Sophia Ostler shares insights from our recent International Women’s Day event on women in agriculture.
Anyone who has investigated the salient issues for women in agriculture, probably knows that women comprise more than half of the agricultural labour force and are vastly excluded from access to land and to financial services. Perhaps they’ve come across the fact that women are disproportionately affected by climate change, due to organised relationships of oppression.
When I attended the International Women’s Day Conference at LSE earlier this month, I wanted to find out what promoters of women and girl’s rights can do for women living in rural communities in low income countries. At a time when aid budgets have been drastically cut, and when defence and protectionism are crowding out existing international cooperation efforts, how should advocates for women in agriculture adapt their approach?
I was struck by the breadth of current research into women farmers and workers that was presented at the conference. I was inspired by projects that are paving the way for progress in gender equality in agriculture. Some common themes emerged:
Localising solutions is the solution. The answer to progress is in local knowledge, as Professor Naila Kabeer put it. Instead of applying large scale development programmes like sticky plasters, gender equity efforts should start small and make science work at the local level.
Women are resilient and can often find ways to overcome situations of structural disadvantage. Dr Imogen Bellwood-Howard’s insights from West African vegetable markets suggest that even in contexts where men are the farmers and have preferential access to land, women have managed to carve out their role in transporting food to sell in markets, which is more profitable and less risky.
This is not to say that outsiders cannot work with rural women to develop innovative solutions, and to address the barriers that limit their economic opportunities. Architect Sarah El Battouty works with rural women in the MENA region to come up with building configurations that make it easier for them to work and save water. Heat stress, and poor building design are some of the less visible obstacles to women’s participation in the economy. This is especially true in countries like Egypt, where 30 per cent of income goes into cooling and heating.
Governments and law makers can play a part in advancing women’s progress in agriculture simply by not standing in the way of innovation. Sugarcrete is a low carbon alternative to concrete that could transform the construction landscape in countries with an abundance of sugarcane waste. Yet Sugarcrete collaborator Oluchukwu Okonkwo finds that the biggest challenge she’s encountered is having to overcome the red tape that obstructs the adoption of sustainable forms of architecture.
Policymakers can also address how some development policies are actively disempowering women. Doctoral researcher Nbuwak Peace Yashim highlighted inclusive policies are not just about incorporating women’s voices into existing policies. A case in point are the many initiatives to industrialise food systems via philanthropic capitalism over the years, under the pretext of women’s economic empowerment. And yet some, like the hybridisation of seeds in Zimbabwe, are the manifestation of women’s disempowerment. Yashim’s research suggests that women’s food security boils down to their access to seeds. If women cannot regenerate seeds, they cannot pass on their precious knowledge of seeds within their communities and across generations.
Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli, from ONE Campaign, summarised this point neatly. To accelerate women’s role in agriculture, we need to change the narrative that Africa is a hungry child because Africa can feed the world. Women in Africa are agents of their own change, and policymakers must think about how to partner with them and learn about indigenous practices. That is where the secret to increasing women’s economic opportunities lies.
Advocates for women in agriculture must take aim at the big picture structural barriers, like the global debt crisis and conflict.
As climate expert Dina Zayed pointed out, we need greater lateral thinking in how we frame the issues we campaign for. Climate change, food security and gender inequality are inevitably underpinned by other issues that are less catchy in the advocacy world, such as slowing growth and external debt. She illustrated this point with the case of Egypt, whose external debt jumped massively between 2010 and 2023 making it one of the biggest IMF debtors. Due to the economic pressure from debt, Egypt, a country highly affected by climate change, must export most of its produce and feed itself by importing 40 per cent of its food supplies. Without this debt crisis, Egypt could be food self-sufficient. Financial shocks like these have an asymmetric knock-on effect on women in agriculture. Everyone’s food security is at stake, but women are less likely to migrate and more exposed to secondary climate shocks like the spread of diseases and pollution.
Policies to address structural issues like the debt crisis do not get as much traction as women’s access to credit and gender-based violence. In Dina’s view, if we want to be serious about addressing the impact of climate change of women in agriculture and their food security, we need to see how it interacts with the debt crisis, and with conflict.
Like financial stability, peace is paramount to gender equality in agriculture.As Professor Rym Ayadi points out, conflict disrupts the value and food chains and women are the first to be impacted. All the effort of the women who individually try to tackle climate change, desertification, and to overcome their lack of access to land and resources, will almost be in vain when there is a conflict in the backdrop. When there is conflict, women’s innate reflex to be self-reliant in the face of hardship, exposes them to even more threats. Conflict generates a migrant population that is perpetually ready to work as wage labourers and unable to integrate into established labour markets. This leaves many, and in particular women, at risk of exploitation.
Muna Eltahir from Practical Action works with women in Sudan who are particularly affected by conflict and displacement. She described how they’ve been forced to flee from the land on which they once harvested their crops and have tried to earn a living elsewhere. With very weak bargaining power, in a context where women are not paid for their work in agriculture, these displaced women are exposed to abuse and the worst paid jobs in agrarian life. This phenomenon rang true with other speakers. PhD candidate Charlotte Brown shared some of the findings from her emerging research on refugee women in Uganda. She described how even in countries like Uganda, where refugees are assigned plots of land and encouraged to become self-sufficient, when subsistence farming fails, it is the mothers who often end up food insecure and seeking precarious income diversification. In worse cases, like in Tigray and in Eastern Congo (north and south of Kivu), conflict-led displacement results in sexual violenceas Dan Collison remarked from his experience of working with farmers in East Africa.
This is a time of change in the international development sector. As the sixty-ninth session of the Commission on the Status of Women draws to a close this week, aid organisations and policy makers around the world are having to rethink their approach to women farmers and workers who are struggling to provide for their families.
As advocates for women in agriculture,we may be unable to restore the aid budget, but we can still help to incubate local solutions, and channel our efforts to tackle the debt crisis and prevent conflict. And we must maintain the momentum for climate actioneven if stopping climate change may seem like a mammoth quest. If debt and conflict were taken out of the equation, many rural women’s efforts to tackle climate change might just be enough to guarantee their own food security and be safe from harm.
