Also partnerships should involve all key local stakeholders and seek to understand their needs through a participatory approach. In this process, communities can share ownership over the decisions and resources that affect themselves. By engaging with women in tea communities and understanding local contexts, partners are best equipped to find the most appropriate solutions when addressing challenges faced by women farmers.
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Strategic partnerships that address the entire value chain and in which partners equally prioritize gender equality are necessary to design intentional, sustainable programming for gender equity in agriculture. It is great to see several of the private sector partners I work with ask for this in our co-created projects.
Yes, I agree Anu. Ensuring that all relevant stakeholders are involved is very important. And also building a common understand of what the problem is and where are the lever points along the value chain for change?
There are several principles that I would highlight as crucial here:
Clearly holistic project design with strong M&E framework and understanding of cultural stereotypes is a must-have.
In addition, involving communities and farmer groups up front will mean that there is a high uptake. Example: ELF’s gherkins project in southern India, where the Marcatus Mobile Education Platform (MMEP) was developed, using video technology to share knowledge with farmers. A team of gender experts was involved in developing the training content and in supporting field officers to ensure videos showcased women as leaders, teachers and decision makers. Gender training for field officers was another key element in order to support them to improve women’s participation in training sessions for example choosing times/locations when women are more likely to feel safe and able to attend.
As a result, women’s participation in the training increased significantly. Before the project began, 88% of traditional farmer training sessions were solely attended by men. After launching MMEP, women outnumbered men at most of the sessions. But for the project to become more gender transformative, a deeper understanding of gender power dynamics and norms would have been needed, along with a clearer strategy on how change could have been further supported.
VSLAs are a proven and highly effective intervention to empower women and encourage income generating activities. Cash transfers are also an effective tool and further research needs to be done how we can scale them through partnerships.
More work is needed to understand how we can create successful, scalable off-taker models that involve new partners as this often is currently out of scope for our suppliers.
Anu, totally agreeing with you. Partnerships with local people create lasting impact and mitigate risks!
@HannahClark we are exploring the use of Radio in upcoming programmes would love to connect and learn from your work so far.
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Such great comments! I’d add that each organization in a partnership needs to understand and acknowledge the power dynamics at play. It can be as simple as naming this in the design process by articulating what each partner brings to the table in soft & hard skills, financial & social capital, etc. and how women can be in leadership positions in the partnership. We find it quite important to establish a dynamic among partners of transparency and trust from the start. A few committed individual champions from partner organizations modeling this behavior makes a huge difference it getting an effective partnership.
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Please do! Check out our website www.farmersvoiceradio.org or contact me on hclark@lyf.org.uk
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• Let’s make use of multi-stakeholder platforms and approaches to bring the women and other players on board.
@ilariaidawalton - I absolutely agree with the importance of M&E being a priority. We need to agree from the start on what we measure and what success looks like. And this definition has to be driven by the women themselves. We often want success to be measurable, e.g. the number of women trained, or the number of women in savings groups – but what is the resulting impact in their lives of these actions? Do these actions ultimately result in women having more agency over their income, their time, their bodies? This can be uncomfortable as partners often want quantifiable metrics which they can report on.
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Hi I’m Hamish and I work with Symrise AG and have co-designed a multi-country, multi-partner, multi-crop PPP initiative called Bridging The Gap with GIZ. Our partners include Unilever in Madagascar vanilla, Mars in India mint, Pernod Ricard in Philippines coconuts and just launched Natura in Brazil on a range of cosmetic ingredients derived from the Amazon.
In all our projects women smallholder farmers are critical partners.
Sorry would just add that we also have good commitment from Kellogg’s and FrieslandCampina who also support our projects in Madagascar.
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Yes, great point about building on the VSLAs and supporting them when they become more mature. In our programmes some of the VSLA’s have formally registered to be able to access specific support and funds available from for example local governments in Kenya.
Great point, Suzanne - I definitely agree! Would love to hear your thoughts on how to bring in different types of value chain partners to create scalable programming, especially when the priorities and business drivers of each organisation is likely to be very different?
Working with local NGO’s and FPO’s (farmer producer organizations) because they work closely with rural population therefore their commitment runs deep in helping to grow and sustain farming conditions on a local level.
In addition, we feel hiring women in field officer position to help show women as authoritative and able to lead and train other women.
We need to design a program that can run autonomously without relying on subsidies and grants, beyond the initial start up stage.
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Hi @sandrasanchez , concerning the women tractor drivers and machine operators in particular, this was not really affected by Covid; those operations were able to continue as usual.
Concerning farm extension services in general, worldwide, we continued to operate and to provide services for farmers - with, of course, sanitary controls and social distancing. To reduce (but not eliminate) physical interactions with farmers, it helped that we had long-standing relationships with farmers, and digital registration systems. We harnessed these to dispense advisory information both about farming (e.g. it’s time to scout for pests!) as well as Covid-related health information.
Excellent to have these clear principles @ilariaidawalton - I’d add the challenge of learning from the M&E system. Everyone is so busy, that establishing and agreeing on critical learning questions at the start, and then coming back to these questions in a partnership as evidence comes in is critical to enable learning feedback loops. And ensuring women in rural communities are involved in this learning and synthesis process.
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I’d echo and add to this. We run two simple tools (1) Drivers of Motivation - what’s in it for ME/YOU/THEM/US - to prepare the ground for alignmenty (2) Drivers of Success - what we bring for success, what we need for success. We get all project partners to go through these exercises very early in the design phase and later as we onboard field teams and additional actors representing the different partners.
This for example helps us ensure that we all have Women Empowerment as a common agenda item, even if the way in which it is addressed may differ from one project to another, dependent on local context.
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A lot of changes are needed in order to reduce the constraints smallholder women farmers are facing across various value chains. Various stakeholders will need to partner with smallholder farmer groups/producer groups/cooperatives to go beyond a focus on agricultural productivity and have a holistic approach that supports access to finance for income diversification which translates to more money in the farmer’s pocket, access to credit ,insurance and preventative health programmes focusing on nutrition.
How to develope a collaborative partnership.
Interventions should be designed to target women. Women should be the core of whatever intention is being developed.
While designing the capacity building programs, the needs of women should be in mind in terms of time, strength and energy so that they benefit women more than men.
The context specific: groups and communities may be the same but may have different issues while issues may also be the same but with different context.
We can build stronger collaboration and partnership by bringing together relevant stakeholders- Cocodod, WCF, LBC etc. We should identify the expertise in the various value chain within the sector.
In order to build sustainable livelihood, we must bring on board the women involved right from the beginning. This will avoid white elephant programs and interventions.
Thank you.
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Symrise together with its partners GIZ, Tanager and Mars similarly upped our game on digital registration in order to keep connections alive during COVID19 in India. In fact earlier in the project there had been considerable hesitation from some partners to “go digital” as they felt it could harm farmer engagement - when presented with no choice, the extension services team moved heaven and earth and now we have 100% digital connectivity.
Same is true in a project in Indonesia where we partnered to create NILAMPEDIA which is run as a Facebook platform for connectivity with farmers - great advantage there was we needed no customisation or training.