{"id":1852,"date":"2022-03-04T19:45:22","date_gmt":"2022-03-04T19:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/reaching-more-women-farmers-via-empowering-extension-agents\/"},"modified":"2024-04-22T14:48:12","modified_gmt":"2024-04-22T14:48:12","slug":"reaching-more-women-farmers-via-empowering-extension-agents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/reaching-more-women-farmers-via-empowering-extension-agents\/","title":{"rendered":"Reaching more women farmers via empowering extension agents"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Addressing gender inequality in Ethiopia is essential to achieve sustainability in agriculture as women perform a large share of agricultural labor (40-60%), and high levels of inequality make it harder to increase productivity and reduce poverty.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> However, women face specific constraints that reduce their productivity and limit their contributions, one of which is a lack of agriculture extension service. Extension agents, including Subject Matter Specialists and Development Agents, receive training from\u00a0Agricultural Technical Vocational Education and Training (ATVET) colleges but the training emphasizes technical subjects, with inadequate focus on gender issues. Moreover, extension agents are predominantly male and direct their advisory services to male farmers. Further, women face limited mobility in certain communities and geographies as well as cultural sensitivities about (male) extension agents providing advice to women farmers. Due to these factors, female farmers produce 23% less per hectare than their male counterparts \u2013 negatively impacting the efficiency, effectiveness, and overall economic progress of the country.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Digital Green recognizes that engaging institutions in change processes is critical to removing structural barriers that reinforce gender norms. We are committed to support government partners in implementing strategies that advance women&#8217;s access to agricultural extension services by acknowledging the power of incentives and informal systems that reinforce norms. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Such initiatives transcend\u00a0Digital Green&#8217;s project activities and have the capability to make the whole agriculture extension service more gender intentional. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One of the mechanisms of supporting the government to reach more women farmers in accessing agriculture extension service is by enhancing extension agents\u2019 knowledge on gender. We empower <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Development Agents to start challenging the different gender stereotypes while producing agricultural extension videos. By creating awareness among extension agents who closely work with Digital Green, and by casting women farmers in our videos,<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> we are c<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">hallenging such stereotypes for the better.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Digital Green has included gender content in video production and video dissemination training manuals <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">to<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> enhance extension agents\u2019 knowledge on gender. Among the content included in the manual are: what do we mean by gender, how to take the issues of gender into consideration when producing and disseminating videos, how to facilitate video dissemination sessions in a gender-sensitive manner, and more. From the feedback we received from Development Agents, the inclusion of gender-sensitive training content has helped them to understand why gender is important in their daily work and even generated additional demand for gender-focused training.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Digital Green recognizes that engaging institutions in change processes is critical to removing structural barriers that reinforce gender norms. We are committed to support government partners in implementing strategies that advance women&#8217;s access to agricultural extension services by acknowledging the power of incentives and informal systems that reinforce norms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1853,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[224],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1852"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3054,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions\/3054"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}