40% of warrantage pilot participants are women
13 January 2011

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Latest figures from the RIU Rwanda-backed warrantage pilot show that just under 40% of the farmers who took part in the 2010 pilot were women.

Augustin Mutijima, Country Coordinator RIU Rwanda, said:

"When setting up the warrantage pilot programme we specifically targeted cooperatives which have a good reputation for empowering women. Over 50% of the farmers we were working with were women.

Then, as reported in December, we admitted a group of individual farmers who needed to use warrantage to sort out their fertilizer loans. These were overwhelmingly male-led farming households and this resulted in our gender statistics changing. It was important that we helped these individual farmers at this time but we will be keen to ensure that as we scale up the programme we maintain a good gender balance in our work. The next harvest season (March 2011) will see over 5,000 farming families benefiting from the warrantage programme.

We are often effectively working with the whole family unit but information on gender is a useful guide to help us think about what we are trying to achieve and how this fits with DFID's priorities.

Overall the results in involving women farmers to-date have been encouraging, but there is no room for complacency."

According to a recent ActionAid report from their EU food rights expert Anne-Catherine Claude women constitute the majority of farmers in most countries and produce most of the locally consumed food in developing countries, but the report claims nearly all agricultural policies ignore the needs of women.

ActionAid stated that only about 3.6% of international development is currently spent on agriculture and only 10% of that goes to women farmers. The third Millennium Development Goal, however, promotes gender equality and the empowerment women.

The average age of farmers supported by the warantage programme is 39 years. According to World Bank figures, in 2008 life expectancy in Rwanda was around 50 years.

Beneficiaries of the Maize Warrantage pilot in Nyagatare District Rwanda	Number of beneficiaries			Average age (years)
	Women	Men	Total
Nyagatare Vision Cooperative	23	0	23	42
Abadasigana Cooperative	22	14	36	33
Abibumbye Cooperative	25	6	31	34
Tuburamuhinzi Cooperative	35	38	73	43
Musheri Farmers Cooperative	0	12	12	38
Katabagemu Farmers group	2	33	35	40
Individual farmers *	1	80	81	40
Total	108	183	291	39

*In 2010 it had emerged that some 120 farmers had not repaid their fertilizer loans because the traders involved in the scheme were offering very low payments for the maize grown. So, NYAMIG and Duterimbere IMF intervened and bought the maize at nearly twice the price offered by the local traders and paid off the fertilizer loans for 81 farmers.