RE: Are agriculture programs supporting women to improve their livelihood? | Eval Forward

Dear Colleagues,

I wish to thank you for taking the time to join this discussion, share your experience and web links to very informative documents. Please allow me to summarize some of your comments and share my reflections following this discussion on women in agriculture which is certainly an important topic as demonstrated by your interest and contribution.

Several of you have pointed out the challenges faced by women; these include no access to Land Ownership; lack of financing; chores and household responsibilities. More importantly, is the lack of voice of women in decision making which can be due to the cultural and societal norms; perception that women are illiterate hence cannot contribute to decision making. Furthermore, technology is perceived as a male domain.

It was also noted that while evaluations found that agricultural production by women beneficiaries increased as a result of their participation in agricultural activities, there was less evidence to suggest that they were individually diversifying their agricultural products and breaking into agri-business and self-employment as expected. This is to say that women continue to practice subsistence farming which is not going to move them and their family from poverty.

It appears that we have yet to find ways for women develop formal and informal support innovation networks with others;  ways for women to exercise decision-making power in intra-household discussions with their spouses, and extended family especially when culture limits this kind of interaction. Not the least is how do we get men to support women including their spouse to innovate and move from subsistence farming to entrepreneurship. Should we say moving women from the invisibles to strong actors along the agriculture value chains?

I also note with interest in your contributions that urban farming especially on roof top is now an activity that is being practiced. I have not yet seen in my work and It would be interesting to see what data exist for this type of activity.  Sadly, you have noted that monitoring systems are not always in place to measure the results of agriculture programs on women performance beyond increased productivity. Furthermore, some of you are finding that program managers still think that M&E exercises are expensive and require significant effort; hence the lack of efficient M&E system.

The Oxford Dictionary provides the following definition for Empowerment which says

To empower somebody (to do something) is to give someone more control over their own life or the situation they are as in “The movement actively empowered women and gave them confidence in themselves.”

This will become more necessary as we try to meet the challenges of the SDGs since statistics tell us that there are increasing number of households being headed by females (for a summary of World bank data please see http://www.factfish.com/statistic/female%20headed%20households). Women are often left in charge as their spouse has left to wage wars and/or have returned maimed; left to work in the cities; have never married; are widowed or the man has simply deserted the family.

Thank you again for your contributions. I hope that we will have more opportunities to discuss this topic in the future and that you will be reporting that women and marginalized groups are moving from subsistence farming to engagement in agricultural market expansion. J

Jackie Yiptong Avila, Bsc, MBA, DPE

International Consultant

Program Evaluator; Survey Methodologist

Ottawa, Canada