We feel some of the biggest challenges are unfair working environments, and ultimately being unrecognized for their efforts as they are doing much of the work. In addition, they don’t always have access to basic education, or control of family income. They are responsible for for much of the household as well, leaving very little time for anything else. In India specifically, women aren’t able to get the required nutritional elements they need, resulting in 50% of women suffering from anemia.
Very interesting point, Leena. The gender division of labour appears to change in response to changing economic opportunities. When men leave agricultural communities in search of higher earnings, women assume many traditionally “men’s tasks”. Men usually move into traditionally “women’s crop activities” when those activities are perceived as being profitable.
Contract farming may also play a role. Contract farming can boost livelihoods by giving farmers access to inputs, knowledge and markets. However, in situations where contracts are frequently signed with the male head of household - and where women have less access to land - then the livelihoods benefit may be concentrated in the hands of those who signed the contract and therefore get the services and control the income.
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Yes! and we need men to lead the effort to change these norms and not leave this work to women alone.
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Yes, government and other stakeholders are making great effort towards land reforms to favour women smallholder farmer. In addition women are being encouraged to own farms separate from that of their husbands.
This imbalance of power is not necessarily between men and women. It can also be between more powerful and less powerful men (e.g. older and younger brothers), or between higher and lower status women, such as first versus second wives: the former may have more access to family labour, such as the family ox, at the right time for plowing - while the second wife may have to wait, resulting in lower yields.
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This is really interesting Julie. And makes an important point that we cannot just view women as one homogenous group as there are huge disparities between different women.
Agree with you. It is also important to also think about how the unpaid care and household burden can be reduced. For example as part of our partnership with Unilever and Oxfam we supported farmers to acquire water tanks enabling time saved to be used for income generating activities.
True! We can’t deal with women issues without involving the men as well. Lets identify male champions and allies to support this cause.
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The above can be remedied by building the capacity of both men and women smallholder farmers through a gender-responsive approach to Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) . We have seen notable changes in introducing CSA practices like training Farmer Field Schools to establish community tea nurseries with drought resistant tea clones.The tea nursery is a gender-responsive approach and was selected guided by the particular needs, priorities, and realities of men and women in tea growing landscapes.
Hallo, I am Joshua Njoroge from Kenya.
I agree with Leena and Munson.
Few women own land and also do most of the work.
For land, Government should allow women to own land, and men should be sensitized on helping women. Boys too should be sensitized early enough that women too are equally important in society.
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Good morning, I am Sandra Sanchez, economist, founder and director of VToujours. Glad to be here and discuss together about Livelihoods, value chais and women
Hi everyone! I’m Lauren Beard, a Senior Partnerships Manger at Save the Children working on our partnership with Unilever (including a programme in Madagascar focused on vanilla farming communities) and our work to assess and address children’s rights in agricultural value chains. Enhancing the livelihoods of women is critical to our work, including involvement and decision-making in household finances, given that women tend to be the primary caregiver for children.
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Agreed, I do believe we can make a start by “putting our own house in order”: do we have diverse enough teams on the ground, do we require our farm coaches and agronomists teams to be diverse, are we asking our suppliers to pay attention to that, etc… That way, we can be role models too, and show that things can be different. The fact that we all intervene one way or the other in the communities should be seen as an opportunity for us to drive change…
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An other issue we’ve seen is that diversifying income and stimulating women to generate income are other approaches that are pursued to increasing household income. These are often ‘combined’ and result in encouraging women in farming households to grow food crops (not cash crops) or other (micro) ‘alternative’ activities, which are often gendered. This appears to push women away from cocoa, instead of providing this as a choice too, and excludes them from a key (cash) crop.
There is little emphasis on professionalizing and scaling women’s businesses or on unlocking(leadership) opportunities for women in the first mile or cocoa production.
This further reinforces the notion that women (only) need an ‘extra’ income to cover personal needs and household expenses, instead of (also) becoming a breadwinner in her own right. Her role in the household continues to be her main responsibility and income generation is something to be done on the side, and combined with her unpaid care duties.
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Our second question today:
It’s so important to ask the women what they want and need. They know, and one of the things I love about Heifer’s approach is we hire men and women from the communities or region, who speak the local language and are culturally appropriate for the area. In the ELF vetiver project, it was wonderful to see a female Haitian project coordinator working with the women on financial and gender equity training; they were smiling and laughing. I think the tone of those trainings would have been different if someone outside that context had come in to deliver the trainings. I thought about how our coordinator could point out cultural issues in a way I could not. For example, the common concept that vetiver harvesting is “too hard” for women. Our coordinator asked the women how heavy were the firewood bundles on their heads and backs? Weren’t they heavy and “hard”, too? It was an invitation for the women to have that conversations in their homes, and hopefully join in the harvesting for profit where before they weren’t seen as capable.
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In Ghana, the dynamic is different. Land ownership is with traditional authorities, individuals and clans etc. about just 20%is in the hands of government. so anytime the land issue comes up, the government pulls away and say, this is not our responsibility.
One of the challenges we had was to educate the field officers who are all men on how to speak to women working in the field. Their natural tendency is to speak to the men working, so we’ve made it a point to include ender training as an active initiative for Marcatus QED so that women are seen and valued in the field.
Absolutely Suzanne! Mechanisms for meaningful change must centre the voices and needs of the women who we are seeking to impact. “Nothing About Us Without Us”. Therefore we need to root our design for change/projects in a robust participatory gender analysis. This helps to ensure that we are responding to the priority issues which women are facing and that we build an understanding of how women are impacted in different ways (e.g. how the factors of ethnicity, religion, age, disability etc. may mean that the project impact women differently).
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