Global forum on food security and nutrition

Joanna Kane-Potaka, ICRISAT, India

There is much activity around digital agriculture, with one of the key technologies being the use of mobile devices to bring better information to rural communities.

But rarely do I see the gender angle being mentioned with the digital revolution and the huge gender bias in digital technologies.

Internet users in India were 71% male and 29% female, as of Oct 2015. Mobile penetration rates for women are 28% while they are 40% for men.

A week ago I visited 2 villages. As usual a large group gathered and were very polite an engaging. In the first village I asked who had mobile phones. All the men put up their hands clasping their phones. Not one women had a mobile phone. When I asked about this they said they could not afford to own more phones – so obviously the men had first rights to the access to information and communications.

However I was inspired in the second village where I met extremely active Self Help Groups and the vast majority of the women had mobile phones and some even smart phones.

My point is to bring the dimension of the digital technologies and the digital divide into solutions as the new technologies can give access to important knowledge in health and nutrition and connecting this to agriculture.

Nitya Rao, facilitator of the discussion, School of International Development and LANSA, India

Digital technologies provide a powerful tool for sharing and accessing information, including on health and nutrition. There seems to be a lot of diversity even between villages in one area, Joanna, from your experience, is this right? Are there divisions of caste or class that mediate access to mobile phones and indeed to information? Are there particular groups where women are not allowed to go to the markets, for instance? In Puducherry, I found women freely using mobile phones to contact wholesaler suppliers of pulses and tamarind at a time when prices were high to see if they could benefit from some form of collective/wholesale purchase. We definitely need more research and understanding of the role digital technologies can play, but also specific constraints that restrict women's access and use. Please do share any papers you may have done on this theme.

Bhavani R Vaidyanathan, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, India

Adding on to the point made by Nitya on gender sensitization of agriculture graduates, engendering the curriculum of agriculture universities will be a good starting point and has to be actively pushed for. The M S Swaminathan Research Foundation and Kerala Agricultural University had collaborated on preparing course material on these lines more than a decade ago: However, uptake is proving to be a slow process. 

Another area is policy for women in agriculture, taking into account the multiple roles they play on the farm and on the home front.  Government officials responsible for delivery of entitlements related to agriculture at the village level have to be gender sensitive.

The title to land is in most cases in the man's name. A woman farmer in spite of shouldering a lot of the work on the land, cannot get access to agriculture schemes in her name. In the process, widows of farmers who commit suicide are oftentimes left at a loose end. 

A Women Farmers' Entitlement Act is very much needed. 

Paul Rigterink, Potomac Technical Advisors, United States of America (second contribution)

Dear Sangeetha

You may find the ECHO Tropical Video Series (Part 2 of 6) - Grafting Tropical Fruit Trees and Avocados to be useful.  It can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BbSjTVEDCc, click on the > in the far right hand column of the uploads area to get to the video.  You can also do a search using keywords Colombia, Youtube, papaya, Cordoba

For a success story see article "Colombia launches new project to boost papaya exports", Campesinos de Cordoba exportan papayas a Canada"

Barnali Chakraborty, facilitator of the discussion, Research and Evaluation Division of BRAC and LANSA, Bangladesh

It is important to realize how far the women themselves value their involvement in agriculture to achieve better nutrition. In Bangladesh it is mostly found that women are although engaged in producing local vegetables, fruits or poultry rearing in their homestead, they hardly count it as an important pathway to contribute to their income or nutrition. Even men who act as the key decision maker in such a context less often acknowledge or realize the importance of women’s contribution in this process. It is important to understand those of the social factors through undertaking rigorous research to help in generating guidelines for context relevant policies.

Mar Maestre, Institute of Development Studies, United Kingdom

Dear all,

I just completed research on unpaid care work dynamics and market systems programmes. While it didn’t target nutrition directly, the implications of the research are clearly linked to it. We have identified the key factors that often undermine women when unpaid care work is heavy, excessive or invisible, within value chain programmes, and the consequences for both the agriculture value chain and for women of not addressing these. Unpaid care can intersect often with agriculture or nutrition related programmes or policies through impacts on time, mobility and agency:

· Time: the more that women increase or decrease time in one sphere directly affects the time available in others.

· Mobility: some women’s responsibilities can limit their mobility and ability to, for example, find stable employment.

· Agency: if unpaid work is not seen as contributing, it can lead to women’s limited control over resources or undermine their self-esteem.

Our research highlighted the need to address the problematic aspects of care provision if we are to generate sustainable changes that support women’s economic empowerment. We also explored tools to understand this, and more importantly, strategies to address it, highlighting the potential of using systems thinking to facilitate change following participatory processes.

The report is not published yet, but it will offer a range of pathways for programmes to facilitate changes to address problematic aspects of unpaid care work, including how to influence norms, through a combination of short- and longer-term changes that contribute to the long-term vision. A key recommendation is to combine interventions to directly address unpaid care, with others that support changes in the agricultural value chain to adapt to existing care responsibilities can be an effective approach. There are successful programme examples that show how, by combining short-term changes or 'quick wins' (e.g. increased recognition of care or adapting market activities to care) with longer-term changes, the underlying constraints can be addressed, even those that seem challenging, such as influencing social norms.

You can find more information about our work here: https://beamexchange.org/practice/research/womens-economic-empowerment/unpaid-care-work/ or contact me, as we will publish the report very soon.