Knowledge about women’s and girls’ benefits from commercial agriculture is limited but sufficient to form the basis of this report.
- Internal obstacles include: ownership, tenure and access in relation to land; a gendered division of labour and time; unequal domestic decision-making power; interactions between poverty, the harvest cycle and the food market; and changing household profiles and gender dynamics.
- Problems with national and international approaches are manifested by their limited success and some shortcomings to date. Persistent problems include: de facto gender and middle class biases; the creation of local dependency; problematic assumptions (e.g. promoting legal changes as a key means to change ownership of land); and a lack of gender mainstreaming.
- Promising approaches for national and international action are: – Making interventions work for women and girls. – Making commercial food markets work for women’s income and assets. – Securing land tenure and legal awareness for women. – Strengthening cooperative action and participation, amongst others through farmer groups. – Equipping women and girls better, through improved extension services and farmer field schools, agricultural inputs, appropriate technologies and dissemination of information. – Making markets work for household food security, by promoting women’s crops, supporting crop diversity and security women’s rights to the cereal harvest.
