Development Works Number 5, December 2012 | Page 3

noted its 2012 progress report, Boosting Harvests, Fighting
Poverty. “What we have now are steps in the right direction.” Feed the Future has specific five-year targets that include reducing poverty by 20 percent in the countries where
it works, and reducing stunting—which indicates chronic
malnutrition—by 20 percent as well.

A Gender “Lens”

ACDI/VOCA

The effects of gender bias go beyond not respecting the
rights of individual women, important as that is. The 2012
Africa Development Report identifies gender bias as a principal cause of hunger in Africa.
Why? The short answer is that worldwide, the major responsibilityfor providing for families falls to women. Female
farmers produce well over half of all the food grownin the
world, including up to 80 percent in Africa and 60percent in
Asia. Thus, barriers to women’s full participation in farming
contribute to lower agricultural growth rates, smaller harvests, and more malnutrition among children.
As the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation notes, “Expansive literature suggests that women are much more likely
than men to spend additional income on food and health
care.” Increasing women’s income, in other words, is likely
to be an important part of a strategy to improve children’s
nutrition, health, and lifelong potential.
These are two good reasons to prioritize the needs of female farmers—they do much of the actual farming, and they
are likely to put any additional resources to good use, creating a multiplier effect that strengthens families and communities and helps them build resilience over time.
Yet, as the American organization Women Thrive Worldwide points out in “Women and Agriculture: Growing
More Than Just Food,” women tend to lack access to tools,
animals, and machines that would increase their productivity. The assumption that farmers are men is pervasive,
extending, for example, to the many tools best suited to use
by men. Hoes are a case in point: women work more effectively with hoes that are not only lighter weight, but have
longer handles than those intended for “everyone.”
“Knowledge is power,” in agriculture as in anything else,
but women receive only about 5 percent of all agricultural

ACDI/VOCA’s Kenya Maize Development Program nearly tripled
maize yields for small-scale farmers in Kenya, about a third of
whom are women. New technologies like improved seeds helped
farmers realize these gains.

extension services. Legally recognized rights to land and
water increase a woman’s influence in the family, enabling
her to ensure that more of the household resources benefit
children. Yet women hold title to only about 2 percent of
the world’s land.
The United States and other donors have become increasingly aware of gender-based barriers to productive
farming—and their cost in hunger and poverty. Evidence
has been coming in from all over: In Burkina Faso, shifting existing resources between men’s and women’s plots
within the same household could increase output by up to
20 percent. If Kenyan women had the same agricultural
supplies and instruction as men, they could increase their
yields by more than 20 percent. In the Indian state of
Andhra Pradesh, sustained access to credit for female and
male smallholder farmers led to a tripling of family assets
between 2000 and 2006.
New “women in agriculture” development projects began to appear as these findings became widely known.
Some efforts were criticized as providing more lip service
to equal opportunity than actual resources, but this has begun to change as local priorities play a more significant role
in shaping projects. Including men and women not just in
theory, but in reality, requires a careful look at when and

30 minutes.

Minimum walking time to an
all-weather road for 70 percent
of Africa’s rural farmers.
3

22 percent.

Median return on Feed the Future’s
investments in agriculture (so half
had an even higher rate of return).