RIU, Africa, women and agriculture...
26 April 2011
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To celebrate the centennial International Woman's Day RIU held a discussion on the role of women in agriculture.
Duncan Sones of the RIU communications team facilitated the discussion. He said:
Augustin Mutijima from RIU Rwanda talked about how they had used radio to showcase some of the women involved in the commodity platforms. They found that these women gained confidence and esteem from this experience and also had a catalytic effect with other women getting involved in the platform.
Grace Jokthan from RIU Nigeria shared her experiences of participating in the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) workshop on gender and market oriented agriculture.
Dr Jokthan explained that it is important to ensure that roles of men and women are considered together. Empowering women needs to be seen as a logical step - not that something is being taken away from the men. The choice of commodities and point in the value where development organisations attempt to make interventions will have an impact on the way that women are impacted. For example, some interventions made by RIU Nigeria, such as the creation of compactor baler teams, did not create a role for women as this involved highly physical work which women were generally poorly equipped for. However, other programmes, such as value-added cassava processing, created opportunities for women to be entrepreneurial.
Vera Mugittu from RIU Tanzania reminded us of that the basic principles of business do not change just because you are working with women: the interventions have to be able to make commercial sense first and foremost. However, sometimes there are barriers or bottlenecks which impact on women in general or even on a single woman. The way RIU Tanzania works is to find ways to overcome the barriers women face in exactly the same way that they address other blockages - addressing the barriers as they arise, not assuming there will be problems from the outset.
Margaret Kroma from Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) was positive in her encouragement for what she had learned about RIU. She cautioned, however, against parochial gender solutions when agriculture is linked to and influenced by distant markets - it was important to have aspirations to empower women to be able to take their place in the agricultural sector.
Some of the RIU programmes have already reported the number of women involved to date.
Aqua Shops, led by Susan Otieno, reported that two of the first six franchisees are women. Along with their male counterparts they are receiving significant training and on-going mentoring. In addition, 66 women have been supported via the capacity building programme on fish farming husbandry practices and business skills. This represents approximately 11% of the total farmers trained suggesting greater effort is needed to attract more women to future training.
NERICA reported that more than a third of the farmers they are working with in Uganda who to bulk up rice seed are women. This is an encouraging result for these enterprises as in many areas of agriculture, as production becomes more explicitly commercial, men tend to take over the activity.
Half of the armyworm community forecasters trained so far are women; they are producing data for farmers the vast majority of whom are also women. Women tend to take on roles such as this that involve volunteering. However, this role has increasingly high status: the data generated locally is becoming part of the national forecasting system in addition to their contribution to driving up productivity and food security in the locality as armyworm invasions are predicted enabling preventative action to be taken.
Initial data from Real IPM Company suggests that women make up half of the 50,000 people who signed up for the free product trial of their seed priming product Gro-Plus.
RIU has previously reported on:
Audience data for Shujaaz
Gender breakdowns for village based advisors and women customers and FIPS project participants
RIU Rwanda gender and warrantage
26 April 2011
Tweet
To celebrate the centennial International Woman's Day RIU held a discussion on the role of women in agriculture.
Duncan Sones of the RIU communications team facilitated the discussion. He said:
"In July 2010 at our team meeting the DFID representative suggested we needed to review the way that we reported our performance in relation to gender. To keep things simple, at our next team meeting in March 2011 we asked three programmes to tell us what they were doing in relation to women and agriculture: Augustin Mutijima from RIU Rwanda, Vera Mugittu from RIU Tanzania and Grace Jokthan from RIU Nigeria. In addition we asked Margaret Kroma, Officer, Gender & Agriculture, AGRA, to participate in the discussion as our critical friend.The main points from the discussion on were captured by RIUtv film on women and agriculture.
What emerged was a great discussion providing examples of highly pragmatic and effective approaches to empowering women in agricultural enterprises in Africa. Basically the teams of innovation brokers looked at any specific obstacles faced by women and worked to remove them as they arose - but they remained ever mindful of the need to apply business principles which would allow long-term sustainable interventions."
Augustin Mutijima from RIU Rwanda talked about how they had used radio to showcase some of the women involved in the commodity platforms. They found that these women gained confidence and esteem from this experience and also had a catalytic effect with other women getting involved in the platform.
Grace Jokthan from RIU Nigeria shared her experiences of participating in the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) workshop on gender and market oriented agriculture.
Dr Jokthan explained that it is important to ensure that roles of men and women are considered together. Empowering women needs to be seen as a logical step - not that something is being taken away from the men. The choice of commodities and point in the value where development organisations attempt to make interventions will have an impact on the way that women are impacted. For example, some interventions made by RIU Nigeria, such as the creation of compactor baler teams, did not create a role for women as this involved highly physical work which women were generally poorly equipped for. However, other programmes, such as value-added cassava processing, created opportunities for women to be entrepreneurial.
Vera Mugittu from RIU Tanzania reminded us of that the basic principles of business do not change just because you are working with women: the interventions have to be able to make commercial sense first and foremost. However, sometimes there are barriers or bottlenecks which impact on women in general or even on a single woman. The way RIU Tanzania works is to find ways to overcome the barriers women face in exactly the same way that they address other blockages - addressing the barriers as they arise, not assuming there will be problems from the outset.
Margaret Kroma from Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) was positive in her encouragement for what she had learned about RIU. She cautioned, however, against parochial gender solutions when agriculture is linked to and influenced by distant markets - it was important to have aspirations to empower women to be able to take their place in the agricultural sector.
Some of the RIU programmes have already reported the number of women involved to date.
Aqua Shops, led by Susan Otieno, reported that two of the first six franchisees are women. Along with their male counterparts they are receiving significant training and on-going mentoring. In addition, 66 women have been supported via the capacity building programme on fish farming husbandry practices and business skills. This represents approximately 11% of the total farmers trained suggesting greater effort is needed to attract more women to future training.
NERICA reported that more than a third of the farmers they are working with in Uganda who to bulk up rice seed are women. This is an encouraging result for these enterprises as in many areas of agriculture, as production becomes more explicitly commercial, men tend to take over the activity.
Half of the armyworm community forecasters trained so far are women; they are producing data for farmers the vast majority of whom are also women. Women tend to take on roles such as this that involve volunteering. However, this role has increasingly high status: the data generated locally is becoming part of the national forecasting system in addition to their contribution to driving up productivity and food security in the locality as armyworm invasions are predicted enabling preventative action to be taken.
Initial data from Real IPM Company suggests that women make up half of the 50,000 people who signed up for the free product trial of their seed priming product Gro-Plus.
RIU has previously reported on:
Audience data for Shujaaz
Gender breakdowns for village based advisors and women customers and FIPS project participants
RIU Rwanda gender and warrantage
| To celebrate the centennial International Women's Day RIU held a discussion on the role of women in agriculture. April 2011 (04:00) |  |
