Lourdes Barreto squats in her greenhouse garden in the village of Huasao in the municipality of Oropesa, in the Andes highlands of the southern Peruvian department of Cuzco, proudly pointing to her purple lettuce, grown with natural fertilizers and agroecological techniques. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
CUZCO, Peru , Oct 13 2022 (IPS)

Lourdes Barreto, 47, says that as an agroecological small farmer she has improved her life and that of Mother Earth. “I love myself as I love Mother Earth and I have learned to value both of us,” she says in her field outside the village of Huasao, in the highlands of the southern Peruvian department of Cuzco.

On the occasion of the International Day of Rural Women, commemorated Oct. 15, which celebrates their key contribution to rural development, poverty eradication and food security, Barreto’s story highlights the difficulties that rural women face on a daily basis, and their ability to struggle to overcome them.

“I was orphaned when I was six years old and I was adopted by people who did not raise me as part of the family, they did not educate me and they only used me to take their cow out to graze,” she said during a visit by IPS to her village.

“At the age of 18 I became a mother and I had a bad life with my husband, he beat me, he was very jealous. He said that only he could work and he did not give me money for the household,” she said, standing in her greenhouse outside of Huasao, a village of some 200 families.

Barreto said that beginning to be trained in agroecological farming techniques four years ago, at the insistence of her sister, who gave her a piece of land, was a turning point that led to substantial changes in her life.

Of the nearly 700,000 women farmers in Peru, according to the last National Agricultural Census, from 2012, less than six percent have had access to training and technical assistance.

“I have learned to value and love myself as a person, to organize my family so I don’t have such a heavy workload. And another thing has been when I started to grow crops on the land, it gave me enough to eat from the farm to the pot, as they say, and to have some money of my own,” said the mother of three children aged 27, 21 and 19.

Something she values highly is having achieved “agroecological awareness,” as she describes her conviction that agricultural production must eradicate the use of chemical inputs because “the Pacha Mama, Mother Earth, is tired of us killing her microorganisms.”

“I prepare my bocashi (natural fertilizer) myself using manure from my cattle. And I also fumigate without chemicals,” she says proudly. “I make a mixture with ash, ‘rocoto’ chili peppers, five heads of garlic and five onions, plus a bit of laundry soap.”

“I used to grind it with the batán (a pre-Inca grinding stone) but now I put it all in the blender to save time, I fill the backpack with two liters and I go out to spray my crops naturally,” she says.

The COVID pandemic in 2020 and 2021 prompted many rural municipal governments to organize food markets, which became an opportunity for Barreto and other women farmers to sell their agroecological products.

Lourdes Barreto (L) began to learn agroecological farming techniques four years ago, which improved her life in many aspects, including relationships in her family. At the Saturday open-air market in Huancaro, in the city of Cuzco, she wears the green apron that identifies her as a member of the Provincial Association of Agroecological Producers of Quispicanchi. CREDIT: Courtesy of Nadia Quispe

“I sold green beans, zucchini, three kinds of lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, Chinese onions, coriander and parsley,” she says, pausing to take a breath and look around in case she forgot any of the vegetables she sells in the city of Cuzco, an hour and a half away from her village, and in Oropesa, the municipal seat.

Another less tangible benefit of her agroecological activity was the improvement in her relationship with her husband, she says, because she gained financial security with the sale of her crops, in which her children have supported her. Now her husband also helps her in the garden and the atmosphere in the home has improved.

Barreto, along with 40 other women farmers from six municipalities, is part of the Provincial Association of Ecological Producers of Quispicanchi, known by its acronym APPEQ – a productive and advocacy organization formed in 2012.

The six participating municipalities are Andahuaylillas, Cusipata, Huaro, Oropesa, Quiquijana and Urcos, all located in the Andes highlands in the department of Cuzco, between 3100 and 3500 meters above sea level, with a Quechua indigenous population that depends on family farming for a living.

Training to strengthen the organization is part of the activities of the Provincial Association of Ecological Producers of Quispicanchi. Maribel Palomino (2nd-R, wearing a headband), the association’s president, talks with fellow members at a workshop held on Sept. 28, 2022. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Spreading agroecology

The president of APPEQ, Maribel Palomino, 41, is a farmer who lives in the village of Muñapata, part of Urcos, where she farms land given to her by her father. The mother of a nine-year-old son, Jared, her goal is for the organization and its products, which the rural women sell under the collective brand name Pacharuru (fruits of the earth, in Quechua), to be known throughout Cuzco.

“I recognize and am grateful for the training we received from the Flora Tristán institution to follow our own path as agroecological women farmers, which is very different from the one followed by our mothers and grandmothers,” she tells IPS during a training workshop given by the association she presides over in the city of Cuzco.

The Flora Tristan Peruvian Women’s Center disseminates ecological practices in agricultural production in combination with the empowerment of women in rural communities in remote and neglected areas of this South American country of 33 million people, where 18 percent of the population is rural according to the 2017 national census.

Now, Palomino adds, “we are part of a generation that is leading changes that are not only for the betterment of our children and families, but of ourselves as individuals and as women farmers.”

She is referring to the inequalities that even today, in the 21st century, limit the development of women in the Peruvian countryside.

“Without education, becoming mothers in their adolescence, without land in their own name but in their husband’s, without the opportunity to go out to learn and get training, it is very difficult to become a citizen with rights,” she says.

According to the National Agricultural Census, eight out of 10 women farmers work farms of less than three hectares and six out of 10 do not receive any income for their productive work. In addition, their total workload is greater than men’s, and they are underrepresented in decision-making spaces.

In addition, women in rural areas experience the highest levels of gender-based violence between the ages of 33 and 59, according to the National Observatory of Violence against Women.

Maribel Palomino (L), president of the Provincial Association of Ecological Producers of Quispicanchi, sells chemical-free vegetables every week at the agroecological market in the neighborhood of Marcavalle in the city of Cuzco, Peru. CREDIT: Courtesy of Maribel Palomino

In this context of inequality and discrimination, Palomino represents a new kind of rural female leadership.

“I am a single mother, my son is nine years old and through my work I give him education, healthy food, a home with affection and care. And he sees in me a woman who is a fighter, proud to work in the fields, who defends her rights and those of her colleagues in APPEQ,” she says.

Palomino says it is crucial to contribute “to change the chip” of the elderly and of many young people who, if they could look out a window of opportunity, could improve their lives and their environment.

“With APPEQ we work to share what we learn, so that more women can look with joy to the future,” she said.

María Antonieta Tito, a farmer from the Andes highlands village of Secsencalla in the southern Peruvian department of Cuzco, shows her seedbeds of lettuce and celery plants. In March 2022 she began learning agroecological practices and is happy with the results that have allowed her to improve the quality of her family’s nutrition while generating her own income from the sale of vegetables at the local market. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

This is the case of María Antonieta Tito, 32, from the municipality of Andahuaylillas, who for the first time in her life as a farmer is engaged in agroecological practices and whom IPS visited in her vegetable garden in the village of Secsencalla, as part of a tour of several communities with peasant women who belong to the association.

“I am a student of the APPEQ leaders who teach us how to work the soil correctly, to till it up to forty centimeters so that it is soft, without stones or roots. They also teach us how to sow and plant our seeds,” she says proudly.

Pointing to her seedbeds, she adds: “Look, here I have lettuce, purple cabbage and celery, it still needs to sprout, it starts out small like this.”

Tito describes herself as a “new student” of agroecology. She started learning in March of this year but has made fast progress. Not only has she managed to harvest and eat her own vegetables, but every Wednesday she goes to the local market to sell her surplus.

“We have eaten lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, and chard; everyone at my house likes the vegetables, I have prepared them in salads and in fritters, with eggs. I am helping to improve the nutrition of my family and also of the people who buy from me,” she says happily.

Every Tuesday evening she picks vegetables, carefully washes them, and at six o’clock the next morning she is at a stall in the open-air market in Andahuaylillas, the municipal capital, assisted by her teenage son.

“The customers are getting to know us, they say that the taste of my vegetables is different from the ones they buy at the other stalls. I have been selling for three months and they have already placed orders,” she adds.

But the road to the full exercise of rural women’s rights is very steep.

As Palomino, the president of APPEQ, says, “we have made important achievements, but there is still a long way to go before we can say that we are citizens with equal rights, and the main responsibility for this lies with the governments that have not yet made us a priority.”

Excerpt:

Members of a women-farmers’ collective demonstrate use of a devices that sends daily bulletins on weather patterns, crops and other matters of importance to farming communities in rural India. Inexpensive technology can have a life-changing impact on rural women. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 19 2020 (IPS)

Access to technology which is relatively inexpensive to deploy can have a life-changing impact for rural women, social scientist Valentina Rotondi told IPS.

Rotondi shared her insight during a presentation of her research titled “Digital rural gender divide in Latin America and the Caribbean” to mark International Day of Rural Women on Thursday, Oct. 15.

At the presentation, Rotondi said her team studied the impact of the digital gender gap and access to technology on women’s health. Their research focused specifically on access to reproductive and sexual health for women in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Access to mobile phones can be a vehicle for improving health and reproductive health for women living in those remote areas,” Rotondi told IPS. “Women living in remote areas can get access to information regarding their pregnancy or their health. As a result, getting access to this information and reducing their travel time to hospital, improves the health status of their babies.”

The research was carried out by the University of Oxford, and the webinar was co-organised by  the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), the Inter-American Development Bank  and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Manuel Otero, Director General of IICA, said in his opening remarks that the observation of International Day of Rural Women was to celebrate the far-reaching “direct implications” and “deep roots” that rural women hold in the lives of those around them. 

“Women in rural territories deserve and need to be applauded, because they are the ones that guarantee rootedness, and are also at the core of family and productive life,” he said.

Otero added that rural women played a key role in ensuring food security and, ultimately, the whole purpose of agricultural development and rural wellbeing.

And yet, often they remain invisible in larger society.

Calling them the “guardians of our rural territories”, Otero said that last week’s celebrations were a part of the framework to gain recognition for such a vital section of society.

“We want to encourage public discussion which is necessary in order to push for development and implementation of high quality policies that would, once and for all, improve the situation for the women who live out in the countryside,” he said. 

At the talk, Rotondi added that while it is very low-cost to implement the kind of technological access that provides women with information about reproductive health, their impacts can be life-changing.

“The impact of those kinds of technology, which are really cheap and [help] connect [the women] to others, are big enough and could really be a vehicle for sustainable development,” she said. 

According to their research, narrowing gender gaps in mobile phone adoption can further narrow gender gaps in internet access, which might be “pivotal” in terms of health of improvement.

Rotondi further cited research that found  access to mobile phones can improve women’s financial resilience , which in turn improves their outcomes.

She shared the findings of their study that support this analysis:

• Women living in rural areas are the least “connected” group.
• The digital gender divide, which hampers women’s ability to access information and communication technologies, was narrowing in Latin America and the Caribbean  until a few years ago
• In 17 of the 23 countries analysed, women are less likely than men to report owning a mobile phone
• Countries that report a narrow digital gender gap also have lower gender gaps in vulnerable employment, youth unemployment and labor-force participation

The digital divide between men and women has been further impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

“In this pandemic situation, whereby schools are closed, people who have access to mobile phones and the Internet might be able to continue education, but those without this technology cannot,” Rotondi added.

Otero of IICA added that the current pandemic has made it more challenging  for the rural women who are even less connected, highlighting the invisibility of rural women and their work.

“It’s not enough to talk about access to land ownership, productive resources, finances, education, training, health, and justice” he said. “In particular, we [must] focus on the issue of connectivity. The pandemic has shown us that [having a] cell phone opens up almost every type of possibility, the ability to study, to sell or to buy – and therefore to work.”

Nila Kispotta (centre) poses for a photo with family members. Kispotta comes from a family of daily wage earners. Like many young, rural girls, pursuing a tertiary education would have been impossible without the financial support she receives from her school, the Moimuna Nursing Institute. Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

By Farid Ahmed
THAKURGAON, Bangladesh , Oct 14 2020 (IPS)

Nila Kispotta, a 19-year-old rural girl from the Oraon ethnic community, has become a figure of exceptional achievement to the small, poverty-stricken village in Thakurgaon in northwest Bangladesh that she grew up in. Born into a family of daily wage earners, Kispotta dreamt of a different life. So when she enrolled in tertiary education to pursue a diploma in Nursing Science and Midwifery — she achieved something her family and community hadn’t even dreamed was possible.

“Girl children are mostly bearing the brunt of poverty in our society, but I continued my fight against all odds. Only a little help can change the life of many girls,” Kispotta told IPS.

It would have been impossible for Kispotta to pursue a tertiary education without financial support.

But after matriculating from a Christian missionary school, she went to a local college for two years before enrolling in the Moimuna Nursing Institute in Thakurgaon, 460 kilometres away from capital Dhaka. It is a non-profit approved by the Bangladesh Council of Nursing and Midwifery, and offers a three-year diploma in nursing for Taka 110,000 or $1,500, which includes tuition fees, accommodation, uniforms and books.

According to the institute’s chair of the board of directors, Dr. Saifullah Syed, it was designed to ensure that rural girls are given an opportunity to receive an education, despite their financial backgrounds.

“We offer needs-based scholarship and we are creating a scholarship fund so that poor girls can receive support,” Syed told IPS, adding that scholarships were funded by voluntary contributions and that the fund was managed by a board of trustees. He added that individual donors could even directly support specific students.

“It is the lowest cost institute in the country, and the fees cover only the running cost of the courses and it has become difficult to run the courses as many poor students are enrolled here because of the scholarship facilities,” Syed told IPS.

Kispotta, who is in her first year, is grateful for the waiver of fees.

“Now it’s easy for me to continue the diploma in nursing at a private institute as the tuition fees have been waived,” she said. Kispotta added that upon completion of the diploma, she plans to pursue a bachelor’s degree in nursing.

“She is our pride,” the elderly Gabriel Kispotta, a distant relative of Kispotta who lives in Thakurgaon, told IPS. “None of us have even passed high school,” he said, adding that around 15 Oraon families lived in the area.

Thakurgaon and its adjoining districts has a population of just over 1.2 million — of which one million live in rural areas — and a literacy rate of just under 42 percent.  

The institute, housed on its own campus, opened early this year with a first group of 20 underprivileged, students, mostly rural girls.

It houses modern labs, a library, a hostel and a large, lush green sports field overlooking the institute where students and faculty participate in athletics, football, handball and cricket. There is also a hospital onsite — the Moimuna Mata Shishu Hospital — that provides free healthcare services and free medicine to poverty-stricken villagers.

“It’s a specialised hospital for women and children, but we run like a general hospital as all kinds of patients come here as they get services almost free of cost,” Director of the Moimuna Mata Shishu Hospital, Dr. M.A. Momin, told IPS.

Momin, a retired civil surgeon from a government hospital who also teaches at the institute, said both the hospital and institute were staffed by capable medical staff who were able to effectively train the student nurses.

The institute’s curriculum offers a variety of courses that include; English, computer literacy, basic nursing, anatomy and physiology. The aim is to train students to a higher standard that would allow them to access further training in facilities in urban areas. 

“There is a huge shortage of qualified nurses in the country and we’re trying our best to produce quality nurses making opportunities for poor eligible students, especially for rural girls,” said the institute’s principal Lucy Biswas.

Students attend anatomy class at the Moimuna Nursing Institute. The first group of students comprises 20 underprivileged, rural students, mostly rural girls. Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

Most of Kispotta’s peers have a similar financial background.

Joya Rani, who enrolled at the institute from neighbouring Panchagar district, told IPS that she badly needed financial support as she had no way of funding her education.

“Getting a chance to study here without any cost is a watershed in my life… I’ve struggled all through my life and I don’t want to lose the fight,” she told IPS. “Certainly I’ll try to become a good nurse and find a job at a big hospital in the capital,” Rani said.

Another student, Sweety Akter, said before enrolling in the Moimuna Nursing Institute she had been able to earn a small amount of money working as a private tutor. The funds went to support her family. “Now it has stopped and sometimes it becomes difficult for me to manage the money for food at the hostel,” Akter told IPS.

Only a handful of students receive full financial support because of funding constraints, management says.

Biswas, who formerly headed a number of government nursing institutes before taking on the post at Moimuna Nursing Institute, told IPS: “Had there been no financial support, many of the students would have dropped out as they come from very poor families.”

Biswas said that even though tuition fees and hostel expenses were cheaper here than any other private nursing institutes in the country, it was still difficult for many of the rural girls to pay their education expenses as their families were locked in poverty and the struggle for daily survival.

“The students are so poor that they [could not afford] smart phones and internet charges at home for online classes during the coronavirus pandemic [lockdown],” Biswas explained. The country went into a nationwide lockdown at the end of March, partially easing some of these restrictions two months later, but continuing with a restriction on travel until early August.

“So they returned to the hostels to pursue their studies [while] maintaining social distancing.”

Excerpt:

Poultry production is giving hope for deported migrants who make up the Association of Active Women Working Together for a Better Future, in the village of Los Talpetates, Berlin municipality in the eastern Salvadoran department of Usulután. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
BERLÍN, El Salvador, Feb 8 2019 (IPS)

Salvadoran farmer Lorena Mejía opens an incubator and monitors the temperature of the eggs, which will soon provide her with more birds and eggs as the chickens hatch and grow up.

Mejía is one of the beneficiaries of a project that seeks to offer productive ventures to women who, like her, have been deported from Mexico or the United States while they were attempting to achieve “the American dream.”

“I left because I worked in a factory in San Salvador, but the money wasn’t enough,” the 43-year-old woman told IPS in the yard of her home in the village of Talpetate, Berlin municipality in the eastern Salvadoran department of Usulután."Rural women are the motors of the economy, and at FAO we support returnees through inclusive and equitable processes." – Emilia González

In 1998, after a dangerous journey of several weeks, Mejia managed to settle in Dallas, Texas in the U.S.

She worked there in cleaning services at a school and in a hotel, but she returned to her country in 2001, with many broken dreams.

“Now I’m focused, together with my colleagues, on making this project grow,” she said.

Mejía and other local women farmers founded the Association of Active Women Working Together for a Better Future in 2010, and came up with an initiative that would offer productive opportunities to other returning migrants.

Currently, some 40 women make up this organisation, 15 of whom are involved in poultry production, who have received technical support from the state-run National Centre for Agricultural and Forestry Technology (Centa), as well as from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) office in El Salvador.

The rest grow El Salvador staple crops: corn and beans.

In spite of the importance of the support from Centa and FAO for the women’s organisation, the Salvadoran State has not yet developed a strategy aimed at the economic reinsertion of returning migrants, and in particular women.

“Sometimes what you need is a little boost,” said Mejia.

In the small rural village of Talpetate, home to some 70 families, jobs are scarce and poverty is rampant.

According to official figures published in May 2018, 32.1 percent of rural Salvadoran households are below the poverty line, compared to 27.4 percent in the cities.

The project, which was launched in November 2018, provided each participating family with 25 hens to produce eggs.

Dennis Alejo, a Salvadoran deported while trying to cross into the United States, has found in tomato production the best way to make a living and generate a handful of jobs in his native Berlin, in the eastern Salvadoran department of Usulután. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

According to the participants, income from the sale of eggs is still modest. But in the future, when production has increased, they expect to earn about 200 dollars a month as a collective.

That money is reinvested in the small collective farm, in order to improve and increase production, with more incubators and infrastructure.

“Rural women are the motors of the economy, and at FAO we support returnees through inclusive and equitable processes,” Emilia González, the U.N. organisation’s assistant representative for programmes in El Salvador, told IPS.

An important component of the project is that it also supports food sustainability, because part of the egg and poultry production goes to household consumption.

“We saved the money we would use to buy a few pounds of chicken,” Marlene Mejía, 46, another of the beneficiaries, told IPS.

She also tried to reach the United States, in 2003, as an undocumented migrant. But she only managed to make it partly across Mexico, before she got stuck in a town whose name she never knew.

After several days of confinement with very little food in a house run by migrant traffickers, she decided to return to her country.

The migration of Salvadorans to the United States is a phenomenon that has marked this small Central American country of 7.3 million people.

It is estimated that at least 2.8 million Salvadorans live in the United States, part of an exodus that intensified in the 1980s, when El Salvador experienced a bloody civil war (1980-1992).

Three planes arrive weekly from the United States with deportees, as well as three buses from Mexico.

According to official statistics, more than 26,000 Salvadorans were deported in 2018, mainly from Mexico and the United States. A high figure, but 1.2 percent lower than the total for 2017, which was 26,837.

For the past four years, Marlene Mejía has also been making pupusas, the most popular dish in El Salvador: a corn tortilla filled with beans, cheese and pork rinds, among other ingredients.

“If you have a job here, why suffer over there?” she asked.

The Salvadoran government offers some support for the economic reinsertion of returnees, through the project called “El Salvador is your home”, launched in October 2017.

According to data from the Foreign Ministry, 147 people received seed money to start up a project for economic and psychosocial reintegration, while another pilot project for the productive insertion of Usulután is aimed at 208 people.

But these are derisory amounts in terms of the number of beneficiaries, given the magnitude of the deportations and the country’s economic problems, so that most returnees find no economic stability, and government assistance falls far short.

“Evidently it is insufficient; a bigger effort is needed to be able to offer options to people when they return to their hometowns,” Jaime Rivas, a migration researcher at Don Bosco University, told IPS.

Some returnees manage to set up ventures on their own, with little or no governmental or international support.

Dennis Alejo, 30, has tried to cross the U.S. border five times since 2010.

The last time, in 2015, he managed to reach the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas, but the group of migrants with whom he had been crossing the desert for seven days was intercepted by the “migra”, as migrants popularly call agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But he managed to escape and hide in the bush.

“I spent the whole night hugging the scrub to hide from a helicopter with a searchlight, which was looking for me,” he told IPS.

Now, through his own efforts, and overcoming all sorts of obstacles, Alejo grows good quality tomatoes on a small plot of land he rents in Berlin, thanks to the 1,800 plants he planted three years ago.

He also employs a dozen young people as pickers, and feels he’s preventing youngsters from risking their lives crossing deserts to get to the United States.

“I don’t pay them much, just five dollars a day, but if I had more support, I could employ more people,” he said.

Because Alejo also faces the lack of financial support to set up an irrigation system to boost production.

With adequate extension support, women farmers can increase productivity and food security in Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Jacqui Ashby and Jennifer Twyman
PARIS, Mar 23 2015 (IPS)

We are lucky to live in a country that has long since abandoned the image of the damsel in distress. Even Disney princesses now save themselves and send unsuitable “saviours” packing. But despite the great strides being made in gender equality, we are still failing rural women, particularly women farmers.

We are failing them by using incomplete and inadequate data to describe their situation, and neglecting to empower them to improve it. As a consequence, we are all losing out on the wealth of knowledge this demographic can bring to boosting food supplies in a changing climate, which is a major concern for everyone on this planet.The millions of poor farmers, both men and women, all over the developing world have an untapped wealth of knowledge that we are going to need if we are to successfully tackle the greatest challenge of our time: safeguarding our food supply in the face of climate change.

Whilst it is true that women farmers have less access to training, land, and inputs than their male counterparts, we need to debunk a few myths that have long been cited as fact, that are a bad basis for policy decision-making.

New research, drawing on work done by IFPRI and others, presented in Paris this week by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security will start this process – here are four fast facts that can serve food for thought.

1. Rural women have more access to land than we think

For decades the same data has done the rounds, claiming that women own as little as 2 per cent of land. While this may be the case in some regions, these statistics are outdated and are answering the wrong questions. For example, much of this data is derived from comparing land owned by male-headed households with that owned by female-headed households. Yet, even if the man holds the license for the land, the woman may well have access to and use part of this land.

Therefore a better question to ask, and a new set of data now being collected is, how much control does the woman have over how land is used and the resultant income? How much of the land does she have access to? What farming decisions is she making? There is plenty of evidence to support the fact that women play a significant role in agricultural production. This role needs to be recognised so that women receive better access to agricultural resources, inputs and services

2. Rural women are not more vulnerable to climate change because they are women

We need to look beyond gender to determine the root causes of why individuals and communities are more vulnerable to climate change. We have found many other contributing factors, such as gender norms, social class, education, and wealth can leave people at risk.

Are more women falling into this trap because they don’t have control over important resources and can’t make advantageous choices when they farm? If so, how can we change that? We must tackle these bigger problems that hinder both men and women in different ways, and not simply blame unequal vulnerability to climate risks and shocks on gender.

3. Rural women do not automatically make better stewards of natural resources

Yes, rural women are largely responsible for collecting water and firewood, as well as a great deal of farm work. But the idea that this immediately makes them better stewards of natural resources is false. In fact, the evidence is conflicting. One study showed that out of 13 empirical studies, women were less likely to adopt climate-smart technologies in eight of them.

Yet in East Africa, research has shown women were more likely than, or just as likely as men to adopt climate-smart practices. Why is this? Because women do not have a single, unified interest. Decisions to adopt practices that will preserve natural resources depend a lot on social class, and the incentives given, whether they are made by women or men. So we need more precise targeting based on gender and social class.

4. Gender sensitive programming and policymaking is not just about helping women succeed

We all have a lot to gain from making food security, climate change innovation and gender-sensitive policies. The millions of poor farmers, both men and women, all over the developing world have an untapped wealth of knowledge that we are going to need if we are to successfully tackle the greatest challenge of our time: safeguarding our food supply in the face of climate change.

A key to successful innovation is understanding the user’s perspective. In Malawi, for example, rural women have been involved in designing a range of labour saving agri-processing tools. As they will be the primary users of such technologies, having their input is vital to ensure a viable end product.

In Nicaragua, women have been found to have completely different concerns from men when it comes to adapting to climate change, as they manage household food production, rather than growing cash crops like male farmers. Hearing these concerns and responding to them will result in more secure livelihoods, food availability and nutrition.

We hope that researchers will be encouraged to undertake the challenge of collecting better data about rural women and learning about their perspectives. By getting a clearer picture of their situation, we can equip them with what they need to farm successfully under climate change, not just for themselves, and their families, but to benefit us all.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

In the Indian Sundarbans, impoverished women band together to fight against hunger, economic insecurity and climate change. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
SUNDARBANS, India, Nov 26 2014 (IPS)

November is the cruelest month for landless families in the Indian Sundarbans, the largest single block of tidal mangrove forest in the world lying primarily in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.

There is little agricultural wage-work to be found, and the village moneylender’s loan remains unpaid, its interest mounting. The paddy harvest is a month away, pushing rice prices to an annual high.

For those like Namita Bera, tasked with procuring 120 kg of rice per month to feed her eight-member family, there is seldom any peace of mind.

“When their very existence is at stake, the island communities are of course adapting in their own ways, but the government of West Bengal needs to do much more." -- Tushar Kanjilal, the 79-year-old pioneer of development in the Sundarbans
That is, until she came together with 12 other women from the poorest households in the Dakshin Shibpur village of the Patharpratima administrative division of West Bengal to insure their families against acute hunger.

Humble women with scant means at their disposal to withstand savage weather changes and national food price fluctuations, they did the only thing that made sense: set up a grain bank under the aegis of their small-savings, self-help group (SHG) known as Mamatamoyi Mahila Dal.

The system is simple: whenever she can afford it, each woman buys 50 kg of low-priced paddy and deposits it into the ‘bank’, explains Chandrani Das of the Development Research Communication and Services Centre (DRCSC), the Kolkata-based non-profit that matches the quantity of grain in a given number of community-based banks.

In this way, “At least one-third of the 75-day lean period becomes manageable,” Shyamali Bera, a 35-year-old mother of three, whose husband works as a potato loader at a warehouse in the state’s capital, Kolkata, told IPS.

For impoverished families, the bank represents significant savings of their meagre income. “Earlier, the only spare cash we had on us was about 10 to 25 rupees (0.16  to 0.40 dollars),” she added. “Now we have about 100 rupees (1.6 dollars). We buy pencils and notebooks for our children to take to school.”

The women’s ingenuity has benefited the men as well. Namita’s husband, a migrant worker employed by a local rice mill, borrowed 10,000 rupees (about 160 dollars) from the SHG last winter and the family reaped good returns from investing in vegetables, seeds and chemical fertilisers.

The scheme is putting village moneylenders out of business. Their five-percent monthly interest rates, amounting to debt-traps of some 60 percent annually, cannot compete with the SHG’s two-percent rates.

But their problems do not end there.

Battling climate change

Designated a World Heritage Site for its unique ecosystem and rich biodiversity, the Sundarbans are highly vulnerable to sea-level rise and intense storms.

Half of the region’s mass of 9,630 square km is intersected by an intricate network of interconnecting waterways, which are vulnerable to flooding during periods of heavy rain.

Roughly 52 of the 102 islands that dot this delta are inhabited, comprising a population of some 4.5 million people. Having lost much of their mangrove cover to deforestation, these coastal-dwelling communities are exposed to the vagaries of the sea and tidal rivers, protected only by 3,500 km of earthen embankments.

Most of the islands lie lower than the 3.5-metre average of surrounding rivers.

Using data from India’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the West Bengal government’s latest Human Development Report warns that sea-level rise over the last 70 years has already claimed 220 sq km of forests in the Sundarbans.

Increased frequency and intensity of cyclonic storms due to global warming poses a further, more immediate threat to human lives and livelihood, the report added.

According to the World Wide Fund for Nature-India (WWF), analyses of 120 years’ worth of data show a 26-percent rise in the frequency of high-intensity cyclones.

Nearly 90 percent of people here live in mud and thatched-roof homes. Paddy is the primary crop, grown only during monsoon from mid-June to mid-September.

Forests and fisheries, including harvesting of shrimps, provide the only other source of income, but with a population density of 1,100 persons per square km, compared to the national average of 382 per square km, poverty among island households is twice as high as national rates.

The issue of food security coupled with the damage caused by natural disasters presents itself as an enourmous twin challenge to women here who by and large see to the needs of their families.

Resilient as the forests around them, they, however, are not giving up.

Fuel, fodder, food

At low tide, the river Gobadia flows just 100 metres away from the Ramganga village embankment, where members of the Nibedita self-help group gather to talk to IPS.

Typically, landless agricultural labourers who comprise some 50 percent of the Sundarbans’ population live in villages like this one, totaling no more than 7,500 people, because natural resources are close at hand.

Population density is high here.

The members tell IPS that four fairly severe storms from May to December are the norm now. Rain spells continue for a week instead of the earlier two days.

When 100 km-per-hour winds coincide with the two daily high tides, storm surges are likely to breach embankments, cause saline flash floods, devastate both homes and low farmlands, and leave the area water-logged for up to four months.

“The local village government kept promising that it would stone-face the embankment’s river flank and brick-pave the embankment road, which becomes too slippery [during the rains] to cycle or even walk,” group members told IPS.

When these promises failed to materialize, the women took matters into their own hands. Using money from their communal savings, they leased out part of the land along the embankment and planted 960 trees over 40,000 square feet of the sloping property, hoping this would arrest erosion.

“For the nursery they chose 16 varieties that would provide firewood, fodder to their goats, and trees whose flowers and [fruits] are edible,” said Animesh Bera of the local NGO Indraprastha Srijan Welfare Society (ISWS), which guides this particular SHG.

Nothing is wasted. All the forestry by-products find their way into the community’s skilful hands. The mature trees fetch money in auctions.

Coaxing nutrition from unyielding soil

A 2013 DRCSC baseline survey found that three-quarters of households in Patharpratima block live below the poverty line. Financial indebtedness is widespread. Fragmentation of landholdings through generations has left many families with only homesteads of approximately 0.09 hectares apiece.

Maximizing land is the only option.

In Indraprastha village, women are growing organic food on their tiny 70-square-foot plots, adapting to local soil, water and climate challenges by planting an array of seasonal vegetables, from leafy greens and beans, to tubers and bananas.

These miniature gardens are now ensuring both food and economic security, pulling in a steady income from the sale of organic seeds.

Tomatoes are trained to grow vertically, ginger sprouts from re-used plastic cement bags packed with low-saline soil, while bitter gourds spread outwards on plastic net trellises.

Multi-tier arrangements of plants to maximize sunlight in the garden, the use of cattle and poultry litter as bio-fertilizer, and recycling water are all steps women here take to coax a little nutrition from a land that seems to be increasingly turning away from them.

While NGOs praise the women of the Sundarbans for their ingenuity in the face of extreme hardships, others blame the government of West Bengal for failing to provide for its most vulnerable citizens.

“When their very existence is at stake, the island communities are of course adapting in their own ways, but the government of West Bengal needs to do much more,” Tushar Kanjilal, the 79-year-old pioneer of development in the Sundarbans, told IPS at his Kolkata residence.

“It needs to urgently formulate a comprehensive plan for Sundarbans’ development anchored on a reliable database and make one agency responsible for all development work,” added the head of the non-profit Tagore Society for Rural Development (TSRD).

Until such time as the government takes development into its own hands, self-help groups like those budding all over the Sundarbans – comprising thousands of members – will be the only chance poor communities stand against poverty, hunger, and natural disasters.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

By José Graziano da Silva
ROME, Mar 7 2013 (IPS)

Around the world, but especially in the planet’s poorest regions, women represent a life force that renews itself daily, sometimes against all odds.

José Graziano da Silva, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO). Credit: FAO News

Rural women, for instance, make up 43 percent of the agricultural labour force in developing countries. Fighting hunger is something they do every day.

They are the faceless enlistees in the most devastating war of our times, one which – paradoxically – is the easiest to win: the war on hunger, that afflicts one in every eight inhabitants of our Earth, some 870 million human beings.

In millions of homes around the world, women are often the ones who make the day-to-day decisions that guarantee that food is placed on an otherwise bare table.

It is the responsibility of governments and international cooperation agencies to empower women, to do justice to the leading roles they play.

This means providing women with the rights, policies, tools, and resources they need for their unrelenting role.

The central role of women in food security and nutrition starts with the thousand days — from the start of pregnancy through the child’s second birthday – that mark a person’s development forever.

Women can make the difference – for better or for worse – in the stark arithmetic that adds up to 2.5 million child deaths every year.

Putting food on a family’s table involves extending a woman’s reach beyond her maternal instincts. It means applying her energy and her life lessons to tilling the land and harvesting crops.

This is especially relevant in Africa, where the 21st Century’s key battles against hunger are being fought. Some 239 million people suffer from hunger in Africa, 23 percent of the region’s entire population.

In rural areas, home to 60 percent of all Africans, we see the most outstanding features of this struggle against tragedy and the importance of women.

Women head one in four rural households in Africa. In Southern Africa, that share is 45 percent.

Wars and ethnic conflicts, migration and environmental collapse have all intensified the absolute and relative presence of women in agricultural labour markets, over recent years.

Their participation in agricultural labour markets in Northern Africa has jumped from 30 percent to 43 percent since 1980. They are the majority in some countries, like Lesotho, where over 65 percent of the agricultural labour force are women.

The new responsibilities being attributed to women come on top of their roles in feeding and caring for their families. The double and sometimes triple burden of work in the field, at home and in the community is not always recognised, or shared by the men in the households. This frequently makes the empowerment of women more difficult.

Paradoxically, everywhere in the world it is women who suffer most from restrictions on access to the legal ownership of land. This in turn limits their access to credit and to the inputs they need to maximise the utmost efforts they put into community wellbeing.

Achieving those rights and that access, in order to close the gender gap in the most vulnerable countries’ farming systems, is one of the most important food security policies that governments and international cooperation agencies could ever implement.

Making states aware of the core role women play in economic and social development and forging a political consensus to give them the tools and rights that their role demands will be vital steps in the fight against hunger.

And not only against hunger.

As mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and, oftentimes, sole supporters of their households, women often are on the front line in the struggle for social justice.

(END)

Excerpt:

In rural Sri Lanka women are tasked with fetching and carrying water for the entire household, sometimes walking miles with pots and bottles balanced on their heads. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
POLONNARUWA, Sri Lanka, Jan 17 2013 (IPS)

During the dry season, when dirt roads are cracked from the relentless heat, the sight of women walking miles, balancing pots of water on their heads, is common in rural Sri Lanka.

While the men tend to paddy fields, the women are left with the arduous task of collecting water for household use. They account for every drop of water consumed, utilised or wasted – making them crucial players in rural water projects.

Talpothta is a typical agricultural village in Sri Lanka’s dry zone, whose life cycle is completely dependent on the rainfall that has become extremely erratic in the last few years.

In 2006, the village was chosen as one of the beneficiaries of a 263-million-dollar Asian Development Bank (ADB) project that set out to provide safe drinking water to 900,000 people in Sri Lanka’s north-central and eastern provinces.

But unlike many other development projects in the country, this is led primarily by women, who comprise an overwhelming majority of the village community.

From the initial planning stages, village women were inducted into the project’s long-term implementation plans, which included installing a community-run water storage tank and mapping out a distribution network to link the entire village to the water supply.

The project’s community leaders advise the roughly 200 village water users, check metres, collect payments and, most importantly, decide when and how to limit the water supply when the dry season sets in. Members also visit households regularly and keep close tabs on usage.

Sheila Herath, a member of the group of local leaders, says women play a critical role in this project.

“The woman in the household is the person who will know how much water is used for what. So we know how much is needed and how much is excess,” she said.

The ADB project planners knew this from experience, not only in Sri Lanka but in other parts of rural South Asia, officials told IPS, adding that 50 percent of participants at planning meetings and at least 25 percent of the officials from the government Water Board were women.

According to Attanayake Mudiyanse Senevirathana, a public official in the north-central town of Polonnaruwa working on improving access to safe water, women have traditionally played the role of ‘water bearer’.

“This is still the case,” he told IPS, adding, “Women also feel they gain more by the success of such projects.”

Thanks to the new water project, women in Talpothta say they find themselves with a lot more free time – something that most rural women can only dream of.

Forty-five-year-old Liyadurige Siriyawathi has returned to a childhood hobby that she gave up when she got married two decades ago – making sketches. She now earns about 100 dollars a month from the sales of these drawings.

Others are engaged in home gardening or say that they now have more time for themselves or for the children.

Kusum Athukorale, who heads the Network of Women Water Professionals in Sri Lanka, told IPS that one sixth of the island’s water supply is derived from rural community projects. Their success depends on women’s participation at every level, she stressed.

“They are the ones who know where the water sources are, how much is needed. They the ones who walk miles to gather water when drought sets in.”

Athukorale calls women the “foot soldiers of climate change adaptation” because of their hands-on knowledge of how natural resources are being used in households.

A recent ADB report entitled ‘Gender and Urban Poverty in South Asia’ found that women’s role in water management was crucial throughout the region.

“Health surveys conducted in 45 developing countries during 2005–2008 showed that globally, women bear the largest burden as primary collectors of water in 64 percent of households, compared with 24 percent of households for men, four percent for boys, and eight percent for girls,” the report stated.

The report warned that women, especially those from poor communities, were at risk of suffering more due to lack of access to safe water “as they are the primary users, providers, and managers of water in households and are responsible for household hygiene.”

The report detailed projects in Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, and Nepal similar to the Talpothta water scheme, where women played a crucial role in ensuring success.

A women’s group in the village of Ramnagara, a town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, was responsible for lobbying local authorities and a non-governmental group to establish pipes close to their homes. Like in rural Sri Lanka, the new pipes freed up time the women would otherwise have spent searching for water.

“Women now use the time saved to participate in group activities and explore other livelihood options,” the ADB report said.

“There is an accumulation of evidence to show that if we are able to (appoint) women as the decision makers for a project on the ground, the success rate goes up almost instantly,” Naoko Ishii, chairperson of the Washington-based Global Environment Facility (GEF), a public fund that assists in projects related to sustainable development, told IPS.

Ishii, who served as Japan’s deputy finance minister and as country head for the World Bank in Sri Lanka before taking up the GEF top post, credits women’s sense of discipline as a key factor in their pivotal role, especially in rural Asia and Africa.

“When women are in charge of a micro finance project, the repayment ratio is much higher,” she told IPS.

By Sabina Zaccaro
ROME, Oct 19 2012 (IPS)

It is a tried and tested truth that when women come together in groups they can address their issues more powerfully than they can as individuals.

Saquina Mucavele, executive director of MuGeDe – Mulher, Genero e Desenvolvimento (Women, Gender and Development), a non-profit based in Mozambique. Credit: Sabina Zaccaro/IPS

Cooperatives provide a sense of accountability and commitment, as well as healthy competition that brings tangible results, according to Saquina Mucavele, executive director of MuGeDe – Mulher, Genero e Desenvolvimento (Women, Gender and Development), a Mozambique-based non-profit organisation with a focus on sustainability, rural development and gender.

In Rome to participate in a seminar sponsored by the World Farmers Organisation on Oct. 19 about how agricultural cooperatives can assist rural women, Mucavele believes that “there is a need for stronger local networks that address women farmers’ and peasants’ specific demands, with a special focus on rural women smallholder farmers.”

Speaking to IPS correspondent Sabina Zaccaro on the sidelines of World Food Week, whose theme this year is ‘Agricultural cooperatives – key to feeding the world‘, hosted by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Mucavele said, “These networks are unfocused and weak. There is (an urgent) need for capacity-building in rural institutions to promote women’s participation in development.”

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: How do agricultural cooperatives support female agricultural workers?

A: Networks and cooperatives are the right strategy for farmers’ development (provided) they have support and good leadership. Working cooperatively is not only about being involved in common work, it also enables members to share their problems and find collective solutions.

There is even the possibility of creating a common market, and other facilities such as hospitals, education centres and banks, for members. By gathering in a cooperative, rural women can strengthen their voice to advocate for rights.

Q: What role should men play in this process?

A: There is an urgent need to change the attitude and mindset within rural communities, where male dominance prevails in all sectors of development. In agriculture, for example, more resources are allocated to the production of cash crops, an area dominated by men, while women are confined to subsistence farming (with fewer) resources and limited access to markets for their perishable goods.

Men should work together with women, recognising that the issue of gender (inequality) affects both men and women, though women feel it more acutely. Men should be fully involved in the goals of reaching sustainable development and reducing gender inequality.

Q: According to recent studies, if women are given the tools to increase food production and productivity they can reduce the number of undernourished people in the world by 12 to 17 percent. How can women overcome barriers to resources and land in order to provide more food?

A: In order to improve productivity and farming methods, rural women need technical advice, information and training.

A good development strategy would recognise the (crucial) role of educating and training rural women to improve production and productivity; promote women-friendly farming technologies that could reduce (the work day) and give women more time for political participation within the community and for other income-generating activities; and institutionalise their involvement and participation in the conception, formulation and planning of policies.

They cannot continue to be seen only as ‘beneficiaries’ but a group in possession of (valuable) knowledge that can advance rural development and also contribute to the national economy.

Finally, it is vital to support and assist women in the registration of and access to land titles and facilitate the issue of credit, especially for smallholder women farmers. This should (ideally) be done through a fund to support women farmers and the creation of women’s banks in rural areas where members can access credit under favourable terms.

Q: Despite the fact that women make up over 75 percent of agricultural workers and livestock-keepers in developing countries and constitute the majority of food producers, processors and marketers in Africa, their role in determining policies in the agricultural sector still remains a minor one. Why?

A: (Deep-rooted) cultural perceptions could be one reason. Women’s opinions are not valued and their rights (are seldom) acknowledged. Age-old barriers like the patriarchal system need to be addressed by engaging not only the government but also traditional (village or district) leaders.

Another reason is the lack of access and control over land and all productive resources, as well as the fact that the highest rates of illiteracy are among women, particularly rural women.

The government should back its agricultural policies with the relevant legal frameworks in support of the development of smallholder women. They should support women’s involvement in the formulation, implementation and review of the budgeting process to ensure that resource allocations are gender responsive.

Q: With 35 percent of its households chronically food insecure and 46 percent of all children below fives years malnourished, Mozambique is one of the world’s poorest countries. Do you see Mozambique’s current presidency of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) as an opportunity to advance new actions on food security and hunger?

A: Heading the CPLP is a big challenge for Mozambique as it involves (leveraging) existing cultural, political and economic ties in an effort to combat poverty and hunger through the promotion of agriculture, expansion of markets and sharing of information within the community.

Our biggest concerns revolve around the implementation of the Regional CPLP Strategy for Food and Nutrition Security and the creation of the Food Security and Nutrition Council (CONSAN), frameworks (designed) to achieve the goal of a world without hunger.

There is also the challenge of implementing other regional gender protocols and conventions that have already been signed but not fully implemented, like the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa.

The CPLP Rural Women’s Forum will advocate for the creation of specific legislation for rural women and their leading role in agriculture.

(END)

Excerpt:

Another month of plying his ‘becak’ (trishaw) in the capital city and Sarjo will be coming back to this West Java district to harvest the rice ripening on his 1,400 sq m paddy.

Sarjo (one name) reckons the harvest will fetch him a timely 325 dollars to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan (Jul. 20 – Aug. 18) before returning to becak-pulling in Jakarta.

Mona, who works as an entertainer in Jakarta’s ‘Princess Entertainment’ nightclub, is also preparing to return home for Ramadan. “But, my boss has warned me that if I leave for Indramayu without completing my contract I don’t need to come back.”

“Entertainment work is not easy,” says Lisa, another Indramayu girl who works in a Jakarta disco. “I am expected to encourage guests to spend money and for that I need to be attractive, even after staying up night after night keeping drunken clients happy.”

Lisa manages to send one million Indonesian rupiah (106 dollars) every month to her parents. “They are too old to work on the farm, so they depend on my earnings,” she explained.

Many residents of Indramayu, one of Indonesia’s ‘rice bowls’, are seasonal migrants to the city where there are opportunities to earn cash by pedaling becaks, running street food stalls and working as construction labourers.

Indramayu’s women, too, are part of the exodus to the cities, working the nightspots, massage houses and the entertainment businesses. Those who are not so lucky end up as domestic workers. Either way, they are vulnerable to violence and sexual abuse.

The shuttling between Indramayu and Jakarta is dictated by the rice cropping cycles. The last months of the year, September, October, November and December, referred to as the ‘ber’ period for the last syllable of those months, form the rainy season when rice seedlings are planted.

Four months later, the paddy is ready for harvest – at least that used to be the case until the cycle began to go awry with changing climate and erratic rainfall.

“We can no longer tell when it is going to start raining or when the rice is ready for harvesting, and so we just continue working in the city until we are sure,” says Sarjo. “It costs money and time travelling between Indramayu and Jakarta.”

Over the last few years, rice crops have been failing in Indramayu not only because of dry conditions but also because unseasonal downpours have inundated paddies, affecting the quality and quantity of harvests.

In a 2007 report titled ‘Indonesia and Climate Change: Current Status and Policies,’ the World Bank had warned that the country could become vulnerable to both prolonged droughts and unseasonal downpours.

These conditions, according to the report, could lead to changes in water supply and soil moisture, negatively impacting agriculture. Additionally, the Bank warned of a rise in sea levels and saline ingress into coastal farming zones like Indramayu.

Erratic weather in Indramayu affects jobs in Jakarta, which are often on contract. “Until a few years ago, we could be sure of our schedules and sign up for specified months,” says Sudira, a construction labourer.

With incomes from both rice farming and the seasonal work in the cities uncertain, many of Indramayu’s farmers have fallen into debt and been forced to sell off their smallholdings, weakening their links to the land.

Lisa is unsure what will happen to the family’s rice fields after her parent’s time and they may have to be sold off. “Already, I am spending more time in Jakarta than in Indramayu.”

A study conducted by the Fahmina Institute, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working on community empowerment, shows that 70 percent of Indramayu’s 11,000 hectares of paddy fields are now owned by about 30 percent of its 125,000 people.

The rest have become landless farmers, struggling to make a living in the cities. Many fall prey to human trafficking networks that have links in wealthy Asian countries like Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and the Middle East.

According to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, a major international NGO, over the last three years, at least 1,500 girls from Indramayu have ended up in Japan as sex workers.

Supali Kasim, chairman of the Indramayu Art Council, explains that female migration from Indramayu goes back to a prolonged drought in the 1960s. That started a trend of women leaving Indramayu in droves to find work in the cities, depriving the rice farms of extra hands.

“Nowadays, women who cannot find work as entertainers in Japan are ‘exported’ as domestic workers to the Middle Eastern countries,” Kasim said.

Currently, there are 93,000 Indramayu women working overseas, going by figures available with insurance companies of which the women are clients.

A student organisation in Indramayu, ‘Sarinah’, has petitioned the government to intervene and create conditions that would encourage the district’s women avoid having to look for risky situations abroad.

Warisyah, a female farmer who has stayed back in Indramayu, said the government could start by ensuring that rice farming is viable. “They can build irrigation networks so that we don’t have to be so dependent on rainfall,” she said.

So far, the government’s response has been to hasten completion of the controversial 900,000 cu m Jatigede mega dam capable of irrigating Indramayu and adjacent districts. But the dam is also expected to submerge five districts and 39 villages along with 3,000 hectares of rice fields.

In 1988, the World Bank cancelled plans to allocate 37 million dollars to the dam – planning for which began in 1963 – following doubts about its consequences to residents and the environment, but the government has pressed on and the dam is due to be operational by 2014.

By that year more of Indramayu’s men and women are likely to have moved to Jakarta and other cities, many never to return.

(END)

Gertrude Mkoloi earns a living harvesting maize on a small piece of land in rural Zimbabwe. Or at least she used to.

Female subsistence farmers, who form more than 70 percent of farmers on the continent, remain clueless about climate change issues. Credit:Busani Bafana

Deep in rural Binga, more than 400 km from the country’s second-largest city, Bulawayo, Mkoloi stared blankly at her maize crop, scorched brown by the sun during what was meant to be the rainy season.

“This is what I have for my labour,” she said, pointing to charred maize stalks that failed to grow tassels – a cluster of male maize flowers required for pollination.

“No one here tells us anything about planning for the cropping season, but what we know is that the rains have shifted,” she said. It is a common complaint among women farmers in this southern African nation, as the bulk of local agriculture remains rain-fed.

According to the Meteorological Service Department, rainfall across the country has declined, while temperatures have risen in the past few years. And this has meant that the traditional agricultural seasons have shifted.

Rural women, who according to the Ministry of Agriculture make up more than 70 percent of food growers here, have experienced failed harvests in recent years due to radically changing rainfall patterns.

In April, Minister of Agriculture Joseph Made announced that this year’s maize harvests had shrunk by 26 percent, due to poor rainfall. And the government has already warned that food insecurity could lead to fatalities.

In another southern African country, Angola, millions are facing critical food insecurity as a prolonged dry spell across large parts of the country destroyed harvests and killed off livestock in the first three months of this year. Up to 500,000 children are now thought to be suffering from severe malnutrition triggered by the collapse in food production.

And the situation is likely to worsen. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has predicted that challenges posed by climate change will result in reduced agricultural yields in sub- Saharan Africa by between 20 and 50 percent by 2050.

But female subsistence farmers like Mkoloi, who according to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa make up more than 70 percent of farmers on the continent, remain clueless about climate change issues. And there is little or no government intervention in Zimbabwe to aid them.

Hazel Gumpo, a smallholder farmer affiliated to the Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers’ Union and a gender activist, said that more needed to be done to educate women about the changing climate.

“There is no doubt in my mind that women are feeding the nation through farming activities. But there is very little or no knowledge sharing for us to understand and deal with the impacts of climate change,” Gumpo said.

In April the Minister of Agriculture Joseph Made announced that this year’s maize harvests had reduced by 26 percent, due to poor rainfall. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

It is one of the reasons there are growing calls for southern African countries to urgently adopt a gender perspective as an aspect of climate change policy.

Gender Links, a southern African non-governmental organisation focusing on gender equality, plans to lobby for the approval of an addendum to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Protocol on Gender and Development. The protocol is a regional instrument that advances gender equality and women’s rights.

While the protocol does not mention climate change specifically, it has provisions that can be used to advance a climate justice agenda. For example, Articles 12 and 13 are about governance and providing for the equal representation of women in all spheres of decision-making.

The preamble of the protocol underlines the need for the elimination of gender inequality in the region and the promotion of the “full and equal enjoyment of rights” and Gender Links argues that the same set of demands can be fought for within the climate change debate.

“Women’s voices and interests need to be amplified in the policy-making around climate change, not least because they are the most vulnerable to climate change because of their different social roles and status,” Gender Links argued.

Many hope that the addendum will be ratified at the SADC Heads of States Summit in Mozambique in August.

The climate change addendum will seek knowledge empowerment for women, especially those in rural areas. And it is something sorely needed in the region, analysts say.

“There is still a lot to be done as far as empowering rural women in the region goes,” said Nonhlanhla Siziba, a gender policy researcher in Bulawayo.

“At least adopting climate change policy issues concerning mitigation measures at that level could mean that governments like Zimbabwe are compelled to work closely with subsistence farmers,” Siziba told IPS.

Mandla Mhlanga, a climate change researcher at the University of Zimbabwe, told IPS that many African countries have been slow to adopt policy issues concerning climate change even though “this phenomenon has been affecting the agriculture sector for decades now.”

“That SADC is being pushed to adopt it now as a policy issue aimed at addressing and improving women’s livelihoods is a step in the right direction. It is also important that this comes at a time when Zimbabwe is formulating its own climate change policy,” Mhlanga said.

But it could still be some time before subsistence farmers like Mkoloi reap the benefits.

Gumpo said: “People like using clichés about how the empowering of women translates into empowering the nation. But we have not seen such empowerment, as talk has been concentrated in political positions and not development where it really matters.”

Meanwhile, Mkoloi has no option but to go ahead and plant her crop for the next season. However, her burnt field of maize is a stark reminder of the uncertain future she faces.

“We are already planning to prepare the land for the next planting season. But we still do not know when the rainy season will start in light of what happened last time,” Mkoloi said.

*Additional reporting by Busani Bafana in Bulawayo.

(END)

At Gakoromone Market in Meru, in Kenya’s Eastern Province, Ruth Muriuki arrives in a pickup full of tomatoes and cabbages despite the scarcity of rainfall in the area, thanks to the greenhouse technology she uses on her farm – and microcredit.

Ruth Muriuki in the greenhouse she built with the help of a microloan. Credit:Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

“A bundle of ten tomatoes which would cost Sh40 (50 cents of a dollar) three months ago is now going for double the price. But we have no choice,” said David Njogu, a vegetable dealer at the open-air market. Muriuki is selling a big sugarloaf cabbage, which would have cost 50 cents three months ago, at 1.50 dollars.

A spot check in the country shows that prices of horticultural produce have shot up in the past three months following the failure of short rains, which were expected to come between October and December last year.

However, farmers who use the greenhouse technology do not need rainfall for their crops to grow.

In the greenhouses, generally made of glass or transparent plastic roof and walls, temperature and humidity can be controlled, making it possible for farmers to grow crops year-round.

Like Muriuki, Sarah Chebet from Nandi hills in the Rift Valley Province describes her two-year experience with greenhouse farming as “a dream come true.”

“I bought my greenhouse through credit offered by a local microfinance institution. Through the project within the past two years, I have been able to buy a maize milling machine, I have put up a retail shop, I have bought two dairy cows, and I have bought a stock of 400 kilograms of maize, which I intend to sell once the prices shoot up,” said the 28-year-old mother of one.

From a single greenhouse, she picks an average of four crates of tomatoes per weekly harvest, which fetches her about 100 dollars per week.

Nandi hills is one of the dry regions in the country, where rainfall is not guaranteed throughout the year.

“Our boy is still young, that is why we are investing in businesses, so that I can stabilise my level of income ahead of him joining school,” said Chebet. Her husband is in charge of other farm projects on their five-acre piece of land.

According to Silas Tuwei, the Integrated Project Officer at Amiran Kenya Ltd., the company has sold more than 2,300 greenhouses throughout the country in the past two years. “Most of them were bought through microfinance institutions targeting women, youth, and learning institutions,” he said. “On average, almost half of the greenhouses are owned by women.”

Amiran, one of the biggest horticultural companies in Kenya, specialises in construction of greenhouses as part of its business. However, other farmers depend on individual builders who know how to make greenhouses.

“In order to reach out to as many farmers as possible, we have signed an agreement with three finance institutions: the Kenya Women Finance Trust, Equity Bank, and the Co-operative Bank of Kenya,” said Tuwei.

At the same time, the CIC Insurance Company now has a policy to cover the hardware component of professionally constructed greenhouses in Kenya, in case they catch fire, are blown down by heavy winds, or are destroyed by any other natural calamity.

“I have discovered that greenhouse farming and general farming through irrigation is the way to go because rain-fed agriculture has failed me many times, especially in the recent past. The rains are no- longer reliable,” said Muriuki, a 64-year-old mother of seven.

In Meru area, she recalls, “Rainfall always came on Mar. 15 every year. There was no doubt about this. But in the past few years, the situation has changed. There is no guarantee that it will rain on Mar. 15 as it was the case in my youthful days.”

But on barely one acre of land in Karimagachiije village, 15 kilometres outside of Meru town, Muriuki is able to produce at least a ton of vegetables every week through greenhouse farming.

She sells the produce to different markets in Eastern and Central Kenya, earning enough to pay college fees for her two youngest daughters in different universities in the country. “This was my first opportunity to pay school fees. Before I started this project, it was solely my husband’s responsibility,” she said.

However, like Chebet, she was not in a position to raise the required amount of money to set up the horticultural project.

“Three years ago, I approached the Kenya Women Finance Trust, where I borrowed Sh300000 (3,750 dollars) as the capital for my farming project,” said Muriuki.

The Trust is dedicated specifically to empowering Kenyan girls and women through lending facilities. The loans are mostly given through self-help groups, where shares of the group members are used as security for loans borrowed by any of the members, because many poor women do not own property that they can use as collateral.

So far, the microfinance institution is financing close to 500,000 low-income Kenyan women to run different small-scale entrepreneurships not limited to agribusiness.

“In my greenhouse, I use a drip irrigation system, where water is released through pipes strategically buried in the soil with an opening at the foot of every plant. This maximises the use of the little available water, because the drip system does not allow runoff or deep percolation,” she explained. In Kenya, the average cost of building a greenhouse ranges between 1,250 dollars and 3,125 dollars, depending on where one is buying the materials, the quality of the materials and the size of the structure.

“In my entire life, I was not able to raise the amount of money that could be used to put up such a project. But thanks to microfinance institutions which have the interests of women at heart, I have become an independent entrepreneur in my old age,” said Muriuki. (END)

This year’s unusually rainy season in Peru is having a negative effect on the wellbeing and health of women in rural areas who are forced, for example, to spend three times as much time walking to collect firewood and water. But the authorities continue to turn a blind eye to the problems they face.

Women washing clothes in a village in northern Peru. Credit: Elena Villanueva /IPS

“It’s very difficult for us to find firewood, but not only that – since it’s wet because of the rain, we have to dry it so it will burn well, and that is causing us bronchial and lung problems,” María Témpora Pintado, a farmer from Peru’s northern coastal region, told IPS.

Pintado, the president of the district association of women of Tambogrande, a farming valley 950 km north of Lima, described how the women, and often their young children, are exposed to smoke for hours as the firewood dries.

“These tasks are done by the women, who stay in our homes, while the men leave early and come back at night, and do not take part in the collection of water or the care of the children that we have to watch after constantly, to keep the mosquitoes brought by the rain from nesting in their eyes,” she said.

Throughout February, the rains affected 12 of Peru’s 24 departments (provinces), and according to the National Civil Defence Institute, have left more than 32,000 people homeless.

That figure was not broken down by gender, but an estimated half of the people affected are women, including Pintado and her fellow farmers in the 186 hamlets and villages in Tambogrande valley, which is 60 km from Piura, the capital of the department of the same name.

Due to climate change, the rainy season has been more intense this year. For example, rainfall in the southern Andean highlands region of Arequipa has been 327 percent heavier than normal, according to the National Meteorology and Hydrology Service.

As a result, rivers have overflowed their banks; houses, farms and roads have been flooded; villages and towns have been cut off; food shortages have set in; and access to public health services has become extremely difficult.

“Our manioc, sweet potato, plantain, corn, val beans, mango and lemon crops have been destroyed,” Pintado said. “What are we going to feed our children? We are anguished, but we don’t just sit around worrying; we go out and walk, we find a way to make soup to feed them.”

Manioc, sweet potato, plantain, corn and val beans are staples of the Peruvian diet.

Peruvian peasant women are forced to trek further and further from home for firewood. Credit: Elena Villanueva /IPS

Agriculture is the economic mainstay in Peru’s rural areas. Women take part in farming activities like planting, watering and harvesting. In addition to these tasks, they are in charge of food preparation and child care, and they also dedicate time to community organisations.

But their work is not recognised.

However, the concentration of responsibilities in their hands, which is exacerbated by the effects of climate change, is causing health problems that have begun to alarm experts and activists.

“We suffer from vaginal inflammation and dropped womb (prolapse) because we are running around all day gathering firewood, drying it out, lugging water, cooking, checking on the crops, feeding the animals, and taking care of the kids,” Pintado said.

“Is this recognised by any of the authorities? Since they’re all men, they’re indifferent to it; they tell us we were born to do all this,” the community leader complained.

The gender discrimination and poverty which rural women continue to face due to the lack of inclusive public policies are aggravated by the different impacts of climate change.

Rural women have fewer resources to deal with the effects of this global phenomenon precisely because they do not have equal access to opportunities such as education, training, or property, studies point out.

According to the latest national agricultural census, from 1994, 20 percent of farms were run by women, but fewer than five percent of these women farmers had title deeds to their property.

Blanca Fernández, a sociologist with the Rural Development Programme of the Flora Tristán’s women’s group, told IPS that the impact of gender on climate change is highlighting the lack of rights of rural women and the enormous hurdles standing in the way of the full exercise of their rights as citizens.

Fernández argued that the fourth National Agricultural Census, to be carried out in October, must urgently incorporate gender variables in order to gain an understanding of the social and economic conditions of rural women in the Andean highlands and Amazon jungle regions.

“Up-to-date data will make it possible to design sustainable public policies, with the participation of women themselves, that would promote their comprehensive development – a viable strategy to make progress in the work of climate change adaptation and mitigation,” she said.

One of the priority areas to be addressed is agriculture, the Peruvian government stated in the second national report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, published in 2010.

The document says the megadiversity of Peru, one of the world’s 10 most biodiverse countries, is seriously endangered by the impact of climate change on agriculture, where the chief factor of vulnerability is poverty.

One-quarter of Peru’s population of 29 million is rural, and 70 percent of people in rural areas are poor.

Pintado said it is essential for local, regional and national authorities to recognise that when talking about climate change, it is necessary to ask how the phenomenon affects women, collect data on what is happening in that respect in different regions of the country, and then start adopting measures.

“When for example a government official says ‘we are going to evaluate the damage caused to homes by flooding,’ they have to include the damages suffered by women and ensure that the actions carried out will benefit our quality of life,” she said.

These and other proposals from women’s organisations in eight regions in Peru have been compiled in a national document.

The content of the agenda of rural, Andean and Amazon women of Peru will be shared at an international meeting to be held Mar. 5-9 in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, in northwest Ecuador.

The third meeting of rural women of Latin America and the Caribbean is organised by a network of organisations and activists throughout the region, which was created in 1990 during the Fifth Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Meeting, to give rural women a stronger voice and give a boost to their proposals and actions in the region.

The Peruvian agenda, to which IPS had access ahead of its release, highlights three aspects related to the exercise of women’s individual and collective rights: violence, food security and sovereignty, and climate change.

The proposals are addressed to government authorities, and include a call for compliance with the law on equal opportunities between men and women, and the implementation of a national agricultural policy with an emphasis on small-scale agriculture. (END)

Eight years ago when Mary Sitali’s husband divorced her, by sending a traditional letter to her parents saying that he no longer wanted her and they could “marry her to any man of your choice – be he a tall or a short man, the choice being entirely yours,” she returned to her village in rural Zambia with their two children and no way of supporting them.

The Barotse Flood Plain, about 190 kilometres long and 70 km wide, floods during the peak rainy season that starts in late January. Credit:Lewis Mwanangombe/IPS

At home in Kandiana village, in Zambia’s Western Province, her late father allowed her to farm his two pieces of land, about a quarter of a hectare each, while the then 51-year-old Sitali waited for another man to marry her, and while her father continued to maintain ownership of the land.

The village is on the fringes of the Barotse Flood Plain, about 190 kilometres long and 70 km wide, which floods during the peak rainy season that starts in late January.

One of the pieces of land that Sitali’s father let her farm was near this flood plain and she was able to plant the traditional rice seed known locally as “Angola”.

The second offer of marriage never came. But through her efforts as a rice farmer Sitali was able to partially support her children, her mother, and even her late brother’s three children.

But Sitali is what the NGO Concern Worldwide describes as a “marginal farmer” because although she works hard, the food she produces is usually not enough to feed her family for the whole year. Other women farmers like Sitali have also had to endure months of hunger, especially towards the beginning and end of the harvest.

Rice has never been a serious cash crop in Zambia, despite its ability to alleviate poverty and chronic hunger. In the 2010 harvest statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture it does not feature among the country’s top 10 cash crops, which include maize, cassava, wheat – predominantly cash crops for white commercial farmers – and groundnuts.

For this reason it has always been outside the basket of crops that receive farm subsidies from the government.

But Sitali is a member of the Nañoko Cooperative Association, which negotiates for farm support for its members from both the government and civil society. It is one of the more than 87 such cooperative associations in the country to which women farmers belong.

According to government statistics, more than 1.5 million women work in agriculture, either as paid employees or as small-scale farmers. Most are semi-illiterate or illiterate and have no formal training in farming practices.

However, NGOs like Concern Worldwide, Civil Society for Poverty Reduction, Pelum Association, Keepers Zambia Foundation, Action-Aid International, Oxfam International and many others support Zambia’s women farmers with training, seed, fertilisers, farm animals and implements. And now the government has started subsidising rice farmers.

“Under the government’s Farmer Input Support Programme we now give rice farmers two bags of subsidised chemical fertilisers – one basal, and a top dressing… They are also given a 10 kilogramme pocket of rice seed,” George Muleta, a field officer for the Ministry of Agriculture, said. On the open market fertilisers can sell for as much as 37 dollars for a 50 kg bag, but with the subsidy it only costs 10 dollars.

The Western Province is the poorest region in Zambia, according to the country’s 2000 national census. Here there are almost two million households, and women like Sitali, who are either divorced, widowed or unmarried, head up to 19 percent of these homes.

And 13,750 women in this province are currently engaged in rice farming, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Patrick Chibbamulilo, senior programme officer at the Japan International Cooperation Agency, said that between 1988 to 2008 Zambia’s national rice harvest grew from about 9,293 metric tonnes to about 24,023. But in only three years from 2007 to 2010 it jumped from 18,317 metric tonnes to 53,000 – a leap of about 288 percent.

Rice farming in Zambia is still rudimentary as the yield per hectare is only 1.44 metric tonnes, compared to the African average of 2.5 metric tonnes per hectare and the world average of 4.15 tonnes per hectare, according to records at the International Rice Research Institute.

For the women in Western Province, farming maize has not been a viable option because the soil here does not support its growth. While it can grow on the flood plain it will be washed away by the seasonal floodwaters from January to May before it matures.

But Sitali and other women here have now benefited from the introduction of a new seed variety of wheat, locally called Nduna.

“We used to go hungry in the lean months of September, October and November – before the mangoes ripen,” Sitali said. “But not anymore, and all thanks to Nduna.”

Nduna, in the local Silozi language of the province, is the title of a traditional leader but the Ministry of Agriculture introduced a wheat seed variety of the same name in 2010. And it was developed specifically for the wetlands of Western Zambia, Muleta explained.

“The introduction of wheat as a second crop has really helped us. Otherwise we would have died of hunger. It has really put money in our pockets,” Butete Biemba, a rice farmer from Ushaa village in Western Province, said. Like Sitali she is a single mother looking after a family of six, after her husband died of HIV/AIDS. She is also a member of the Nañoko Cooperative Association.

Now both Sitali and Biemba earn 60 cents per kg for their wheat. It is more than twice the amount they can sell their rice for, which goes for 25 cents per kg at harvest time.

“Unlike rice, wheat does not require so much water to grow. Just the wetness in the soil is good enough for the crop. And the great thing is that by September all the wheat would have been harvested, leaving the farmers time in which to prepare their fields for the next rice planting season,” Muleta said. (END)

By Mathilde Bagneres
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

Violence, torture and other forms of cruel treatment are on the rise for women in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

Lilly Be'Soer, founder of Voice for Change, a non-governmental organisation for women's rights in Papua New Guinea. Credit: Mathilde Bagneres/IPS

The highlands women of Papua New Guinea (PNG) experience the most frequent and severe forms of violence, according to two studies. The violence is linked to extreme cultural traditions that discriminate against women and girls, such as polygamy, forced marriages, sorcery, witch-hunting and extra-judicial killings. But at least one woman is fighting back in Papua New Guinea. Lilly Be’Soer, who was once a victim of tribal conflict and has been in a polygamous marriage, founded Voice for Change, a women’s rights non-governmental organisation (NGO).

In 2010, Be’Soer was awarded a Pacific Human Rights Defenders Award. Most recently, she has helped negotiate a peace agreement to resettle 500 internally displaced families.

IPS correspondent Mathilde Bagneres spoke with Be’Soer about her experiences, the situation of women in Papua New Guinea and the role of Voice for Change. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What is the main purpose of Voice for Change? What is it achieving on the ground for Papua New Guinea’s women? 

My own experience made me understand that there are many women who are facing the problems that I faced. Many of them are displaced, resettled or survivors of violence in PNG. We set up this organisation, this network, to support women who are facing those problems.

Over the past four years, Voice for Change leaders have responded by forming an organisation that runs two main programs: Promoting and Protecting Women’s Human Rights and Economic Empowerment of Women.

Because of tribal conflicts, thousands of people are internally displaced in PNG. One of our main works is to try to mediate and intervene during confrontations, tribal conflicts and wars to come to a peaceful resolution.

We also work on women’s economic recovery. Women who have been internally displaced, the widows, survivors or victims of violence, need support, and need to be economically empowered.

Voice for Change is providing opportunity for those women to access cash from the organisation’s loans and credit project so that they can engage in income generating activities to support their family, send their children to school, pay for school fees or improve their house.

One of the most promising new ideas to is to unite women market vendors in a mass association, to give them voice in visioning, planning, budgeting and managing the markets, which are their mains site of income earning.

Q: How did you and Voice for Change facilitate mediation in tribal conflicts and wars in your country? 

Being a woman and a women’s rights defender is really challenging in the society I come from. I had to make a lot of sacrifices, in terms of money, for example. I have to be present in every social obligation; I have to be part of what the community is doing.

I have to do certain things to earn that recognition, so they can allow me and give me the space to be able to fill roles that are traditionally endorsed by men.

Women in conflict-affected highlands societies are in dire need of financial support to engage in economic activity to generate income to meet their family’s basic needs and to seek justice.

Since 2009, Voice for Change has been involved in assisting about 500 families who were displaced as a result of a tribal war. For years, women were internally displaced and they had no place to grow food and no way of supporting themselves and their families.

We have successfully, in the last six months, led the pre-mediation consultations and now we have come to peace reconciliation by both tribes.

Now we are working on resettling those women and their families back to their land, so they can start a normal life again.

Q: You are taking part in the CSW’s 56th session as a member of the panel about “Governance and institutions for the empowerment of rural women”. What concrete measures do you think Papua New Guinea’s government should take to empower women? 

Since independence in 1975, state legislative, administrative and judicial systems in the largely unexplored highlands region were still very weak, inadequate, neglected and under-resourced.

The government of Papua New Guinea hasn’t been really supporting the rural women. And in terms of gender-based violence, the fact that women are abused is an accepted norm.

A husband can hit his wife in the public place and nobody will support the woman. Women, as a result of polygamist relationships, are fighting against each other and are sometimes killing each other.

One of the bigger problems we also have is women who are tortured, killed, burned alive, because they are blamed for sorcery. And there’s nothing the government has done about it.

The government of Papua New Guinea has signed many international conventions, and treaties to promote the safety of women in the country but it’s not doing the job. It is not honouring its commitment to protect women. The government has neglected rural women.

The CSW has been on every year. This is my first time here, and it would be really interesting for me to know if the United Nations can make a government honour its commitment to support women on the ground.

In PNG, the government signed the declaration to end violence against women and all forms of discrimination against women. It also signed the Security Council’s resolution 1325 for women in armed conflicts.

Everything is signed, but the government is not making its commitment. The U.N. should ensure that governments honour their commitments. And meanwhile, 60 to 90 percent of women are currently victims of sexual or gender based violence in PNG.

(END)

Excerpt:

Women farmers clearing abandoned farmland in the drought-affected Nachol village in Northern Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By IPS Correspondents
ANANTPUR, India/BARIND TRACT, Bangladesh, Feb 25 2012 (IPS)

Agriculture currently provides a livelihood for roughly 1.3 billion smallholder farmers and landless workers, of which nearly half – close to 560 million – are women.

A vast majority of these women are living on a precipice, where small changes in their environment could result in chronic hunger and abject poverty.

Given the unprecedented scale of climate change, which has already caused massive food insecurity this year, rural women are not only extremely vulnerable, but also woefully overlooked by governments and policy makers who define top-down strategies for hunger and poverty eradication.

In response, the United Nations’ 56^th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), scheduled to run from Feb. 27-March 9 at U.N. headquarters in New York, listed the empowerment of rural women as one of its priority themes for the year.

“If rural women had equal access to productive resources, agricultural yields could reduce the number of chronically hungry people by between 100 and 150 million,” according to a press release issued Thursday by UN Women.

This year’s CSW promises to examine the “empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, sustainable development and current challenges (and) will agree on urgent actions needed to make a real difference in the lives of millions of rural women.”

But while the U.N. is only just beginning its session on rural women, female farmers around the world are already deep in a struggle to secure their environment against the destablising impacts of climate change by using their traditional role as community leaders and ingenious farmers to sow the seeds of hope for their future.

Resisting drought at the local level

Mosammet Rini-Ara Begum proudly points to a heap of rice stored in a makeshift tin shed in her backyard, located in Bangladesh’s arid, Northwestern Barind Tract region.

The boiled rice grains shimmer in the sunlight as the 34-year-old mother of three opens the bamboo fence of her small grain storehouse, saying, “This is the third time I got such a good harvest of rice despite the drought.”

Women farmers are adapting their production to new climate circumstances. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

For several years now thousands of farmers in the region have abandoned agricultural land and production, especially cash crops like rice and wheat, in the face of unusually hot and arid weather, in the 7500-square-kilometre region.

Advised by agricultural experts on drought-resistant crops, Rini and her husband cultivated a new breed of rice known as BRRI-56, which is highly tolerant of extremely hot and dry conditions.

Unlike other local rice varieties, which require rain soon after planting, BRRI-56 grows without water for weeks. It also survives the Barind heat, which often reaches 50 degrees Celsius between July and November during the rice maturation period.

“We offer all sorts of support to farmers, especially to poor women who often need professional counseling and demonstration of the successes achieved by fellow farmers,” said Mujibor Rahman, a leader of a local farmers’ network known as the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Club in Chapainawabganj district.

Thirty-two year Joynab Banu, a farmer from the Rajshahi district, told IPS, “There are climate related risks in cultivating crops in such extreme weathers. But since we have enough knowledge on climate adaptation we are ready to take any challenges.”

Agriculture provides about 36 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of Bangladesh and employs roughly 60 per cent of the labour force. Rice covers about 75 percent of the country’s cultivable land, mostly in the Northwestern front.

With growing awareness of climate-resilient capacity, increased numbers of women, especially landless peasants, widows, divorcees and others facing social isolation in the Northwest, are now using abandoned agricultural land to contribute to crop production and secure the country’s food security.

Women lead the way to “organic”

Anantpur, a region in India’s Southern state of Andhra Pradesh is arid, treeless and made up of poor red soil, with low annual average rainfall of 553 millimetres, making it the second most drought-prone district in India.

Erratic monsoons and a rain shortage, both attributed to changing climate, led to crop failure year after year and by the early 2000s debt-ridden farmers’ suicides had run into the thousands.

Farmers’ desperation and increased contract farming has led to unsustainable reliance on chemical fertilisers, creating soils that demands more and more scarce water, while farming costs have rocketed.

But in Singanamala mandal, an administrative block of Anantapur, women farmers like Ramadevi (41), Lingamma (38) and Katamayya (41) decided to return to organic fertilisers and pesticides and have since experienced enourmous savings.

Nagamanamma (31) shifted to organic farming in 2009, on 2 acres of leased temple land.

“I opted for organic farming for one reason: it asked for family labour and not the kind of investment that chemical farming demands,” she told IPS.

In the first year alone she went from seven bags of groundnut per acre to 15 bags, weighing 42 kilogrammes each, while reducing her expenditure from 40 to 12 dollars.

In this region, red-haired caterpillar pest attacks are common on the watermelon crop, which is grown beside the groundnut.

Previously, women had been forced to pay 40 dollars for an 80-millimetre dose of chemical pesticide-concentrate but with organic materials, the cost is not even a tenth of that.

Neem seeds gathered from the adjoining forests form a pesticide that costs just 10 dollars for a 50-kilogramme bag.

The benefits of going organic have percolated down to the landless too. A group of forest gatherers, smallholder farmers and women’s self-help groups from 10 surrounding villages are operating a unique symbiotic cooperative – the Singanamala Producers’ Cooperative – to produce organic pesticide.

With the help of a local NGO they installed a seed-pulverizing machine. While previously local traders had exploited the women seed gatherers, now they share profits equitably among members.

Women are already leading the way towards a more organic, just future. The question for the international community – including the U.N.’s CSW – is whether or not the world will follow.

*Naimul Haq contributed to this story from the Barind Tract, Bangladesh; Manipadma Jena from Anantpur, India; and Kanya D’Almeida from Washington DC

*This is the first of a two-part series on rural women, climate change and food security.

(END)

“Sometimes I think of giving it all up,” Aura Canache, a small farmer in Venezuela, told IPS. “My neighbours get loans and aid, but I never have. The farm assistance plans are for men, although there are many women living off the countryside too.”

Aura Canache, in front of one of her sheep enclosures on her small farm. Credit: Estrella Gutiérrez/IPS

Millions of women farmers in Latin America have similar reasons to feel discouraged, because while women farmers and rural workers become more and more numerous, there is a lack of public policies recognising them and addressing the change.

“There is no doubt that there has been a feminisation of the rural labour market in Latin America,” Fernando Soto, senior policy officer at the FAO regional office in the Chilean capital, told IPS.

But that feminisation is taking place in a sector marked by deep-rooted inequality, which Soto illustrated by citing a few examples taken from studies that amply reflect this situation.

In Mexico, “women in rural areas work an average of 89 hours a week, while men work only 58,” he said, adding that the situation is similar in many other countries throughout the region.

Nevertheless, “nearly 40 percent of these women do not have their own incomes, while only 14 percent of the men are in that situation,” said the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) officer.

“A good part of the work of rural women is invisible, and it is an enormous amount of work,” he said.

This situation will be discussed by the delegations attending the 56th session of the
Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to be held at United Nations headquarters in New York Feb. 27 to Mar. 9.

The priority theme at the meeting will be “The empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges.”

International Women’s Day, celebrated Mar. 8, has a similar slogan this year: “Empower Rural Women – End Hunger and Poverty”.

The executive director of U.N. Women, former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, said the agency she heads “looks forward to continued and greater collaboration with the U.N. system and other partners to remove the obstacles that exclude rural women and to advance laws and policies that promote their rights, opportunities and participation.”

Canache, on her farm that is less than one hectare in size, located 130 km east of Caracas in the farming region of Barlovento, knows nothing about the meeting in New York. But she is very familiar with the realities that will be described and discussed there.

The Venezuelan farmer, who has 50 head of cattle, 50 sheep and 40 horses, as well as rabbits and two fish farming ponds, has to plough everything she earns into running her farm near the Capaya river, which flooded her land in 2010. On that occasion, a number of her animals drowned, and she had to rebuild some of her farm buildings and clear her dirt roads.

“The climate is getting crazier and crazier, but the last two years the weather was horrible, and that drives up costs and losses,” she says.

Canache, a youthful-looking 73-year-old who employs three farmhands, became a farmer when she was widowed a quarter century ago, after her four children had completed their university studies in Caracas.

“I live for my animals and my farm. But it is too hard to see that for those who give out the (public and private) loans and assistance for agriculture, I don’t exist, while the men who are my neighbours were given huge loans after the flood, and tractors as well,” she says.

“Just imagine what I could do with a tractor!” she says.

“With financing, better roads and some technical support, I could produce a lot more, hire more people and things would not be such a struggle. They discriminate against us, even though we women farmers are more responsible and more reliable in paying off our debts than men. I would give up food from my table to meet my payments,” she says.

Bachelet said that if women had equal access to resources like credits, seeds and fertilisers, they could increase yields on their farms by 20 to 30 percent, which would boost agricultural output in the developing South by four percent and would lift 100 to 150 million people out of hunger.

Soto explained that a recent study by FAO on conditions among women working in fruit production, one of the fastest-growing agricultural sectors in Latin America, found that that they suffered from increasingly precarious labour conditions and growing social vulnerability.

The study, carried out in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, but whose findings are considered representative of the region as a whole, concludes that this is due to three main reasons: the informal nature of the work; the fact that the women earn minimum wage or less, despite an increased workload; and the lack of health coverage and labour security.

FAO studies on the link between the rural labour market and poverty, conducted in 13 Latin American countries, show “a lack of public policies, institutions, and oversight of compliance with existing standards and laws,” Soto said.

“A greater state presence is needed, so that distributive mechanisms can function,” because “while agriculture in Latin America is modernising, growing and generating income, it is not being distributed, but is increasingly concentrated,” the FAO expert added.

If the rural labour markets “worked better for women, without a doubt that would reduce poverty among them and improve their living conditions,” he said.

Figures from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) indicate that rural poverty represents more than half of all poverty in most countries in the region, and in some countries the proportion is much higher: 72 percent in Guatemala, 69 percent in Costa Rica, 67 percent in El Salvador and 59 percent in Paraguay.

Like in other developing regions, family farms are the main providers of food in Latin America, supplying nearly half of what the region’s 600 million people eat.

The work of women on family farms in Latin America tends to be unpaid, Soto said. The women occasionally engage in paid non-agricultural work as well, and they also are responsible for raising the children and “other caregiver tasks that fall to women because of the patriarchal values that prevail” in the rural world, he added.

Among the specific challenges facing women in the rural sector is the problem of access to land, FAO and other organisations point out. Only 11 percent of rural women hold land titles in Brazil, 22 percent in Mexico and 27 percent in Peru, according to studies.

But there are reasons for optimism, because efforts to promote women’s inclusion in rural production are sprouting up, in areas like microcredit, “which has specific products aimed at the inclusion of women,” Soto said.

The growing incorporation of women in agricultural production is key to pulling rural households out of poverty, and it depends on a set of public policies working in a coordinated manner in the labour market, production, and access to credit and resources – “and on greater shared responsibility in child care,” Soto said.

At the 56the session of the CSW, the Latin American government delegations will have two weeks to demonstrate that they are listening to voices like that of Canache and millions of other women who constantly run up against hurdles in the countryside.

* With reporting by Marianela Jarroud in Santiago.

For a long time, Zambian women's participation in politics has ended at voting. Credit: Richard Mulonga/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 23 2012 (IPS)

When the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) held its inaugural meeting in London back in 1946, the U.S. delegate, Eleanor Roosevelt, read an open letter to “the women of the world” calling on governments to encourage women everywhere to participate in national and international affairs.

The letter also urged women who are conscious of their opportunities “to come forward and share in the work of peace and reconstruction as they did in war and resistance”.

But 66 years later, the worldwide struggle for gender equality and gender empowerment continues unabated – even as women find themselves discriminated against, and victims of violence, both at home and on the battlefield.

As India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri told the Security Council Thursday, close to 90 percent of current casualties in wars and situations of armed conflict are civilians, with the majority being women and children.

“Obviously, women bear a disproportionately large share of the burden of conflict, but have a marginal say in matters of war and peace,” he said, pointing out the irony.

This is perhaps a function of the gender imbalance in our societies, reflected in positions of power and influence, he added.

Despite this, Puri argued, women should not be viewed solely as victims of war.

They also have to assume the key role of ensuring family livelihoods in the midst of chaos and destruction, and are particularly active in the peace movements at the grassroots level and cultivating peace within their communities.

“Therefore, the absence of women at the peace negotiating table is unconscionable,” declared Puri, as he implicitly criticised the fact that peace negotiators are overwhelmingly male.

Yasmeen Hassan, global director at the New York-based Equality Now, told IPS economic downturns bring with them rising fundamentalisms and a clinging to practices and beliefs that pose a challenge to gender equality.

Similarly, she pointed out, war and lack of security lead to a curtailment of women’s rights.

The developing world has seen a lot more instability – economic, political, social – that has often been exacerbated by conflicts, both internal and cross border, that pose the biggest barriers to gender equality.

“Instability and conflicts also make women’s rights activism difficult as women may become divided on issues of national origin, race and class,” she added.

A 10-day meeting of the 45-member CSW, beginning next Monday, will focus on another battle front: the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication and sustainable development.

According to the newly-created U.N. Women, rural women constitute one-fourth of the world’s population of seven billion people. Still, only five percent of agricultural extension services are provided for women farmers, and in rural sub-Saharan Africa, women hold less than 10 percent of the credit available to smallholder agriculture.

“If rural women had equal access to productive resources, agricultural yields could reduce the number of chronically hungry people by between 100 and 150 million,” says U.N. Women.

Asked about the key achievements on gender empowerment in the last five to 10 years, Hassan told IPS, “Everyone agrees that it is an issue that has to be put on the agenda – women’s empowerment has come to be seen as essential for development and, more importantly in current times, for building peace.”

She said the shackles of culture and religion, though still binding women much more harshly than men, have come to be seen – at least internationally – as not inevitable and in fact breakable.

Gigi Francisco, the Philippines-based general coordinator of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), told IPS that amidst the backdrop of uncertain times for economies worldwide and re-commitments made by the international community to ending poverty and achieving sustainable development, there is a more deliberate focus on ordinary women’s roles in production and consumption across the economic south.

By relieving women’s practical burdens linked to their gender roles, it is assumed that women and their families will become more efficient in accessing and distributing resources that would eventually redound to some degree of empowerment, she said.

At the same time, Francisco pointed out, when women become more efficient in performing their roles, the rest of the society and the entire economy benefit.

Focusing on the issues and concerns of grassroots women is the right thing to do. “However, what is fundamentally wrong with this approach is that without a women’s rights perspective the focus on efficiency confers entitlements to poor women solely on the basis of their labour,” she added.

As well, the approach does not lead to any transformation of the existing gender division of labour that positions women in a subordinated way within families and societies, she added. And being less poor does not mean that the gender gap had become less unequal.

Asked about gender progress, Francisco said the rise in the number of women entering official positions of power and authority at local, national, regional and global levels is a major achievement in one key aspect of gender equality.

This is undoubtedly a clear follow through on obligations set in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA) adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women in China.

While institutional arrangements and mechanisms for gender equality have provided the framework in progressively realising gender balance in political reforms, changes could not have taken place without the actions by women’s rights advocates and movements that pushed gender equality issues to the realm of public deliberations and resistances.

“In celebrating women who are in positions of power, we must remember that firstly, the situation for women leaders across and within countries considerably vary,” Francisco said.

“Secondly, that gains, even the celebrated ones, may be transient and seriously threatened by a host of neo-conservative reactions that emerge from simultaneous upheavals and uncertainties, and thirdly, powerful women will need to be assessed not in terms of how long they remain as poster girls for gender equality but in terms of their concrete contributions to ensuring that the rights and well-being of ordinary women are secured and promoted.

“And that the processes of governance at all levels remain accountable to women’s rights organisations and movements,” she said.

Related to this, she said, is a big challenge that UN Women now has to face: how it will work out its mechanisms and processes of partnership with and accountability to the women’s movements in a transparent and consultative way.

Excerpt:

By Mathilde Bagneres
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 22 2012 (IPS)

The phrase “financing for gender equality” may sound dry, but it lies at the heart of some of the most intractable problems faced by women around the world today – and whether the political will exists to allocate real resources to solving them or simply pay lip service.

Beginning next week, from Feb. 27 to Mar. 9, ministers and civil society delegates will meet at the United Nations for the 56th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).

This year’s meeting is especially critical because it will assess how governments have made good on promises at the 52nd session in 2008 to boost financing for gender equality and the empowerment of women.

Stephanie Seguino. Credit: Courtesy of Stephanie Seguino

The topic covers everything from broader macroeconomic policies, to public finance and gender responsive budgeting, the mobilisation of international resources and aid, and finding new and innovative sources of funding.

Stephanie Seguino, an economics professor at the University of Vermont in the United States, will take part in the CSW discussions as a member of a panel on “national experiences in implementing the agreed conclusions of CSW 2008”.

IPS Correspondent Mathilde Bagneres talked with Seguino about how women are particularly affected by the current economic crisis, and the role of government in crafting policies that promote not only women’s equality but sustainable development for society as a whole. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Low wages and underemployment of women have been a persistent problem around the world, long before the latest financial crisis. How can financing for gender equality address these issues?

A: Some of the problems of women’s lower wages and underemployment can be addressed through gender-aware targeting of public expenditures as well as anti-discrimination policies. Clearly, policies to promote girls’ education, including publicly funded education, are key.

However, more than that, policies to reduce women’s care burden and policies to promote men’s participation in unpaid caring labour – such as paternity leave – free up women’s time to engage in paid work.

Also, public investment in infrastructure that improves women’s access to health care – rural health clinics, skilled health personnel – and reduces the time they spend fetching water and fuel, or moving goods to market helps them engage in productive activities.

Training programmes that target women, especially for non-traditional “male” jobs, are important. In agricultural economies, governments can offer loan guarantees where women lack title to land in order to leverage their access to credit.

(But) even these steps will be insufficient to undermine pay inequality. Governments need to assertively develop and enforce anti-discrimination legislation, AND affirmative action programmes. Governments can serve as role models by ensuring that some minimum level of leadership positions is filled by women – 30 percent or more.

Q: The 2008 CSW Declaration expressed concern about “the growing feminisation of poverty”. Is this a trend that is likely to continue in the near future?

A: The forces of globalisation continue to push down the wages of workers, and result in a squeeze on public sector budgets (because of the declining corporate tax burden and reductions in tariff revenues).

As a result, women are likely to fare poorly, especially in the context of high unemployment. This is because men tend to be seen as more deserving of jobs when jobs are scarce.

Until we resolve these negative macroeconomic pressures that result in slow growth, job shortages, and growing inequality, it will be difficult to resolve the problem of women’s poverty and that of the children they care for.

Q: You have written that “This crisis provides the opportunity to rethink the role of government in the economy”. Can you briefly elaborate on that idea?

A: This crisis has its roots in the global deregulation of economies, leading to market failures, the growth of inequality, along with increased economic insecurity.

Firms have pursued profits often at the expense of broadly shared well-being. This is not to condemn corporations for their behaviour. Firms seek to maximise their profits in the context of societal rules that regulate their actions.

This poses two challenges for governments. First, they must identify and enforce a set of rules and regulations that are sufficiently flexible to permit firms to innovate while also requiring firms to align their profit motives with social well-being. To give an example, firms try to reduce their costs to raise profits.

They can do this by lowering wages or by innovating and thus raising their productivity. Their choice about which path to cost reduction to take will depend on the set of incentives that governments set.

If a government sets and enforces a minimum wage, firms will be constrained to innovate as a way to compete, which is a good thing for the firm, workers, and society as a whole.

Second, governments have an important role to play in investing in key areas to “crowd in” private investment. For example, investment in infrastructure and education is good for business because it reduces their costs. It is also good for citizens as a whole. The challenge is to carefully target those expenditures so that they do succeed in stimulating business investment that leads to higher incomes.

A related challenge is to identify gender-enabling investments. As I noted above, some public spending that had previously been thought of as social welfare is in reality social infrastructure investment – e.g., education, health, and conditional cash transfer programmes.

They are investments because they improve the productive capacity of the economy, yielding a stream of benefits into the future, which can be used to pay down the debt incurred to finance these expenditures.

The concept of social infrastructure is not well developed. It is an important one, and is an important avenue for promoting gender equality in ways that are financially sustainable.

Excerpt:

“I had never worked before, and now I produce kilos and kilos of dried fruit to sell. They taught me how to dry peaches, tomatoes, peppers and grapes, and I decided on my own to try it with melons and pears – and they were spectacular,” Susana Robledo, a proud new entrepreneur from rural Argentina, told IPS.

Rural woman in Argentina engaging in one of her invisible daily tasks. Credit: Courtesy of Estudios y Proyectos

Robledo is one of more than 200 women who participated in the Women Entrepreneurs Programme organised by the non-profit organisation Estudios y Proyectos (EyP) in the rural towns of El Colorado, in the northeastern Argentine province of Formosa, and Lujan de Cuyo, in the midwestern province of Mendoza, where she lives.

In the past, surplus fruit crops were simply left to rot. Now that Robledo has learned different techniques for dehydrating and preserving fruit, as well as tips on marketing, she stores kilos of various types of fruit in her freezer and sells them at the different markets held regularly in this region of Mendoza, where the local economy is primarily centred around vineyards and wineries.

The EyP project is aimed at developing rural women’s entrepreneurial skills in order to help them become economically independent. To this end, the organisation also works on such issues as women’s rights to land ownership and the problems they face in obtaining loans – as well as their right to decide how many children they want to have, or to protect themselves from domestic violence.

When women’s rights are laid out for them, “they take ownership and demand respect for them,” Liliana Seiras, the director of the project, told IPS. “We approach them from the angle of production, but we always move deeper into the underlying issue of women’s rights, to help them gradually move towards their own empowerment.”

For their part, the participants have only one complaint about the project and their trainers: “Why didn’t they come sooner?” This is the sentiment voiced by Paulina Gil, now in her 70s, who took part in the project in El Colorado.

“Our work was worth nothing in the past. The men toyed with us, hit us, threw us out of the house with our kids and moved other women in with them,” recounts Gil in a video produced by the organisation.

The video reveals the violence and deprivation of rights and opportunities faced by these rural women, a situation made more acute by their geographical isolation, as well as their isolation from one another. This is a phenomenon that the programme is also working to overcome, by promoting links and partnerships among the women, including joint business ventures.

Although every country has its own unique circumstances, rural women in Argentina face a similar situation to those in the rest of Latin America.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) states that there are 24 million “invisible” women producers in Latin America, and this invisibility is heightened in rural areas, where women work in the same places where they carry out their domestic tasks and reproductive roles.

Agricultural engineer Cristina Biaggi, author of “Estudios de Mujeres Rurales en Argentina” (Studies on Rural Women in Argentina), told IPS that the invisibility of women’s work in the countryside is the result of cultural factors that lead them to think of themselves as their husbands’ helpers, as opposed to producers in their own right.

According to official statistics, only 21 percent of rural Argentine women consider themselves to be “employed”, while 10 percent are classified as “unemployed”. The remaining 70 percent are neither involved in nor seeking paid employment. As a result, they appear in the statistics as “inactive”, despite the fact that they work around the clock.

The “inactive” category is gender-biased because it does not adequately capture the work performed by rural women, said Biaggi, who stressed that their under-representation is partly due to the way they themselves view their work.

Susana Robledo, quoted earlier, is a prime example. She told us that she “had never worked before,” until participating in the Women Entrepreneurs Programme. In fact, she and other women like her are not only responsible for housework and child-rearing, but also take part in sowing, weeding and harvesting crops, raising livestock, milking cows and sometimes even producing crafts.

Nevertheless, Robledo, a 55-year-old mother of two sons – one of them already married – had never considered herself a rural producer, despite working side by side with her husband on their small farm.

In El Colorado, many women only came to recognise their capacities after their husbands left. “It’s amazing how many women there have been left on their own to raise their children,” commented Seiras.

When the provincial government stopped providing subsidies for cotton farming, the men went to the city to look for work, and most of them never came back.

The women were left with the burden of supporting their families, without an income, and also without legal title to their land, which meant that they were not eligible for loans, for example. In circumstances like this, it is no surprise that the training programme has been so successful, and so highly appreciated.

“The first thing we did was to set up a silo and grain sheller to store surplus crops that could be used as animal feed,” said Seiras. Through a few small changes and training aimed at improving production, the women were able to begin selling their goods directly to consumers in the various public markets held in the area.

But first it was crucial to work on their low self-esteem and lack of awareness of their rights, Seiras stressed.

In Mendoza, the first activity organised by EyP was a weekly hairdressing and manicure session for participants in the programme. “We taught them how to style their hair and to make skin lotions with honey, milk or cucumber,” she said.

“A month of ‘beauty salon’ sessions was like fertilising a field. It improved their self-esteem, and they were ready to begin training,” she explained.

The women were trained in a number of different activities until they found the one that best suited their abilities and needs. These ranged from weaving to the preparation of dried fruit and aromatic herbs, sausages and even pre-baked pizza crust.

Many of the participants are women originally from Bolivia who came to Argentina as temporary workers hired to pick garlic or onions and ended up staying. They face conditions of extreme subjugation, but have only recently begun to recognise this fact, noted Seiras.