Due to growth of the agriculture market professionally and progressed economies worldwide, the world is treating farming differently. Farming has shifted from a passionate livelihood to a livelihood that needs the opportunity to be fostered by newly added business incentives. As a result, many farmers developed their skills and competencies to fit in market-orient farming and value chain demand, so they become agripreneurs. However, can every farmer become agripreneur? What does it take to be an agripreneur? The purpose of this study is presenting common challenges and opportunities in agripreneurship supported by successful stories from East region Cameroon.
Female farmers, who make up on average 43 percent of the agricultural labour force, face gender-specific barriers which limit their agricultural productivity compared with that of men. These constraints include lack of access to rural advisory services (RAS) and producers’ organizations. Improving women’s access to RAS can help close the gender gap in agriculture by making information, new technologies, skills, knowledge, and other productive resources more accessible to female farmers. The GRAST provides: • A methodology for assessing the gender-sensitiveness of RAS and organizations; • feedback on areas of the RAS provision that need improvement or that are working well. The tool focuses on three areas of inquiry (the enabling environment, the institutional level, and the individual level) and is expected to help systematize good practices and lessons learned to provide targeted policy advice and capacity development to member countries working towards gender-equitable rural advisory services.
While much has been written about the importance of mainstreaming gender in agricultural value chains (and the challenges inherent in doing so), relatively few studies have provided details on cases in which gender integration 1 has been successful. This study, therefore, presents a collection of experiences in which rural advisory services (RAS) were able to successfully mainstream gender into agricultural value chains, categorised in terms of “best-fit practices”. While the examples presented here cannot be precisely replicated in other contexts, they provide general guidance for organisations that implement programming related to agricultural value chains.
in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda
While there is mounting evidence on the link between promoting women’s equality and economic empowerment and other development outcomes, such as sustainable agricultural and economic growth, gender issues are being inadequately reflected in agricultural policy strategies and programs. At the same time, a changing climate means that there is a shrinking window of opportunity for action, and it is imperative that climate-smart approaches to agriculture help close the gender gap and promote women’s empowerment, economic development, and societal resilience to shocks.
This manual is a resource and toolbox for NGO practitioners and programme designers interested in diagnostic and action research for gender sensitive and socially inclusive climate change programmes in the rural development context. It is meant to be an easy to use manual, increasing the research capacity, skills and knowledge of its users. Integrating gender and social differentiation frameworks should ideally begin from the start of the programme cycle and be coordinated throughout research, design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation phases. The data gathered using this toolbox supports this programme work.
A facilitator’s guide to incorporating gender awareness and analysis into extension training and programming
The Facilitator’s Guide is the overall summary of steps and processes to be followed by workshop facilitators during all or part of the sessions used. The Participant’s Guide is for use by participants during the workshop and accompanies the CD to be provided at the end of the workshop. The Appendices contain case study and gender tool examples for use during specific workshop sessions. There are also pre and post evaluations that can be administered before and after the workshop to track participant learning outcomes.
This brief explains the concept of gender equality in advisory services and discusses the opportunities that gender equality in rural advisory services can create for global and local food production, women’s economic empowerment, household food security, and nutrition. It summarises experiences of how gender equality can be pursued in advisory services and provides some practical examples.
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This book makes the bold claim that empowered women and men are better, more successful farmers who can make the most of the opportunities around them. We argue that there is a causal relation between more equal gender relations in the household and in the community, and better agricultural outcomes. The one underpins the other. This is a radical thing to say, because it means that the standard development interventions – more extension services, better information, more fertilizer, better machinery – will not fully achieve their goals unless women and men are on equal footing, able to make rational economic decisions unhindered by gender norms that limit what is “appropriate” for women or for men to do, or to be.
Empowering women as decision-makers in all areas of their lives is challenging and exciting. It is a key to poverty reduction. Transforming gender relations will help to make smallholder agriculture and associated development efforts more effective and efficient, with knock-on effects for a variety of development outcomes.
This case study explores the Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) Ghana’s women extension volunteer (WEV) model. The WEV model is a peer-to-peer extension approach that uses community-based female volunteers to increase agricultural information dissemination in rural northern Ghana. The model is part of a national volunteering flagship program of VSO Ghana, a non-governmental organization (NGO). It was initiated in 2009 as a joint effort with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA). The case study is based on fieldwork performed from August through November 2012 in nine districts across the three northern regions of Ghana. The study specifically explores what the volunteer model has been able to achieve and in what ways it effectively increases extension services for female farmers. The primary benefits of the model are identified as strengthening farmer groups and enhancing the liaison between farmers and public sector extension agents and NGOs. The study also covers factors that can determine the sustainability of this model, such as recruitment, program development and support from MoFA. The study concludes that, although the volunteers perform some extension duties, they currently have limited abilities in providing technical agricultural information or introducing farmers to agricultural innovations or new technologies. As it stands, their role is complementary to that of public extension agents in that they can expand gender-specific extension services by liaising between service providers and women farmers in areas already being served and helping facilitate dissemination of information in their communities, but they cannot be expected to replace agricultural extension personnel.
A review of land reforms in fifteen countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia. The report examines the role of Development coperation in land reforms and the extent to which donor organisations have addressed cocerns related to gender equality