Stories tagged: the female face of farming

13 Empowering Stories of Women in Family Farming

To celebrate the 2014 International Year of Family Farming, Farming First has curated a list of 13 inspiring stories of women’s empowerment as heads of rural family farms, from our 130+ supporter organisation base. It is the first in our brand new series of content mash ups.

Women account for 60 to 80% of smallholder farmers in the developing world. Yet in sub-Saharan Africa, only 15% of landholders are women, and they receive less than 10% of credit and 7% of extension services. Policies that address gender inequalities could lift 150 million people out of hunger. How can women be empowered to make this estimation a reality?

1. IDE: Veronica Builds a House… With Tomatoes

Veronica Sianchenga was one of the first in her village to buy the Mosi-o-Tunya, a locally manufactured treadle pump developed by iDE Zambia in response to the needs of local customers. It costs less than imported pumps and produces a higher output because it was designed for the specific local topography of rural Zambia. Using their Mosi-o-Tunya, Veronica’s family has already started reaping the benefits of additional income from irrigated produce thanks to iDE’s links to wholesalers and caterers in Livingstone. More

2. IFDC: Using Vegetables to Increase Gender Equity in Bangladesh

IFDC has been active in Bangladesh for over 35 years – assisting farmers to increase productivity, advocating for enabling policy environments and introducing new productivity-enhancing technologies such as fertilizer deep placement. Now, IFDC’s focus reaches beyond rice production to fruit and vegetable crops – an area deemed to be almost exclusively the domain of women. Helping women improve the productivity of more nutritious, high-value products such as vegetables and fruits not only increases family income but also promotes ground-level nutrition by increasing the amount of healthy food available for home consumption. More

3. TechnoServe: Guatemalan Women Launch Successful Nut Product Business

TechnoServe is helping a group of Guatemalan women to harvest, process and commercialize Ramon nut food products. “Alimentos NutriNaturales” has offered hope to many poor women in the community – hope that they could bring in extra incomes for their families and take on new responsibilities outside the home. More

4. FANRPAN: Women Accessing Realigned Markets (WARM) Project Uses Theatre to Give African Women Farmers a Voice

FANRPAN‘s Women Accessing Realigned Markets (WARM) Project seeks to strengthen women farmers’ ability to advocate for appropriate agricultural policies and programmes. The project uses an innovative tool, Theatre for Policy Advocacy, to engage leaders, service providers and policymakers, encourage community participation, and research the needs of women farmers. The project in pilot sites in Malawi and Mozambique. More

5. One Acre Fund: Carolyn Lunani Increases Her Acreage Six-Fold

Twenty-eight-year-old Carolyn Lunani farms four acres of land, where she plants beans, peanuts, bananas, sweet potatoes, trees and other vegetables. In 2009, she joined One Acre Fund, who provide farmers with a service bundle that includes seed and fertilizer, credit, training, and market facilitation. With the extra profits she has earned since joining One Acre Fund, Carolyn has bought a cow and constructed additional rooms on her land that she rents.

Photo courtesy of One Acre Fund/Hailey Tucker

Click here to download a photo essay on Carolyn Lunani from One Acre Fund

6. International Plant Nutrition Institute: Helping Indian Women Self Help Groups Make the Right Fertilizer Decision

In South Asia, 90 percent of smallholder farmers using fertilizer do not achieve optimum crop yields due to a lack of access to soil testing services. In response to this information gap, the International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI) South Asia Program developed the Nutrient Expert® decision support tools in partnership with MAIZE CRP to provide location-specific fertilizer recommendations for farmers growing maize and wheat. More

Photo courtesy of CIMMYT

7. Self Help Africa: Banana Boom for Zambian Women

Christine Mwale predicts that the income of women in her village can double when they become full-time suppliers to the new Banana Enterprise Project being supported by Self Help Africa in Nyimba, Zambia. Established by Self Help Africa in collaboration with Nyimba District Farmers Association, the project will buy banana from 600 women farmers with small plantations in the area. More.

8. Farm Africa: Working with Women in Ethiopia to End Poor Nutrition

Before joining Farm Africa’s project in Tigray, Zemansh and her family had no assets or resources and worked as labourers to get some money to buy food. They were lucky to eat one meal a day. Farm Africa provided Zemansh with two goats and training in goat management and breeding. More

Photo credit: Farm Africa

9. World Farmer’s Organisation: Why Women Farmers are Part of the Climate Change Solution

Filmed at COP19, held in Warsaw in 2013, Susan Carlson, Chairperson of the Women’s Committee of the World Farmers Organisation explains how women farmers can be a part of the solution for both food security and climate change, if they are given equal access to knowledge and technologies. More

10. African Enterprise Challenge Fund – Mariam Kamo’s Cocoa Farm in Sierra Leone Goes from Strength to Strength

Mariam Kamo inherited a large cocoa plot when her husband died , and manages it with her tw sons. Biolands Intl., Africa’s largest exporter of organic cocoa, has been working with smallholder farmers in the Mbeya region since 1999, providing training, technical advice, supplies of seedlings and pruning equipment. Mariam now gets a much higher price for the coffee she produces and can pay the school fees for her four grandchildren. More

11. Fintrac: Helping Esther Fatachi to Turn Chillis into Cash

The Zimbabwe Agricultural Income and Employment Development program (Zim-AIED), in partnership with Better Agriculture, has worked with smallholder farmers at Tshovani, Zimbabwe to diversify from low yielding crops to produce African Birds’ Eye chillies.With input loans and training, farmers like Esther Fatachi saw their profits soar. Esther earned more than $5,000 after selling her produce, with which she purchased a residential stand at a nearby business centre, a water pump, and paid school fees for her grandchild. More

12. Panaac: Linking Women’s Co-operatives to Market in Kenya

Lucy Muchoki of the Pan African Agribusiness and Agroindustry Consortium owns a business in Nairobi, Kenya and engages women’s co-operatives to grow the raw crops she needs to process the herbal products she sells. Watch the video here.

13. Farming First Compiles Evidence for Investment in Female Farmers

Farming First partnered with FAO to raise awareness of the gender gap in agriculture, and the impact that closing that gap would have. To explore the award-winning infographic “The Female Face of Farming” in full, click on the image below.

Enough Food IF – Hunger Summit Pledges £2.7bn to tackle malnutrition

On Saturday 8th June 45,000 people gathered in London’s Hyde Park to campaign against the devastating hunger and malnutrition suffered by millions all over the world. The Enough Food IF campaign, set up by Bill Gates in partnershipwith organisations including Oxfam, UNICEF and Twin, aims to raise awareness of the main themes due to be discussed at the G8, including:

AID: Life saving aid is needed to help the world’s poorest receive vital resources to alleviate hunger;
LAND: Stop land grabs and enable farmers to grow essential crops instead of being forced to produce biofuels;
TAX: Companies need to stop dodging tax in poor countries so that people can free themselves from hunger;
TRANSPARENCY: Governments and big companies need to be honest about their actions that keep the world’s poorest in a cycle of hunger;

Speakers such as Bill Gates, Satish Kumar, Danny Boyle and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams urged campaigners to do their bit to end hunger and malnutrition, as well as highlighting the need to empower smallholder farmers. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said:

In the last 50 years we have seen huge progress, but still 20,000 children die everyday needlessly…just ask yourself what you can do and then go do it!”

Satish Kumar, a long-time peace and environment activist who has walked around the world to promote peace, urged the crowd to think about the rights of smallholder farmers around the world, stating:

Land belongs to the farmers, it should be in the hands of the farmers and not businesses.”

Empowering female farmers was also shown to be key to alleviating hunger, poverty and malnutrition, as women often lack land rights and access to the right tools and knowledge, preventing them from reaching higher yields.

In response to the Enough Food IF campaign UK Prime Minister David Cameron led a high-level hunger summit where £2.7bn was pledged to tackle global hunger and malnutrition. The pledged money aims to save 20 million children from chronic malnutrition, which is currently the biggest underlying cause of death in under fives around the world.

250,000 paper flowers were also planted at the event, with each petal representing a child’s life lost to malnutrition. (see image below)

To improve global food security and nutrition Farming First urges G8 leaders and policymakers to:

Promote a clear joint focus on a common goal for food security at the global level through policy and operational coherence
Encourage increased transparency on how much of pledged funding has been committed and to what types of programmes
Engage a wide range of stakeholders to ensure that efforts are coordinated, clear, collaborative and ultimately successful.

The Enough Food IF campaign will continue in Belfast on 15 June ahead of the G8 taking place 17-18 June at Lough Erne Northern Ireland.

Find out more about global food and nutrition security initiatives here

Farming First and FAO launch Interactive Infographic: ‘The Female Face of Farming”

Farming First and The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have jointly launched a new interactive infographic entitled “The Female Face of Farming”.

The infographic is a striking visual representation of the statistics that underlie the urgent need to invest in rural women. You can view the full infographic at: farmingfirst.org/women

Women are the backbone of the green economy, especially in the developing world where (on average) they comprise 43 percent of the agricultural labor force. Yet they receive only a fraction of the land, credit, inputs (such as improved seeds and fertilizers), agricultural training and information compared to men.

The impacts of the gender gap in agriculture are significant. Women farmers typically achieve yields that are 20-30 percent lower than men. Yet the vast majority of literature reviewed confirms that women are just as efficient as men and would achieve the same yields if they had equal access to productive resources and services.

If women were given equal access to resources as men, they would achieve the same yield levels, boosting total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 – 4 percent.

This additional yield could reduce the number of undernourished people in the world by 100-150 million or 12–17 percent. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa alone, that would reduce the numbers of malnourished children by 13.4 and 1.7 million respectively.

As we strive to meet the global food security challenge and produce enough food to feed an estimated population of 9 billion people by 2050 then empowering and investing in rural women will be instrumental in meeting this demand. Not only will this help significantly increase productivity, but also it will help reduce hunger and malnutrition and improve rural livelihoods. And not only for women, but for everyone.

The infographic consists of 17 individually-designed graphics, each of which tells a part of this important story. Each graphic can be Tweeted and/or embedded for use in presentations or blog posts.

Key questions addressed in the infographic are:

Why are women so important to agriculture?
Where does the gender gap exist in agriculture?
What are the impacts of the gender gap in agriculture?

The infographic has been launched in parallel with the ongoing UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and International Women’s Day on 8^th March.

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