ACDI/VOCA
Small-scale farmers in Kenya, about a
third of whom are women, nearly tripled
their maize yields with the help of ACDI/
VOCA’s Kenya Maize Development Program. New technologies like improved
seeds helped farmers realize these gains.
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 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 how programs need to support women’s leadership and full
participation—plus a plan to provide this support.
Empowerment and Reducing Hunger
The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index was launched in 2012 by
Feed the Future in cooperation with the U.S.-based International Food Policy
24 Essay 4
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Bread for the World Institute