10/04/15

Gender-friendly tech could empower women in agriculture

Farming tech
Copyright: Flickr/Neil Palmer/CIAT

Speed read

  • Current agricultural tech are labour-intensive, and thus are not suitable to women
  • Researchers should create tech to aid women and reduce gender gap in agriculture
  • Such tech could help women free up time and be more productive, says an expert

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[NAIROBI] Female-friendly agricultural technologies and innovations are needed to bridge the gender gap in agricultural productivity and food security.  
 
A forum dubbed Empowering women for sustainable natural resource management, which was held in Kenya last month (3 March), noted that there are challenges and opportunities that exist in promoting gender equality in Africa, adding that policy and institutional interventions are needed to enhance women participation in environmental management.
 
Speakers at the forum said that women find it difficult to apply and use some agricultural technologies and innovations because of their technical and labour-intensive designs, noting that most are geared to commercial farmer and not smallholder farmers, most of whom are women.
 

“The briquette machine that sought to ease women’s energy needs and the MoneyMaker technology for irrigation require a lot of physical strength to use, [thus] disadvantaging women.”

Annabel Waititu, The Institute of Environment and Water Management, Kenya.

“For instance,  the briquette machine that sought to ease women’s energy needs and the MoneyMaker technology for irrigation require a lot of physical strength to use, [thus] disadvantaging women ,” said Annabel Waititu, the executive director of the Institute of Environment and Water Management in Kenya.
 
Aisha Karanja, the executive director of Kenya-based Green Belt Movement (GBM), an organisation that empowers communities, especially women, in environmental conservation, added: “Indeed gender inequality remains an underlying factor in women’s agricultural productivity.”
 
Jean Jacob Sahou, the regional development coordinator of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNDP) Africa office in Kenya, said women and children suffer the most from environmental degradation as a result of  their role in day-to-day activities of wood and water collection, food processing as well as from poor agricultural incomes.

The forum was organised by the GBM, the African Union Commission and the UNDP.

 Addressing the forum from the perspective of a researcher, Mary Njenga, a postdoctoral fellow in bio-energy at the World Agroforestry Centre, Kenya, said researchers need to observe women smallholders on the ground.

She adds that researchers could use science and technology to improve what already know, noting that doing so could help women adopt technologies that researchers would create.  

“In developing projects for research and development we must work and identify the challenges from people’s own perspective and then bring in science and technology to the local situation,” Njenga said.

Asa Torkelsson, advisor for economic empowerment at the UN Women Regional Office for Eastern and Southern Africa, said technologies are needed to address most of the bottlenecks that women face within agriculture to enhance their productivity through better storage and value addition.
 
Torkelsson added that such technologies could reduce women’s labour to free up some of the time being allocated to other tasks that hold up their productive engagement in agriculture.

This article has been produced by SciDev.Net's Sub-Saharan Africa desk.