Tag: Gender

Women Who Grow: How women farmers in Odisha, India are at the forefront of the digital agriculture revolution

Posted on by michael

In the heart of verdant Odisha, India a quiet shift is underway. Thousands of women farmers under the Swayam Sampurna Farmer Producer Organisation (FPO) are transforming agriculture – embracing digital tools to secure their livelihoods, boost climate-smart crop production and make data-driven decisions.

Swayam Sampurna, which roughly translates to “complete self-reliance”, is an FPO created by women farmers, for women farmers – consisting of over 4000 members spread across 139 villages in Odisha, India. The organisation is headed by an all-women Board of Directors, and is staffed by Community Resource Persons (CRPs) who are women farmers well versed in the unique needs of each community they serve. 

These smallholder farmers often face delays in receiving timely and tailored guidance on farming practices, seeds and inputs. Many farmers rely on traditional advisories and must depend on infrequent visits from government horticulture agents or travel long distances to agriculture departments. Delayed access to advisories can lead to many missed opportunities to improve yields for major local crops like millet, watermelon and tomato.

Digital Green Trust has introduced digital interventions across all points of the agricultural value chain, empowering the women of Swayam Sampurna to make data-driven decisions for their farms and families.

Video Advisories Promote Climate-Smart Agricultural Practices

The use of chemical fertilizers is prevalent in India, but heavy use has serious health and environmental effects including reduced soil fertility and contamination of water sources. 

Digital Green’s video advisories, made by digitally-equipped women farmers, and shared by trained women CRPs,  promote the use and preparation of climate-smart, organic fertilizers to improve crop health. “By watching videos, I’ve started preparing organic manure to reduce input costs and improve the health of my watermelon crop,” says a farmer.

E-Farm Collects Data to Boost Demand 

The E-farm application empowers CRPs to generate demand digitally instead of manual, paper-based collection from each farm. Farmers can capture product demand directly from their fields, collecting data efficiently.

With this intervention, CRPs free up valuable time otherwise spent manually recording data from each farmer. Kabita Taria, a CRP from the Baunsnali Gram Panchayat explains: “Previously, we had to travel to collect indents from farmers. Now, with e-Farm, everything is updated instantly on the app!”

By leveraging e-Farm’s digitally aggregated demand data, Swayam Sampurna can enhance their bargaining power and use their insights to negotiate better prices for their crops.

Farmer.Chat Provides Real-Time, Customized Advisory

CRPs use Farmer.Chat to provide accurate and timely answers to questions from the farming collective. Farmers often seek real-time advice on managing pest attacks and treating crop diseases. A farmer explains, “The platform offers tailored advice for the crops I grow, making it more relevant and easy to follow. I can find useful recommendations anytime, helping me make timely decisions for better results on my farm.”

With Farmer.Chat, Swayam Sampurna’s farmers no longer have to rely on bi-monthly visits from horticulture experts – often too late to tackle urgent pest and disease issues. “Now we can get all the information very easily, without depending on the nearest medicine shop,” says Singha Tudu, a farmer from Jashipur who had been struggling to address crop diseases effectively.

Empowering Women through Capacity Building

Through Digital Green’s tailored training program, CRPs are equipped with the skills to use digital tools like Farmer.Chat and e-Farm. This allows them to facilitate informed decision-making at every stage of farming—from crop management to market negotiations.

As women farmers themselves, CRPs understand the specific challenges faced by their communities. Their ability to use digital tools to guide other women farmers has created a peer-sharing ecosystem – where each CRP not only improves her own farming practices, but also enables the same for other women in her community.

The Ripple Effect of Digital Empowerment in Agricultural Communities

The ripple effect of digital empowerment is profound: with digital tools at their fingertips, women no longer need to rely on external resources and can make climate-smart, data-informed decisions for their farms and families. This not only lowers their household burden but also increases the collective bargaining power of women-led FPOs, ensuring market access for their produce, and higher income flowing into their communities.

As digital-first CRPs and FPOs continue to spread accurate, real-time and customized agricultural knowledge, these interventions have the power to transform the way entire communities approach agriculture, empowering women farmers – in Odisha, and beyond – to pave the way for the future of agriculture.

Gender Integration in Digital Green’s Work

Posted on by Susan Thomas

Agriculture is a family business in Ethiopia, as it is in most countries. Women farmers conduct up to 75% of farm work, accounting for 70% of family food production in Ethiopia. However, women produce up to 35% less than male farmers because they have less access to extension services and inputs such as seeds and fertilizer.[1] This is because agricultural extension services have traditionally been geared toward males and development groups (25-35 farmers organized by the government in their neighborhoods for extension and agricultural development services) are made up of “heads of family,” who are predominantly men. In order to address this, the Ministry of Agriculture of Ethiopia, in collaboration with other non-governmental organizations, is aiming to close the gender gap in agricultural extension services. As part of this endeavor, Digital Green is developing women-only development groups to boost women’s access to agricultural extension services. Furthermore, Digital Green’s video extension approach aims to close the gender gap in farm labor and decision-making by better understanding gender roles in farm labor and decision-making and ensuring that the structure, design, and delivery of video extension services meet the needs of both men and women.

To better integrate the gender dynamics in the project districts and better incorporate them in the video extension approach, Digital Green is collaborating with Tanager[2] through the IGNITE[3] project, a collaboration of Tanager, Laterite and 60 Decibels.  IGNITE supports Digital Green’s effort in increasing women’s access to agriculture extension services and gender integration across project activities.

A qualitative research conducted by Laterite as part of research initiatives of IGNITE titled “Exploring Intra-Household Decision-Making and Best Practice Adoption Outcomes of Women-Targeted Digital Extension”[4] shows that women and men have distinct gender roles in wheat farming. Traditionally, men lead on several farming activities like land preparation and sowing, but women and children provide essential support for these activities, while women also lead on others. Men tend to dominate land preparation, sowing, purchasing inputs such as fertilizer or herbicide, and selling the crop. Men are also heavily involved in harvesting and threshing (with support from women and children) and contribute to weeding. Men are rarely involved in support activities like fetching water or preparing food.

Women play a supporting role in almost all farming activities and take the lead in some. Crucial supporting roles, like fetching water for chemicals and fertilizer, monitoring leaves for rust, clearing land of debris, availing fertilizer, and preparing food for all laborers are led by women. Women also take lead on post-harvest storage of wheat. Together with men and children, women harvest and weed as well, and prepare the threshing floor.

Figure 1:  division of farm labor[5]

Despite their distinct farm labor role, nearly all participants agree that land belongs to the household as a whole and is not owned by any individual. There are also women who owned wheat plots independently, such as households headed by single mothers or widows.

Besides gender mainstreaming, Digital Green is also focusing on women-specific activities, such as establishing Self Help Groups (SHGs) and repurposing a women’s development army organized by the government to tackle different health issues. According to the gender analysis conducted for the Digital Agriculture Advisory Service (DAAS) study, although women make up a large portion of the agricultural labor force, their contribution is underestimated[6], and as a result, they do not receive the necessary agricultural extension services. Moreover, their decision-making ability in the household and on the farm is limited by stereotypical social norms. To address these issues, Digital Green has formed 4900 Women Development Groups, totaling 120,714 members, and thus far has reached 94,037 of them through video-based extension services.

Digital Green is also challenging the stereotyped gender norms through the videos used for advisory services recognizing women’s roles in agriculture and promoting shared decision-making. Whenever it is feasible, we cast female farmers as role models in the videos. Moreover, Digital Green also produces women-specific videos that focus on the activities women play on the farm predominantly. The result of the qualitative study shows that Women farmers appreciated the presence of women in the video and see them as role models to follow. They also spent more time than men praising the video sessions, mentioning that they are relevant, and timely and giving them great motivation to improve as farmers.

Furthermore, Digital Green has formed SHGs, voluntary organizations of 20-25 individuals homogeneous in terms of socioeconomic background and gender, who get together to solve shared problems and enhance their level of living. SHG involvement is significant because it contributes to women’s economic, social, and political empowerment through increases in income, savings, and/or loan repayments, and skills after women are exposed to group support and accrue social capital through frequent meetings. Accordingly, under the DAAS project, Digital Green has formed 66 SHGs with a total of 1650 members providing technical and financial support to the group members. Digital Green also provides training on the SHG approach for Woreda staff from the Women and children affairs office, Agriculture Office, and Micro and Small Enterprise Office. The training helped the trained staff to provide the necessary support and follow-ups for the SHGs. “The SHGs approach is increasingly recognized as a community development strategy to fight poverty, promote grassroots democracy and build social capital. The approach was introduced to Ethiopia from India in 2002 and has enabled numerous low-income women to pull themselves out of poverty, exercise local governance and revitalize social solidarity.”[7]

The DAAS project is generously supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.

 

 

 

 

 

Footnotes: 

[1] USAID, Empowering Women Through Agricultural Development in Ethiopia, 2017

[2]  Tanager is an international non-profit organization established in 1993 and an affiliate of ACDI/VOCA.

[3] Impacting Gender and Nutrition through Innovative Technical Exchange for Agriculture (IGNITE) program, is a five-year investment in a technical assistance mechanism to support African institutions to integrate gender and nutrition into their agriculture interventions and way of doing business. IGNITE is implemented by Tanager, Laterite and 60 Decibels.

[4] Exploring Intra-Household Decision-Making and Best Practice Adoption Outcomes of Women-Targeted Digital Extension

[5] Note: the roles displayed are community normative roles for women and men, as expressed by the farmer in the focus group discussions. However these differ on an individual household basis, especially differ for female-headed households.

[6] The role of women in the agricultural economy in Ethiopia: the case of Aira woreda in western Wollega zone, Oromiya regional state, Moa Alemayehu, International Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Research, 2019

[7] Yntiso, Gebre. “The Self-Help Groups Approach in Ethiopia: Promising Achievements and Formidable Challenges.” Journal of Ethiopian Studies, vol. 48, 2015, pp. 33–60. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44326306. Accessed 18 Aug. 2022.