realities of climate change. The U.N. and the World Bank have worked extensively to promote sustainable agriculture in Montenegro. One important component of this work has been a realization of the need to make these efforts explicitly inclusive of female farmers, who are often overlooked.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, in particular, has a long history of working to promote competitive, sustainable agriculture in Montenegro that actually improves the circumstances of Montenegrin farmers. In addition to the focus on agriculture, the FAO has also put in place rural development initiatives and helped the Montenegrin government to ensure the sustainable management of the country’s natural resources.

There are some areas where the FAO has been particularly successful. Together with the Montenegrin government, it was able to improve the sustainability and management of the country’s forests, which is important as wood is still a key source of fuel, especially in rural areas. Montenegro has also made strides in recent years in managing its fisheries on the Adriatic coast. The focus now is on bringing Montenegrin agriculture in line with E.U. regulatory standards and ensuring that small farmers can compete on the international market in anticipation of Montenegro eventually entering the European Union.

Rarely, however, do these kinds of initiatives make a point of being inclusive of female farmers. In the Western Balkans, strict gender roles persist and farming is not seen as something that concerns women. But female farmers in Montenegro account for 13 percent of landholders and 65 percent of the agricultural workforce, indicating that perhaps these gender roles are becoming out of date. Female farmers have recently had success securing grants from the World Bank’s MIDAS program, but too often farmers, especially women, are not made aware that these programs exist to help them.

Now, finally, these women are being addressed and reached out to as a real constituency. The Ministry for Agriculture and Rural Development hosted a workshop exclusively for female farmers that allowed them to network and learn about options for assistance that many of the women did not know they had.

Sustainable agriculture in Montenegro, and in the Balkans more broadly, is ultimately going to be about more than eliminating ecologically harmful practices and increasing crop yields in an ecofriendly way. It will also consist of leveling the playing field and improving equity in the industry across all demographics and of producing more and wasting less.

– Michaela Downey

Photo: Flickr

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Helping Female Farmers in Tanzania

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Female farmers are often less successful than males mostly due to gender inequality. Females have greater difficulties in securing land rights and accessing the necessary resources to properly run a farm. In Tanzania, for example, female farmers produce 14% less than male farmers. In Africa, almost half of all agricultural workers are women; therefore, farms across the continent are not as productive as they could be.

If women were treated equally in the agricultural sector, farm production would increase by up to 30% per day and feed 150 million more people each day, which would have the power to drastically reduce world hunger.

Undoubtedly, the mention of “reality television” procures an image of Kim, Khloé and Kourtney or that HGTV series where they renovate rundown homes, but how can reality television fit into this issue? Well, in Tanzania, “reality television” resonates most closely with the popular series starring female farmers.

About 25 million people throughout Tanzania tune into Mama Shujaa wa Chakula, or Female Food Heroes. The show focuses on female farmers sharing farming techniques, attending agriculture training sessions and learning lessons on finance. Female Food Heroes also, of course, includes competitive challenges.

The entertainment of the show comes in the form of these challenges; this season, for example, participants must create a tool, test new cooking techniques and embark on a treasure hunt. The show will shoot for three weeks in August, where a winner is selected through viewer votes and a panel of judges.

Created by Oxfam, the series seeks to empower female farmers and educate them on progressive farming techniques, while providing the stars of the show a place to demonstrate and voice their agricultural aptitude. Oxfam is an international organization dedicated to ending global poverty, composed of 17 individual organizations working together with partners and communities.

Although about 75% of farmers in Tanzania are women, gender inequality overlooks their involvement. The show, however, spotlights and praises female farmers for their contributions and actually provides the means for them to efficiently farm.

The overall winner will receive a $10,000 cash prize, but other prizes include solar panels, irrigation tools and harvesting machines. Perhaps the greatest prize of all, however, is the status and respect each contestant leaves with. Female Food Heroes provides female farmers with the opportunity to fight against global poverty and gender biases.

– Sarah Sheppard

Sources: Take Part, PRI , OXFAM 1, OXFAM 2
Photo: Flickr

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Biking Across Canada to Raise Funds for Female Farmers in Ghana

Bike_to_GrowMay 15, 2015 was a big day for Sarah French and Mary Fehr. It was the day they began their fundraising campaign called Bike to Grow, in which both undertook an 8,710-kilometer trek across Canada.

Former interns at the Mennonite Economic Development Associations, or MEDA, French and Fehr were both inspired by their experiences and have since topped $100,000 in their crowdfunding campaign approaching Ontario. “Complete strangers have opened their homes, hearts and wallets to provide a place to sleep, a complimentary meal or a friendly face in unfamiliar places,” said French. “We’ve met so many people who are inspired by our efforts and MEDA’s work. Mary and I in turn are equally touched by their generosity and kindness.”

During their internships with MEDA, both saw poverty firsthand, witnessing it in Nicaragua and even experiencing it for themselves in Tanzania. One issue that stuck out to them was the inequality that female workers faced. In both Nicaragua and Tanzania, many women worked to help support their families, but they either couldn’t contribute as much as men could or they were single parents, among other situations. French and Fehr saw an opportunity to help change that with a project called GROW, which stands for “Greater Rural Opportunities for Women.”

In order to help families grow, each member who is contributing financially should be able to reap fair benefits, no matter the gender. Check out http://www.meda.org/bike-to-grow to donate and find out more information about Bike to Grow. The journey ends September 1, 2015 in Newfoundland.

– Anna Brailow

Sources: MEDA 1, MEDA 2, Upbeat
Photo: Lsuag Center

Index Insurance Reaps Benefits for Female Farmers

index insuranceThe concept of crop insurance is a well-established practice in developed countries: in anticipation of natural disasters or other impediments to good crop yields, farmers purchase insurance to cover the cost of lost revenue.

Yet traditional agriculture insurance is either unavailable or overly expensive in many developing countries, leaving small-scale farmers, particularly women, vulnerable to natural disasters.

Nevertheless, recent expansions of index insurance programs, in particular the Global Index Insurance Facility, are enabling small-scale women farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean to adequately ensure their crops at affordable prices.

Unlike traditional insurance, index insurance “pays out benefits on the basis of a predetermined index for loss of assets and investments … without requiring the services of insurance claims assessors,” the World Bank reports.

More specifically, “a statistical index is developed before the start of the insurance period to measure deviations from normal for such parameters as rainfall, temperature, seismic activity, wind speed, crop yield or livestock mortality rates.”

Since 2009, GIIF, a program managed by the World Bank Group, has been leading and supporting index-insurance programs across the developing world. In collaboration with partners like MicroEnsure and Kilimo Salama (now ACRE), GIIF often aggregates farmers into groups and enrolls them into insurance programs—an approach both commercially feasible for insurers and empowering for women farmers.

Recent statistics indicate that women farmers in the developing world are at particular risk for agricultural instability. A recent study by the World Bank Group and the ONE Campaign found that although roughly half of the farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa are women, women farmers in Africa produce between 13 and 25 percent less than their male counterparts.

The World Bank Group and the ONE Campaign attributed this difference largely to women farmers’ lack of access to credit and other financial tools.

According to estimates by the Food and Agricultural Organization, if women farmers worldwide had the same access to resources as their male counterparts, “their yields could increase by as much as 30 percent, resulting in 150 million fewer people going hungry.”

GIIF’s index insurance programs are already reaping benefits in many developing countries. In Kenya, a payout initiated by the GIIF program during a drought kept thousands of women farmers in business, allowing them to purchase seeds and fertilizer for the next growing season.

In Haiti, a GIIF partner is offering weather index insurance to 70,000 clients, mostly women farmers who provide essential goods and services to communities.

The World Bank reports that overall, these index insurance programs have helped close the gender gap for farmers in the developing world—a critical step in fighting hunger, tackling malnutrition, and boosting global food security.

– Katrina Beedy

Sources: World Bank 1,  World Bank 2
Photo: Siani

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Female Farmers Key to Fighting Hunger

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Female farmers working small plots of land to grow food may be a solution to ending world hunger according to international aid group CARE.  As leaders prepare talks for the Hunger Summit in London, advocates are reminding leaders to look to female farmers as a solution and answer to food insecurity. Around the world, 60 to 80 percent of food production in developing countries is grown by women. In stark contrast, only about 5 percent of training and resources ever get to these female farmers.

Julia Netwon-Howes, CARE Australia CEO, believes small-scale farmers are key in the fight against world hunger. Families around the world are being fed and sustained by women farming on small plots of land and their ability to increase the size and quality of their crops can lead to huge gains in fighting hunger. Studies show the world produces enough food for everyone, but the poor distribution and scarcity in some regions leads to millions still going hungry each day. To address the 1 in 8 still going to bed hungry, not only does production need to be addressed, but distribution must also be studied.

While action has been taken, small-scale farmers have been left out of the mainstream. With close to half of all agriculture being produced on small-scale farms, they must be taken into consideration as future plans are drawn to fight hunger. Assistance and government help must expand their focus to include both large and small-scale farms. This includes helping female farmers with better farming techniques, diversification of crops, and nutrition education. Farmers must be educated on the value of a variety of vegetables and food beyond the staple crops of sweet potato or maize grown every day. As they are educated and helped, hunger and malnutrition will continue to decline.

– Amanda Kloeppel
Source: ABC Radio Australia