Gender inequalities are a key impediment to achieving food security in many households in sub-Saharan Africa. Although women do most of the farming on the continent, growing an estimated 70 percent of its food, they often have little control over the money that their crops generate.
A number of programs are addressing these gender issues and helping change cultural practices that undermine food security. Marian Bradley is the country portfolio manager for Uganda of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad) - a United Nations agency focusing on rural agriculture. She spoke with AllAfrica's Cindy Shiner about how Ifad's programs are assisting Ugandan women and helping improve income from agriculture in general.
Give us a snapshot of Ifad's programs in Uganda.
Ifad's entire lending program [to Uganda] at this point is about U.S.$100 million for five different projects. We're supporting three focal areas in Uganda: the decentralization process, the Program for Modernizing Agriculture (PMA) through our vegetable oil development program, and the National Agricultural Advisory Services program (NAADS).
Have Ugandan farmers begun to make a shift away from subsistence agricultural production?
It's an objective of the government of Uganda to move their farmers from subsistence agricultural production to more commercialized production. As farmers raise their productivity, they improve their livelihoods by having a little bit of cash. Also, they're able to improve their own food security, because they can use cash to purchase food or particular items that they can use to raise their own household nutrition.
Ifad did a study related to one of our projects being implemented by the Ministry of Local Government, where we supported road development and the development of markets. We found that, whereas 60 percent of the farmers had not been participating in the market and had only been producing for their own households, which is basically subsistence agriculture, about 40 percent of the households were only producing for their own subsistence by the end of the project. So we had seen a marked change, a drop by about a third of the households who were only producing for subsistence.
To what extent is the government making an effort to improve the agriculture sector?
I would say that, on one hand, agriculture is an extremely high priority for the government of Uganda. They have supported the NAADS program to improve the technological knowledge of farmers and they've had this longstanding policy for the modernization of agriculture, but it remains a challenge for them. It is difficult to modernize agriculture if other parts of your economy are not modernizing at the same time. The two have to go hand in hand.
When you're coming from a very low level of development, modernization is a challenge. The economic growth rate of Uganda has been quite high for a number of years now. It is definitely modernizing, and I would say that we seen very broad-based development. But you do not yet see rising wages in agriculture that would reflect the impact of modernization in the industrial sector.
Can you tell us about some of the gender inequalities in Uganda? How is the government supporting women farmers?
I would say Uganda is one of the more advanced countries. It has specific mechanisms for ensuring that women fulfill 30 percent of positions in civil society groups, it has a certain number of women parliamentarians and targets relative to the number of women who should be reached in farmer groups.
[But] gender inequalities continue to disenfranchise a significant proportion of the agricultural workforce, which is one of the factors contributing to low productivity in Uganda. In many households, the imbalances between workloads and sharing in the benefits of production are a result of gender inequalities. This leads to the persistence of subsistence agriculture.
Although women play a major role in agricultural production - and we estimate that they probably form about 60 percent of the labor force for agricultural production in Uganda - it's often their husbands who market the produce and use the income earned. So women are reluctant to adopt practices and technologies that would be more market-oriented because they receive little additional reward.
What are your programs doing to support women farmers in Uganda?
What Ifad has done is try to address the gender disparities at the household level. We're trying to do that to ensure that all members of the household can share more equitably in the benefits of improved production.
Under our district livelihoods support program, which is being implemented in 13 districts in the four regions of Uganda, we're supporting a process called 'household mentoring'. We have trained mentors who visit a selected number of households repeatedly over a six-month period - about once or twice a month - to discuss the gender roles within households: who is doing what, why does the lady perhaps have difficulty increasing her production, what she might need in terms of access to household resources. What we've found is that households that go through this mentoring process often readjust the labor burden between men and women, and they have a better distribution of the income earned. So the household mentoring, too, has turned out to be very important to ensure that women equally participate in the benefits of development.
Another example of an Ifad project where we're trying to address some of the gender disparities is in the vegetable oil development project, where we're supporting the production of sunflower. What we realized is there are two contradictory processes at work. In some areas, where sunflower has replaced cotton, women have better income earning opportunities, and they're able to process oil for their own families' diets. So we see improved household nutrition and rising levels of rural per capita vegetable and oil consumption in their diet.
In other areas, where we see sunflower has replaced crops, men are reaping most of the benefit. So we're trying to address some of the challenges of this counter-impact of sunflower production in some of the regions.
Are the results of the mentoring process proving sustainable?
Initially, when development was a very top-down driven process, we thought, 'Well, if we just show people, give people better seeds and fertilizer we're going to get production increases and everybody's income is going to rise.' A bit of the Jeffrey Sachs approach – you might get some short-term benefits, but, unfortunately, unless you get the sustained behavioral changes within families, those benefits don't last very long. That's why over the past 10 years we've been refining what we call our targeting approach.
In Kenya, we tried to get what we called a focal area approach, where we would go in and identify the poorest households. This household mentoring approach is something that's being used quite successfully in Zambia. What [we] have done in Uganda is based on the experience that we had with the focal area approach in Kenya and the positive experience in Zambia.
It would be difficult for me to say that it has solved all the problems. But you can see, in a country like Zambia where it's been underway for a lot longer, that in some of the households there have been profound changes in the way men and women work together, treat each other and divide the fruits of their labor.
One example that I know in Uganda is with regard to the sunflower in the areas where it's replaced cotton. Before, cotton was a men's crop. The men used to sell the crop and then take the money and go off and drink it or marry a second wife or whatever. But now that the women are cultivating the sunflower, not only do they sell their own sunflower in some areas, so they get the financial benefit, they also can process it. So instead of the benefits being drunk away by their husbands, it's actually transformed into oil that is consumed by their children.
So the men don't try to control that income?
If you have a woman who is participating in a livestock grazing activity, in some cultures she might be able to get the milk from the cow for the family, but then she wouldn't ever ride a bicycle and go and sell the milk. So that type of benefit can be captured by the men. Choosing a crop that women cultivate and sell is one way of ensuring that the benefits go to women.
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For certain types of horticulture crops, like potatoes, once you begin to upscale production of potatoes you see the bags are actually too heavy for the women and it's actually the men who come in and take up the marketing, so it's also a scale issue.
How do the men respond to household mentoring?
It depends on the personality. Some men are extremely receptive. Some of the men are extremely proud of their wives who take initiatives. Some couples, some farm households, are extremely unified and when the men see their women empowered they actually begin to change themselves. For example, we've done an oil palm development project on an island in Uganda, and one of the men farmers didn't want to have any part in oil palm. He said [to his wife], 'If you want to do this you can do this.' And so he gave her a bit of land to do it on. She's planted about 30 trees, which are extremely lucrative as they reach full maturity. He very sheepishly said he is tremendously proud of his wife, who is now sending her children to school, who has her own cell phone, has her own micro-businesses and has far surpassed her husband in income earnings. He's always the first to introduce her. So it depends on the personalities of the people.
Is there anything else that you would like to add?
It is extremely challenging to work in cultures where there are huge gender disparities. One of the biggest parts of the problem is helping women feel that they have an equal right to a productive asset. It's very difficult sometimes to help women feel that they really can do something. This is where efforts for education for girls [are important]. Make sure that they go to school, that they have privacy when they begin to get their periods, that there are adequate sanitary facilities in the schools.
While we can help women farmers, there are much broader questions of empowering women, ensuring equal access to education and ensuring other, let's say, social benefits - and healthcare, too - so that they have reproductive healthcare, so you don't find yourself with a girl who's 13 years old with a baby and expecting another one.
