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Portrait de Taibat Yusuf
Taibat
Yusuf
Kwara State University Malete Nigeria

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Soumis par Taibat Yusuf le lun, 24/07/2017 - 15:29

 

 

The questions explored:

  • what are the main challenges to gender equality in agricultural  finance?
  • What has been done by the AfDB, DFIs and Stakeholders to address the gender gap in agricultural finance?
  • Which financing mechanisms could be successfully used to tackle gender equality in agricultural finance?

what are the main challenges to gender equality in agricultural  finance? Main challenges to gender equality in Agricultural Finance

  • Economic exclusion; as a result of cultural rules and custom which impose domestic workloads with severe time burdens on women farmers
  • Financial systems that perpetuate women discrimination: Financial institutions are sceptical about financial management ability of women. They consider women as higher risk than men. They offer less assistance to women
  • Limited participation in political and public life: In most African countries, society do not permit women to be seen or heard in the public as such, very few women hold policy – making positions at the national level and those that do tend to be concentrated in social ministries such as health and women affairs. They rarely hold position in technical ministries like ministry of agriculture which have far reaching implication for the policies generated there. In most cases the policies are often far from addressing the main concern of women.
  • Lack of education and poor retention of girls in schools: Rural women suffer discrimination in term of access to education like any other economic opportunities in agriculture. Some rural communities in Africa belief more in male child education than female child, they  remove girls  often from schools than boys to help with farming and household work when work burden is too much
  • Gender – based violence; women and girls are often molested or raped if found in places where they should not be found culturally
  • Harmful cultural practices;  these are laws, customs, beliefs and attitudes that confine women mostly to the domestic sphere and impede their access to credit, production inputs, employment, education and medical care

What has been done by the AfDB, DFIs and Stakeholders to address the gender gap in agricultural finance?
Contributions of DFIs and AfDB Towards  Gender  Gap in Agricultural Finance

  • Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO): FAO has placed gender equity in access to resources, goods, services and decision making among its key strategic objectives in agricultural and rural development for the next 10 years with the aim of  creating social relations in which neither of the sexes suffer discrimination. FAO adopted the use of gender analysis to address differentiated access to and control over resources and decision- making within rural communities and households to designs programmes and projects that will be effective efficient and equitable.
  • IFAD empowers poor rural women and men to achieve higher income and improved food security through Micro finance system. A financial system or service that is accessible to men and women in the rural areas.

Contributions of the IFAD Microfinance system:

  • Economic empowerment: improves women’s roles in household financial management. May encourage them to invest more on their existing economic activity or start own economic activity or raise their status in household economic activity through visible capital contribution. Increased participation in economic activities may raise women or their control of their own and household income. This in turn may enable them to increase longer term investment in and productivity of their economic activity as well as their engagement in the market
  • Increased Well –being: increasing women access to finance can increase household well being. This is partly the result of economic empowerment. This in turn will increase household nutrition, health, literacy and happiness which will lead also to men’s well being, poverty reduction and changes in gender inequality in the household.
  • Social and economic empowerment of women: combination of women’s increased economic activity and decision making in the HH can lead to wider social and political empowerment. Having the opportunity to contribute to HH welfare gives women greater confidence and sense of self-worth.The positive effects in women confidence and skills, their expanded knowledge and the formation of support networks through group activity and market access can lead to enhanced status for all women in a community

Contributions of AfDB
The bank strategizes to maximize the role of African women in strategic decision making with the aims of; promoting women access to financial resources in other to maximize their participation in all parts of economy, closing the gaps in legal status and property rights and providing skills and training to make gender equality a reality. Also in the area of infrastructure AfDB aims to construct  infrastructure which will alleviate the burdens of the rural women, and to adopt projects that will benefit women more during construction and service stages

Solid evidence of the bank contributions towards gender equity is in the area of infrastructure. In 2014 the bank invested US$6.8 Billion in key projects across the continent with nearly 60% of the sum going into addressing the infrastructural gap.

The bank invested heavily in transport infrastructure by building or rehabilitating highway network, feeder roads – linking businesses and households to markets and services to reduce transport cost for farmers particularly women, raising rural income to reduce poverty and food security. The bank also invested in railroads, airports and port facilities providing women better access to markets and participation in global value chains (GVC).

The bank  funded energy sector providing more people with electric connection. It also invested heavily in water and sanitation in many African rural areas to ease the problem of public health threats associated with shortage of clean portable water and reduce the burden of women and girls who often walk long distances to access water.. The bank provided support in the areas of developing markets development,  storage facilities and irrigation infrastructure to increase crop production, processing and sales.

Contributions of the Stakeholders
In an effort to bridge the gap between men and women farmers in Nigeria various women groups and organizations have emerged.
They include national and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), credit and thrift cooperative societies. These groups and organizations have contributed immensely to the gains women farmers have recorded and the voice they now have in overall national policy on agricultural development

One such group is Women Farmers Advancement Network (WOFAN) (Yemisi et al 2009) The main thrust of the group include; providing a forum through which members of rural Nigerian communities express themselves, encouraging the formation  of commodity groups to garner access to agricultural credit and insurance facilities; and introducing labour- saving technologies including modern farm implements and the use of solar energy.

Women – In – Agriculture in Nigeria (WIA)
The  programme was established  Nigerian government in 1998 when it became obvious that in spite of a decade of World Bank’s assistance in building up Nigeria’s agricultural extension services, women farmers were still receiving minimal assistance and information from extension agents. This arises from the fact that agricultural extension services had traditionally been focused on men and their farm production needs while neglecting the female half of the production. The WIA programme was launched to improve agricultural extension services to women. Establishment of the WIA programme ensured that extension services in each state in Nigeria has female extension workers at every level of operation from state headquarters down to the grassroots The formation of WIA farmers’ groups facilitates the dissemination of agricultural innovations and provides women with better access to farm inputs and credit. In spite of the laudable achievement recorded by WiA, a number of problems have been encountered, these include; shortage of WIA extension agents as the ratio of extension staff  to farm family is still low making it non- feasible to individually meet all the women farmers. Most of the WIA extension staff are not purely agriculture – based, not trained in agriculture and most importantly the programme is seriously underfunded.

Which financing mechanisms could be successfully used to tackle gender equality in agricultural finance?
Recommendations

Use of Groups and Organizations Rather than Government machinery
It has been found that women groups have proved to be one of the most effective and entry points for initiating activities and reaching the poor households. In Nigeria WIA subsisted on women groups. Government recognizing that more than one-thirds of Nigerian women belong to cooperative societies and other locally recognized formal and informal associations built on these indigenous women groups to expand th e newly established WIA program. AfDB and other DFIs can borrow and learn from this experience. 

Gender Analysis

  • In an effort to bridge the gender gap, there is the need to recognize that some issues and constraints related to participation in agriculture are gender specific and stem from the fact that men and women play different roles , have different needs and face different challenges on a number of issues and at different levels. We can not therefore, assume that women will automatically benefit from effort involving rural people in project design and implementation. There is need to support the women to be directly involve with the development and implementation of the new project
  • Rural women participation continues to be underestimated in many countries as unpaid workers are frequently excluded from national statistics and/or farm women are considered housewives in agricultural statistics, such underestimation need to be addressed in order to clearly demonstrate the importance of rural women in agriculture

Soumis par Taibat Yusuf le lun, 10/07/2017 - 13:10

 

 

The questions are: 

What are the challenges of women engagement in agricultural production, processing and distribution value chains?
How have Development financial institutions supported women’s engagement in these sub sectors?
How should the banks address these challenges?
How could the ENABLE a youth empowerment initiative be used to support gender equity in these sub sectors?

Here is my take:
Women produce more than 50 percent of the food worldwide. Food crop production is an important subsector of the agricultural sector which provides foods and materials for household and agro-industries respectively.  Existing literature lend credence to the fact that women dominated food production and also perform overwhelming majority of the work of food processing in most developing countries (FAO 2005, Hills, 1996). Food processing contributes to food security through reduction in losses, diversity of diets and supplying of important vitamins and minerals. Food security as endorsed by the International Conference on Nutrition in 1992 is a state of affairs where all members of a household at all times have access to safe and nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life. This implies that women perform virtually all the tasks required for household food security and ensuring good nutrition.

Challenges
Inspite of the significant contributions of African women to agriculture , they still face a lot of discriminations inform of unequal access to most productive resources such as; Land, education and training, health, agricultural credit, extension contact, food and housing and often their legal standing is inferior and are unable to participate in politics and policy making. Women in most Sub – Sahara Africa have no direct access to lands traditionally like others in patrilineal societies where access to land is through their male relatives. Access to land is crucial in agricultural production as this is tied to access to credit and other means of production. Women often have difficulty obtaining credit because they rarely hold title to land or to capital assets often required as collateral. Africa women make up 80 percent of food producers but receive only 2-10 percent extension contact (FAO 2005). This is due to the fact that majority of the extension agents are men resulting into bias in the dissemination of information about new developments in agriculture in favour of men.

Jadesola (2004) noted that in some of the villages in old Bendel State where a hydraulic palm oil press was introduced, 72 percent of the villages used it the first year, this dropped to 24 percent in the following year because  in the first place, the machine was not designed for women to be handle  and because the daily time schedule did not coincide with their own time. As such, women did not benefit from the increase in the processed oil.  This demonstrates how lack of education and training have made it difficult for women to be integrated in development programmes. In a similar study  (Awoyemi and Adekanye 2005), it was observed that other than in the case of such simple farm implements as hoes and cutlasses, agricultural capital, particularly in terms of modern machinery, does not appear to reach women much in developing countries. The situation is the same for such complementary factor inputs as improved technology agro-chemicals such as fertilizers and herbicides, improved farm management practices and agricultural credit.  All these challenges have constrained the ability of women in agricultural production. 

Women in agribusiness (all processes involved in getting farm produce to consumers in the required form, time and place) are seriously constrained by the low level of infrastructure in the rural areas. Infrastructure includes physical roads and railways, education and health facilities, social services such as water, electricity and communication system. In most parts of the developing countries, physical and marketing information are poorly developed, storage facilities are rudimentary, supply of potable water is not adequate. Electricity supply is often epileptic, communication system is still poor although recent expansion of Global system of mobile communication (GSM) infrastructure and internet service has improved communication but it is too expensive for rural people

The contributions of Development Finance Institutions in support of women in production, processing and trading.
Government sources provide credit at minimum interest to rural women to promote women engagement in small enterprises and facilitate socio-economic change and development while the NGOs fulfils the credits needs of poor women engaged in the unorganized sector not being adequately addressed by the formal financial institutions. The impact of the financial institutions on these women has made them financially strong and are quite successful in creativity and innovation based working process.

Difficulties faced in accessing finance

  • The greatest deterrent to women entrepreneurs is that they are women. Financial institutions are sceptical about entrepreneurship ability of women. They consider them  as higher risk than men.
  • They lack tangible security – land
  • External factors working against women to financial support include; internal discrimination, inaccessibility of information, transportation opportunity and infrastructure
  • Internal factors such as low risk aversion by women, lack of self-confidence and lack of vision
  • Banks also ask for a lot of paperwork which most women cannot handle

How can the Banks Address the Challenges?

  • Financial Institutions  should provide more working for both small and large scale agricultural women ventures
  • Conduct repeated gender-sensitization programmes for policy makers and financiers on how to treat women with dignity and respects as persons in their own right.
  • Collect more gender disaggregated data on rural and agricultural activities to inform stakeholders the appropriateness of redesigning credit instrument or financial services.
  • Building on present potentials: Women entrepreneurs possess skills and techniques that are an asset to the development process. They do form groups and associations in their endeavours, where such groups already exist, capacity building of such groups will be more successful than forming a new one of members with less commitment.