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2009 Summer Seminar Series
Back to 2009 Seminar Series
July 29
Integrating Gender in Agricultural Programs
Presenters: Nienke Beintema, Head of the Agricultural Science & Technology Indicators Initiative, International Food Policy Research Institute
Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute
Panelists: Thomas Hobgood, Senior Agricultural Advisor, Bureau for Africa, Office of Sustainable Development, USAID
Haven Ley, Program Officer, Agricultural Development, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Catherine Ragasa, Agricultural Economist, Agriculture and Rural Development, World Bank
Moderator: Michael Yates, Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator, Bureau of Economic Growth, Agriculture and Trade, USAID
Seminar Summary | Question and Answer
Haven Ley
Ruth Meinzen-Dick
Catherine Ragasa
Thomas Hobgood
Nienke Beintema
PowerPoint presentations: N. Beintema presentation (340 KB) | R. Meinzen-Dick presentation (2.21 MB) | T. Hobgood presentation (667 KB)
Handout: Women's participation in agricultural research and higher education: key trends in Sub-Saharan Africa - N. Beintema and F. Di Marcantonio, July 2009 (PDF - 351 KB)
Seminar Summary
Michael Yates’s Opening Remarks
Integration of gender concerns throughout USAID’s portfolio is a goal of our entire agency, and
it’s one that we take seriously. In agriculture, gender equity problems include women’s
access to resources, particularly land and inheritance rule issues; access to services like
credit and extension and agricultural inputs; and access to markets, including access to
information and deal-making opportunities. Not surprisingly, gender issues heavily influence
agricultural development programs, and failure to effectively integrate gender into agricultural
development will limit our impact and contribute to continued food insecurity, environmental
degradation, and even greater human suffering, which tend to be borne disproportionately by
women and children. Effective integration, on the other hand, can increase our efficiency
and development impact and better harness the creativity and energy of roughly half the world’s people.
Dr. Ruth Meinzen-Dick’s Presentation
I’m going to briefly recap some of the whys and some promising approaches to overcome them. In particular,
we come back to the importance of strengthening women’s assets because when assets are equalized, women are
at least as productive as men. How do we make agriculture more gender equitable? I’m going to relate it
to the project cycle.
Here is the bottom line: Why pay attention to gender in agriculture? Because you can’t address
poverty in South Asia and Africa unless you address gender issues, and because these economies and the
livelihoods of people are so dependent on agriculture. That’s it. Everything else is elaboration.
Agriculture is the field and the garden, production, postharvest processing, and natural resource management.
Women play key but often unacknowledged roles in all of those. Women’s assets and income are critical to
improving the household’s health and food security, but women face greater constraints than men in most
developing countries.
The broad figures: 80% of Africa’s food is grown by women, 90% of the work in processing the food,
60% of the work in marketing, and 80% of the proper transport and storage. Relative to men, women
spend more of their income on food for the family and are more strongly associated with child health
and nutrition.
In much of the developing world, women have less control over land and less security. Without secure land tenure,
they can’t make certain investments or lack the incentive. They have less access to credit, less access
to agricultural extensions, less human capital, less education, poorer nutritional status, and poorer
health. In particular:
- Land constraints: women’s weak property and contractual rights, including statutory rights and customary rights.
Promising strategies include improving legal literacy.
- Water: women are the main users of water for productive and domestic use, but
irrigation programs often target male farmers. Strategies include integrated programming and
looking at promising small-scale technologies affordable and targeted to women.
- Livestock: women generally invest in small livestock as a stepping stone to
building their assets. Strategies include concentrating on innovation that helps
increase small stock rather than just large stock, which may be more likely to be owned by men.
- Soil fertility: women often have less fertile soil for cultivation and less cash to purchase fertilizer.
Promising approaches include providing microcredit, decreasing the size of bags, providing research on
soil-fertility improvements.
- Extension: Although extension is heavily biased against women throughout the developing world,
other methods of extension, including farmer field schools, have been effective at reaching women.
Also important: increasing the number of field female extension staff, ensuring they have transport,
training male extension workers to work with women, simplifying messages, and understanding and
using communication technologies and social networks.
- Labor: women have other obligations as well. Labor-saving technologies can help.
- Market: in African markets women are constrained by the costs of getting to the market,
harassment, and so forth. Good approaches include using marketing groups.
The important message is the need to involve women as well as men in decision-making to
make sure both needs are met. How do you do this in a project cycle? In needs assessment,
collect and understand information about men’s and women’s roles in agriculture and how
the roles affect and will be affected by the project. Design the project to address constraints.
Think about training, staff gender balance, and necessary partners. In implementation,
ensure gender expertise. Budget adequate resources. In monitoring and evaluation,
ensure women’s and men’s voices are heard. Ask systematic questions.
Neinke Beintema’s Presentation
My presentation will focus on a small project that we just completed, which looked at the
participation of females in African agriculture research and higher education.
Women are still under-represented in agriculture and the general system. It is important to
include women as equal contributors to and beneficiaries of science and technology not only
to achieve gender balance, but also to tap into substantial additional capacity resources.
Agricultural research systems, especially in Africa, are having a severe capacity problem.
We surveyed the main agricultural research and higher education agencies in 50 countries. We looked at
information by degree, but also age structure, discipline, years of service, departures, and
promotions. Our main conclusion is that women are coming into entry-level positions in research
and education at a much higher rate than men. The gender gap is narrowing, but it remains low
in all the countries. And because this growing share of professionals at entry positions are
women, they are overall younger than their male colleagues, have lower degrees, and at lower
professional levels. There is concern about this capacity increase in staff holding bachelors degrees.
Haven Ley’s Presentation
I want to focus on the business end of this question. I thought I’d take a few minutes to very concretely express a couple of key aspects the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is working on in our project planning and project implementation cycle.
In 2006 we created the global development program to increase opportunities for people in the developing world to lift themselves out of hunger and poverty. We asked three critical questions: what issues affect the most people but receive the least attention and resources, what are the most effective ways of helping a large number of people over come hunger and poverty, and where can we have impact that is both scalable and sustainable both environmentally and economically over time. The answer came back, agriculture. Today, agriculture development is, economically, second only to our global health program.
Our goal is to help 150 million of the poorest farming families in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia overcome hunger and poverty by tripling their income by the year 2025. To reach this goal we follow several key principles. We focus only on small farmers; we concentrate on farm families that live on just a few hectares of land or who earn or consume under $2 a day; we put women at the center of our work; and we believe that a resilient and sustainable agricultural system is impossible to attain without understanding and supporting the needs that women producers, processors, marketers, and consumers face in agricultural development.
In 2008 we created a gender impact strategy that outlines the definitions, expectations, and roles and responsibilities of Foundation program officers and grantees in terms of a vision of success for women producers in our grant. There is a portfolio of grants that leverage women-focused gender constraints in agriculture development.
We are a data rich, data focused organization. Grantees prove their proof of concept by using data to justify their objectives, their approach, and their beneficiaries. We ask our grantees to spend the time and to spend the money to getting it right. Data that we asked the grantees to be collected on an ongoing basis showed that those numbers were arbitrary. We asked them to think meticulously and seriously about refining those numbers. In many cases a target is a useful tool, but including an arbitrary amount doesn’t do much to get the right outcome that we want.
And let me just say about resources: It takes money, and it takes technical bodies.
You cannot expect to support a program that’s gender responsive on the cheap or on the fly. In gender analysis, recruiting, hiring, and retaining qualified women is sometimes more expensive, but it might be technically absolutely necessary to do so.
This is a learning area for us. We target areas of greatest inequity for women farmers in gender constraints like land, like human capital. But we are also reluctant to classify crops as women’s crops or men’s crops and to carve out special projects for them on that basis. It is difficult to tell whether women grow lower value crops because they have different preferences and concerns or simply because they can’t access the land and credit information that will allow them to produce higher value commercial crops. We are struggling with how do you target those women in specific areas and remain open to the dynamicism of different crops, cropping systems, and ways of considering the household.
Tom Hobgood’s Presentation
You are not going to achieve economic development unless you first develop your agriculture sector. You’re not going to develop your agriculture sector unless you include women in programs and processes related to project design and implementation. You’re not going to reduce poverty and hunger unless you include women.
You look at agriculture in Africa. At the top you have large farmers, medium farmers with some commercial ability, medium farmers without commercial ability, and then a lot of small farmers. But turn it around. The focus is smaller farmers, and it’s mostly women. We’ve got to think that way. We won’t be successful if we don’t.
Both in the Foreign Assistance Act and in our Automated Directives System, we are required to integrate women into agriculture and into all programs.
At USAID, we’ve had two approaches. One is integrating women into programs. The other approach is women-focused or women-targeted. There’s been compliance to doing gender disaggregated analysis, but who pays attention to that data and what’s done with it is another question.
In development assistance: we have to address the obstacles that poor women face as impediments not only for women, but for success in increasing agricultural productivity, reducing poverty, and reducing hunger. Studies show that targeting poverty starts with giving women economic opportunities that have multiplier effects for benefits for themselves and for their families. We’ve already said that women produce up to 80% of the basic food stuffs. Yet, less than 1% of total credit goes to women in agriculture.
We have examples of success under the initiative to end hunger in Africa.
The Agriculture and Economic Growth Program in Mali integrates women into all aspects of the value chain so that they see themselves as entrepreneurs and have direct connections with banks and commercial buyers. The Gate Pilot Project provides a methodology for looking at how to analyze gender constraints, how to integrate them into value chains, and how to integrate them into commercial systems. The Global Food Security Response has morphed into the new administration saying that, again, agriculture is important. One of the seven key areas for support is women and families in agricultural development.
We are talking about making sure that we integrate gender into all agricultural programs, that we address nutritional issues of women and children in agriculture, and that we work to eliminate constraints that prevent women from being key players. The “how?” is what we need to support and provide guidance to our field missions about. We’re transforming the way we are doing business, allowing both men’s and women’s full participation, making women and families in agriculture a specific focus with specific targets and specific reporting requirements.
Over the years, because funding for agriculture went down, we lost a lot of our technical capacity, not only technical capacity but a lot of experience. So we need to rebuild that capacity amongst ourselves and our partners.
Develop a common understanding of practical gender analysis skills as the basis for identifying issues in agriculture; create a better understanding and appreciation for the implications of gender on agriculture; build knowledge and tools for integrating gender into technical tools and agriculture. What has worked, how has it worked, what are the lessons that made it work, how can we scale up, how can we make it no longer a second thought but a first thought? It is women and agriculture that we have to focus on.
Catherine Ragasa’s Presentation
If there is any take-home message, it is the importance of data. It can’t be underestimated. It’s very important to know and measure data from the institution of governance, but I have to emphasize the importance of also measuring and monitoring beyond the institutional and the governance level.
Change in mindset is also very important. In addition to data and change of mindset, we have high level political commitment. Second, we need resources and incentives. Third, we need technical guidance and technical expertise. And I believe that we are in an opportune moment because there seems to be increasing investment in agriculture. In the World Bank, we are doubling investment in African agriculture. There is also growing recognition of the value of gender. So these are all opportunities.
In the World Bank we have a high level commitment by the president of the World Bank. He made three measurable targets of gender in agriculture. First, we want by December 2010 to have at least 50% of our agriculture projects to have gender responsive actions. Second, we aim by 2010 to have at least 50% of all agriculture projects to have gender responsive or gender specific M&E. And third, we want at least 50% of all land policy and administration projects to use gender analysis in project design and implementation. We have resources and incentives. There is also a gender action plan.
What do we actually do and how do we actually do it in the World Bank? We focus on several things. First, we focus on and target of how we do gender integration in our operations. Second, we do capacity building. Third, we focus on the youth. Fourth, we focus on the private sector. Fifth, we are striving to be demanding driven, rather than using conditionality in our operation. And lastly we really focus on partnerships.
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Question and Answer
[abridged]
Question #1: I often hear the terms “gender” and “women” being used interchangeably; I’m wondering if we are talking about providing women with more material support to improve production, or are we trying to fundamentally transform the sector in a way that eliminates gender-specific barriers for both men and women? The second question is do young women actually want to go into agriculture when it is a sector that is oftentimes not really profitable? Are we trying to get women into a sector that could, for many, be a poverty trap, and is that really a good strategy? What can we do to address that?
Answer #1:
Haven Ley: If I had another ten minutes, it would have been this idea of including men under the rubric of gender in a way that it often doesn’t include. It’s really central to this point of rumination that we are having at the Foundation about gender versus women. It gets to the center of my question about looking at the household as a real location for a unit of change in our cultural development and not looking at women in isolation. And then, thinking more about women, is it a poverty trap is a fantastic question, and it’s one that we all struggle with, and we’ve gotten a lot of comments on it. In some cases we are talking about actual day-to-day living, especially if we are talking about those earning or consuming the equivalent of $2 a day. If we acknowledge the reality of some of the beneficiaries, then we can start talking about what is a poverty trap? And how can we create these systems that are more responsive to their needs? It’s a tricky question, and I don’t think we want to incentivize women to get into agriculture.
Catherine Ragasa: The principle should be livelihoods rather than agriculture. Agriculture is just one factor or option. We should not force agriculture if it is not really that profitable. But in Africa there is really a huge potential in agriculture. They have abundant supply and abundant production. It’s just that little gap in terms of marketing it, processing it, and trading it that’s missing for both men and women. And if we can tap into that one, it’s really agriculture that will bring profitability and economic growth.
Question #2: Haven, I thought your point about resources and their critical importance is the one that I would like to shine a spotlight on. We don’t know what we are spending. We don’t have any idea, and we don’t at the moment have tools to track and measure. I wonder what you guys are thinking about on that score?
Answer #2:
Haven Ley: That’s a great question, and we are doing it in many different ways, and not all of them fantastic. We are doing individual line items that then get carved out, we are adding line items to other line items as add-ons. We are estimating that if we do this right then it will be easier to do it in larger projects, it can be as much as 15% of project cost.
So you are actually tracking it?
Haven Ley: We are trying to, but we don’t have one system or type of approach yet. But if you talk to me again in a year, I might have a different answer to that question.
Question #3: Sometimes in the work that we do, we face difficult decisions when we are looking to extend our program and for funding. The first question we are asked is where do you have the information that proves that your program is effective? And we have to pay staff to collect that data. How we can solve that problem? How we can have resources available to collect the data needed to prove that our program is effective when we have to divert our staff from doing their work?
Answer #3:
Tom Hobgood: I think it comes back to resources and making it clear that we, the funding agency and the partner, are holding each other mutually accountable for results and putting some resources and expectations behind it.
Ruth Meinzen-Dick: I think including both the women and men participants in the program in the monitoring and evaluation is one way of getting the data. The other is just to realize that tracking it is part of the job. It makes for a more effective program and people are aware of it. But it is a matter of changing the mindset to realize that women and men are full participants in this, that a farmer doesn’t take a wife; she may be a wife.
Question #4: My question is, strategically, if the organization you’re working for doesn’t have a policy, doesn’t have the tools, and you’re a grants manager in the trenches, would you suggest me saying, hey, we don’t have a gender policy, we don’t have tools, let’s deal with this. Or would you continue trying to be an exemplar and integrating this into your framework, into your monitoring and evaluation, and just trying to be that little cog in the wheel that’s doing a good job that hopefully somebody someday will look down and say, wow that looks like a really good idea, so let’s come together and latch onto really useful tools?
Answer #4:
Tom Hobgood: You never want to be a cog in the wheel, but I think you have to work at both levels. When you talk about the importance of a political leadership mandate, we have that now, both for agriculture and for women and families in agriculture. We have to provide whatever information, lessons learned, and expectations to people in the field that you will do an implementation plan, look at this component, and tell us how you are going to achieve results in this area, and we are going to do everything we can to provide you with the information, the tools that you need to do that. So, it’s both.
[From the audience]: I want to assure you that the ambassador who actually heads up implementation at State works directly with the Secretary; she’s working together with the Secretary, as well as with the policy and planning team, as well as with USAID and various agencies and NGOs to work on integrating gender into security and development issues. She just met with the Gates Foundation, we’re meeting with lots of ambassadors in those regions that have potential, and the Secretary is going to those regions in Africa. So I think she will also mention those issues. I think you do have that highest level of political will. Now, it is how do we ensure that there is interagency coordination? And how do we make sure that all these efforts can be coordinated with existing mechanisms like MCC goals and the great work that NGOs are already doing? I just want to put it out there that there is the highest political will.
Previous USAID Summer Seminars
Notes, Q&A transcripts, handouts, and slides from previous USAID Summer Seminar are available for the following years: 2008, 2006, 2005, 2004 and 2003.
How to Contact Us
Any questions concerning the Summer Seminars should be directed to the 2009 Summer Seminar Planning Team at ksc@usaid.gov
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