Women are at the heart of agriculture in many countries. At the same time, women face a number of challenges that keep them having from full control over their lives. 

“Many development programs meant to empower women don’t have empowerment strategies,” said Agnes Quisumbing, a MRR Innovation Lab principal investigator and senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). “Programs that try to improve women’s decision-making power and other forms of agency, those we can classify as empowering, and those are programs that can actually have transformational impacts.”

Quisumbing and other MRR Innovation Lab researchers are testing how to spark transformational and lasting women’s empowerment in rural communities. This includes Quisumbing’s project that revisits the site of an earlier development program for women to look for lasting impacts through a cyclone and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other projects include comprehensive support for women to increase productivity and empowerment as well one for women shea producers that seeks to increase the benefits they receive for their work.

Testing for Resilient Empowerment in Bangladesh

All too often, hard-won successes of development programming can be wiped out by a single disaster. In Bangladesh from 2015-2018, the Agriculture Nutrition and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) project improved agricultural production practices, children’s diets, and women’s empowerment and relationships in the home. Less than two years later, Cyclone Fani led to widespread flooding that damaged cropland and housing in four of the 16 districts where ANGeL programming took place.

Quisumbing was part of the ANGeL project’s initial evaluation led from IFPRI and is now part of a MRR Innovation Lab study led from Cornell University that planned to learn whether the benefits of ANGeL sustained through the shock of Cyclone Fani. However, the 2020 pandemic-related shutdowns began just as the survey team were on their way to the field. When the team returned last year, the surveys included a new module with questions related to COVID-19.

“What we want to find out now is whether the gains that were experienced during ANGeL were sustained after both the cyclone and the pandemic,” said Quisumbing. “We’re specifically interested in whether women have been able to hold onto their assets or at least not deteriorate their asset holding as much compared to those who did not take part in the project.”

Access to Credit for Women Shea Producers in Northern Ghana

In Northern Ghana, shea trees across rural landscapes provide women an important source of income. Women carry out more than 80 percent of activities in the region’s shea value chain, including shea nut picking, processing and marketing. Locally, people use shea butter as cooking oil and it can be processed into cosmetic products such as pomades and soaps. The market for shea products is also growing globally.

“Women tell us that during the off-farming season their income from shea production helps them to survive but also serves as income that they can put back into their farming,” said Fred Dzanku, senior research fellow at the University of Ghana Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER). “They see linkages between the shea activity and other household production activities.”

Dzanku is leading a Feed the Future ALL-IN study in Ghana that tests how access to credit in the form of marketing contracts, both written and verbal, impacts how much women shea producers receive for their harvest. This project is designed to address the lack of bargaining power women have during the season between harvests when they most need money to buy food for their families. In those times, they sell their shea nuts cheaply and miss out on higher prices when the overall supply is low.

“Shea production is one of the most important economic activities for women in Northern Ghana,” said Dzanku. “If we improve the value chain and make it more profitable, we believe that it would help to reduce the gender gap since women in the region are constrained when it comes to access to land and other resources for agricultural production.”

Support for Agricultural Productivity and Empowerment in Uganda

Women smallholder farmers in Uganda are especially vulnerable to climate change. At the same time, women are critical to agriculture, producing the vast majority of the nation’s food.

“Women who work in agriculture in Uganda lack information on how to respond to changing climate conditions,” said Florence Kyoheirwe Muhanguzi, an associate professor of women's and gender studies at Makerere University. “They lack the capital to engage in nonfarm income generating activities and they are also challenged with gender-based constraints in making household decisions on the use of the income that comes from the proceeds of agriculture.”

Kyoheirwe Muhanguzi is leading a Feed the Future ALL-IN project in Uganda that takes a comprehensive approach to creating opportunities for women. Input packages of stress-tolerant seed varieties and fertilizer, as well as training on gender-responsive climate-smart farming, are designed to increase productivity and provide a measure of protection against drought.

The additional components of the project round out the support needed to create empowerment. A revolving fund provides the capital for women to start small businesses. Trainings on business skills and gender transformative approaches have included women and their husbands.

“The main aim of the gender transformative training was to create awareness about discriminatory norms that create those gender-based constraints,” said Kyoheirwe Muhanguzi. “The trainings also provide a platform for women and men to examine, reflect on and question those beliefs, social systems and the unequal power relations that cause gender inequalities in our rural communities.”

High Potential Impacts Across the Agriculture Sector

This kind of research could yield important insights that benefit a country’s entire agriculture sector considering the high numbers of women who work in agriculture. In all but six of the current 20 Feed the Future target countries, a majority of women work in agriculture. Among those countries, over 80 percent of women work in agriculture in in Malawi and Mozambique, as do over 70 percent of women in Uganda, Nepal, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.

“The question is about how agricultural development programs can provide women with opportunities to empower themselves,” said Quisumbing. “Creating those opportunities is a more sustainable process in the long run.”

 

Go in-depth with MRR Innovation Lab research on transformational women’s empowerment:

• Gender, Nutrition-Sensitive Agricultural Programs and Resilience in Bangladesh
• Reducing Poverty Among Women by Strengthening the Shea Value Chain in Northern Ghana
• Strengthening the Resilience and Empowerment of Women Smallholder Farmers in Uganda
• A Randomized Evaluation of an Integrated Graduation and Contingent Social Protection Program in Kenya
• Linking Financial and Agricultural Innovations for Women Farmers’ Resilience in Nigeria

 

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This report is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) cooperative agreement 7200AA19LE00004. The contents are the responsibility of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk and Resilience and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.