In relation to Bore Bako FCU, the low member number/participation of women and youth was a clearly noticed challenge i.e., representing only less than 8% of the union total members. Despite Bore Bako FCU’s ambition to ensure women and youth in the agribusiness development, there were no satisfactory progress made in solving this challenge mainly as the process requires the knowledge of different sectors principles and systems i.e., cooperatives, agriculture, local administration.
To alleviate this challenge, 2SCALE Youth and Gender specialists supported Bore Bako FCU to conduct youth and gender need assessments. These assessments help to fully illuminate on the ways in which women and youth have been engaged in the partnership, what potential ways to engage them and how best to ensure interactions are sustainable. Potential women and other relevant local actors were identified. In addition, based on the assessment informative and educational meetings were facilitated with the potential women and youth.
Bore Bako FCU lack the needed capacity to recruit, train, and register women as new members in the existing farmers’ primary cooperatives. Thus, while facilitating Bore Bako to take the lead and ownership of the processes, it identified all other relevant support actors to collaborate as a task team. Besides to Bore Bako FCU, the identified task team actors are the farmers’ primary cooperatives, local administrations, agriculture offices and Cooperative promotion offices.
Etefa Senbeto, Manager of Bore Bako FCU said ‘the low members and participation of women and youth is a clear challenge to us (i.e., representing only less than 8% of the union total members).
Bore Bako organized different meetings with the relevant actors. The meetings were organized to create common understanding of the challenge within the established task team, and thereby to mobilize all relevant capacity needed to bridge the challenge. At the end, the task team developed an intervention plan to improve the specified challenge i.e., the low member number/participation of women and youth in the existing farmers’ primary cooperatives.
Furthermore, as indicated below, implementation strategies were also set with defined roles and responsibilities of actors within the task team on recruiting, training and registration of new women members:
Consequently, following the activities carried out with prioritized 3 farmers’ primary cooperatives, a total of 120 new women members were recruited under 3 ABCs.
Worke Dugassa said ‘though I participated in the agriculture activities, I did not contribute on decision making, as I didn’t have much information. Now, I realized that by becoming member of Bore Bako FCU I can have better access to information and knowledge. This will empower me to actively participate in the agriculture activities and stay satisfied’.
As expected, the main learning of such women and youth targeted implementation is the success of including new women members. In addition, below are some worth mentioning learnings captured:
Empowerment through the collaboration of different value chain actors – when one actor fails to solve a challenge because of the lack of all needed capacity. Specially, solving a challenge could be complicated when the process requires the knowledge of different sectors principles and systems. In such cases, the best empowerment strategy could be mobilizing needed capacity through collaboration of other actors while supporting the primary actor to take the lead and ownership of the processes Such engagement will be easier when the different actors promote shared objectives.
Empowering women and youth to ensure sustainable agribusinesses development – develop appropriate system in collaboration with relevant actors to recruit, contact, and organize special events for potential women and youth. Such events are relevant to build trust and raise the awareness of women on the agribusiness systems by providing them with relevant information and explanations on wrong perceptions through participatory discussions. In addition, such participatory processes provide opportunities to assess the need and satisfaction of women as valuable inputs to ensure sustainable agribusiness development.
Promoting ownership through the official membership registration process – though membership certificate is usually part of internal administration procedures, providing the certificate to newly registered members make them feel more connected and included. Thus, while organizing special events/trainings for potential members, due consideration should be given to have enough copies of membership certificates. Besides, appropriate official representatives (authorities) should be present to provide the certificates. Organizing such events with official ceremonial procedures promote ownership and active participation of newly registered members.
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