Women play a key role in agricultural production and trade, but their contributions tend to be undervalued and under-compensated. 2SCALE views activities through a ‘gender lens’, introducing a deliberate pro-women bias in order to increase women’s participation in all areas from planning and budgeting to management of cooperatives.
2SCALE teams worked with a gender advisor to ensure that women’s needs and perspectives were taken into account even at the planning stage. This often meant asking uncomfortable questions. Are there implicit biases in the requirements to become full members of the cooperative? The common criteria such as land size or volumes produced generally discriminate against women. Can women afford the membership fees – and if they can, do they have “permission” to pay, or to buy shares? A number of primary cooperatives are now considering specific measures proposed by 2SCALE, including reducing share size/price and discounted fees for women. 2SCALE teams work with the community, sensitizing male farmers (and especially community leaders) and sometimes facilitating local meetings to discuss practical solutions.
Change comes slowly, but there has been a marked increase particularly in capacity building for women. For example in the dairy partnership, 42 lead farmers are helping to promote new fodder crops; 17 are women. In the sorghum-sesame partnership, our value addition activities focus almost entirely on women entrepreneurs.