Tag: gender

Gendered perspectives on nature-positive solutions: insights from small-scale farmers in Kenya

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A farmer showing her field in Kisumu County, Kenya. Her fields had suffered severe soil erosion in recent few years. Photo by Elsa Wallin for NATURE+

This blog post is written by Dickson Kinuthia, International Food Policy Research Institute, and Elsa Wallin, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. It was first published at CGIAR blog.

Nature-positive solutions face many barriers to adoption. Research in Kenya shows that entrenched gender roles, which tend to leave women the brunt of the work and lesser economic power, need to be considered for the successful implementation of nature-positive agriculture, particularly if it leads to higher farm income. The design and implementation of nature-positive solutions therefore requires keen attention to the gender divide.

Agricultural-based livelihoods, especially for women and other marginalized groups, are at risk due to multiple challenges including climate change, entrenched inequality, lack of investment to improve livelihoods and inadequate policy frameworks to support small-scale producers.

Additionally, the prioritization of mass-scale production of cheap food, industrial agriculture has inflicted a disastrous cost on the environment and people, leading to deforestation, land degradation, water depletion and biodiversity loss and increased global greenhouse gas emissions. global greenhouse gas emissions. This status-quo approach to agriculture adds to the challenges faced by smallholders, who rely on healthy, natural systems to eke out a living.

The CGIAR Nature-Positive Solutions Initiatives (NATURE+) aims to address these challenges by re-imagining, co-creating, and transforming agri-food systems to deliver food and livelihoods for people sustainably. This involves responsible natural resources management, enabling agriculture to be a net positive contributor to nature, and staying within planetary boundaries. Nature-positive solutions are critical for reducing and reversing biodiversity loss while improving food production and strengthening smallholder farmers’ resilience.

However, research remains limited on the gender-differentiated impacts of unsustainable agricultural practices, perception, awareness of and preferences for nature-positive solutions, and capacities to contribute to nature-positive food systems. A qualitative study conducted under the framework of NATURE+ in Kenya aims to shed light and understand gender differences in perception, awareness, constraints and incentives to the adoption of nature-positive solutions. The results presented here draw on this qualitative data collected in the Kenyan counties of Kajiado, Kisumu and Vihiga.

The NATURE+ research team at a farm in Kisumu County, Kenya that has mango trees integrated in the field. Photo: courtesy of Elsa Wallin for NATURE+

The overall pattern of labor division revealed clear gendered responsibilities. For example, women actively engaged in planting maize and vegetables for household consumption or lower-value market sales. Men engaged in planting beans, millet, and other crops that fetch higher prices in the market. Moreover, men were involved in field preparations such as ploughing, as this was perceived to be a challenging task that required a man’s strength. Women, on the other hand, played a key role in planting, weeding, and harvesting, often tedious and time-consuming tasks. Concerning livestock, men tended to own cattle, sheep, and goats while women often only owned poultry, which are less profitable.

Despite limited ownership of livestock, women played a significant role in caring for livestock. They were involved in feeding the animals and milking the cows. A male participant in Kajiado County explained that the woman in the household was responsible for milking the cows and cleaning the cowshed and “the man comes in only during the slaughtering and selling of cattle.”

In addition to the farm work, women carried a considerable burden of responsibilities in the home. This led women to work long hours and have less free time than men in general. In the literature, this is often referred to as time poverty, affecting women. Therefore, women have limited possibilities to participate in training on nature-positive solutions and to adopt beneficial agricultural practices that are more time-consuming, such as nature-positive practices.

Technology-adoption questions

Many farmers expressed a vision of a more mechanized agriculture future to run their farms. However, the adoption of technology could have both positive and negative gender outcomes. For example, the time-consuming activity of fetching water was the responsibility of women and children, but in case a motorcycle was used men were willing to help with the task, thus reducing the disproportionate allocation on household chores for women. Similarly, the threshing and winnowing of sorghum was another female-dominated task performed manually, but if machinery were used, men would be willing to participate. However, it could also have the contrary effect of men taking over and excluding women from the activity and as such keeping them from learning and limiting their influence on decision-making on sorghum cultivation and sale.

The gender division of labor and control of agricultural resources could vary slightly according to the household structure. Monogamous families had a clear structure of the man being the head of the household, overseeing decisions related to crops and livestock. In polygamous families, resources such as livestock and land were often strictly divided between the wives and therefore allowed for some more independence in decision-making. However, the husband was the ultimate owner, and the wives were still required to do the necessary labor to care for the men’s fields and livestock. In female-headed households, women were less confined by strict gender roles and could participate in tasks and acquire skills they were traditionally not given access to. Despite this, they often had low access to resources limiting the productivity and management of their farm.

Considering that women were in general disfavored when it came to agricultural resource access and ownership and had a disproportionate burden of time-consuming responsibilities, gender and women empowerment needs to be at the core when promoting nature-positive solutions or sustainable agricultural practices in general. Nevertheless, men could perceive it as threatening to their role as household heads and providers if women got too much influence in agricultural decision-making processes. A key take-away is therefore to work simultaneously to support women’s empowerment and educate and involve men to reduce the risk of tensions within the community. This is crucial in promoting long-term sustainability when supporting small-scale farmers in transitioning to nature-positive solutions.

In conclusion, nature-positive solutions are critical for restoration and prevention of further biodiversity loss and environmental degradation, while ensuring that agricultural production bridges the food and nutrition security gap. Understanding gender-differentiated roles, constraints, and preferences can enable policymakers and practitioners to design and promote nature-positive practices that meet men’s and women’s needs while protecting nature. These should be disseminated in ways that reach, benefit, and empower women. Gender-responsive design and scaling of nature-positive solutions can help reduce gender inequalities in agrifood systems, while enabling both men and women to contribute to environmental sustainability.

Countering the pitfalls of gender mainstreaming in development through gender transformative approaches

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This blog post is written by Karolin Andersson, PhD student in Rural Development at the Department of Urban and Rural Development, SLU.

Over time, gender inequality in global development has been addressed in different ways with varying outcomes and effects on people. Some approaches have been criticized by feminists and other activists for not taking the issue seriously, and for using the strategy of gender mainstreaming as a means to achieve economic growth rather than equality. In some areas of development, such as agriculture, gender transformative approaches to development research and practice have emerged in response to such critique.

Gender inequality has been considered a crucial issue in global development since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing 1995. Today, gender inequality is often addressed through the governance strategy of gender mainstreaming, which intends to challenge and change gender biases that lead to unequal development outcomes. In practice, however, gender mainstreaming efforts have mostly meant integrating and including more women into existing development projects and programs without challenging their underlying structures, gender norms, and unequal power relations that are the root causes to gender inequality. This has tended to turn gender mainstreaming into an instrument towards other goals such as economic growth, and it has contradictory cemented ideas of women as both especially vulnerable and as responsible for their own empowerment and for alleviating poverty and hunger. This approach has little prospects to achieve just, and thus sustainable, development outcomes.

Therefore, feminist researchers and practitioners persistently continue to reveal and challenge the biases and unequal effects of the dominant ways of addressing gender inequality in global development policy and practice, and of how gender mainstreaming is implemented. Many argue that if gender equality is to become an actual reality, development ideology, theory, and practice need to connect with and fully integrate feminist ideas and ideals of care, justice, and emancipation. Only then may it become possible to achieve sustainable and sustained social change.

Optimistically, some progress has been made over the past decade in this regard, for example within agricultural development. Researchers and practitioners in this field have increasingly challenged and questioned how gender has been addressed in agricultural discourse, including turning gender, and women in particular, into instruments of and as responsible for development objectives through modernized agriculture. In response, agricultural development actors have gained an increased awareness of the significance of power relations, gender norms, and unequal structures in agriculture. This has led to an emergence of what has been termed gender transformative approaches to agricultural development policy and programming. This broad range of approaches include a view that development interventions should engage with and prioritize the underlying constraining social structures and intersectional power dynamics that perpetuate gender inequalities at different scales. Gender transformative in this context refers to fostering the examination of gender dynamics and norms and intentionally strengthening, creating, or shifting structures, practices, relations, and dynamics toward equality. Application of such gender transformative approaches to development interventions could have positive effects on both the unequal gender relations and the sustainability of agricultural and development outcomes across scales. Indeed, linking development interventions with feminist objectives of challenging and changing unequal power relations and gender norms is the necessary pathway to realize a sustainable tomorrow.

In a recent article*, Karolin, together with Katarina Pettersson and Johanna Bergman Lodin, analyze how gender inequality is addressed in Rwanda’s current agricultural policy. The analysis shows that the policy’s gender mainstreaming efforts end up addressing the effects rather than the causes to gender inequality in agriculture, and that gender equality indeed becomes a means to achieve economic growth rather than social justice. The paper argues that the policy thereby risks reproducing and exacerbating existing inequalities, and suggests that it instead engages more with gender transformative approaches to challenge the underlying structures, gender norms, and unequal power relations that persist in Rwanda’s agriculture sector.

*Andersson, K., Pettersson, K., and Bergman Lodin, J. (2022). Window dressing inequalities and constructing women farmers as problematic – gender in Rwanda’s agriculture policy. Agriculture and Human Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10314-5.

DevRes 2021: Takeaways that may help us in reaching SDGs in low-income countries

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This blog post is written by Adan Martinez Cruz, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Forest Economics and SLU Global coordinator.

From 14 June to 16 June 2021, DevRes 2021 allowed us to exchange insights on challenges and opportunities to accomplish the 2030 Agenda –with a focus on low-income countries. Originally scheduled for June 2020 to take place at Umeå University campus, DevRes went digital. The success of this adaptation strategy can be illustrated by the 500 registered participants from all over the world, the 125 speakers in 51 sessions, and the variety of topics covered.

I was fortunate to chair two sessions and I will tell you my takeaways from these sessions.

During the “Gender and inclusion in agriculture” session, we learnt about the relevance of empowering women to fight poverty among smallholder farmers in Nigeria, and about the role of ethnicity and gender in adopting agroforestry strategies in Vietnam. In particular, Mai Phuong Nguyen, who works at World Agroforestry, reported her findings from semi-structured interviews to 60 farmers (30 men and 30 females) across three provinces of northwestern Vietnam. These interviews explore preferences, constraints, and opportunities to adopt agroforestry practices among Thai and H’mong people. These two ethnic minorities rely on farming sloped land, which results on high levels of soil erosion –hence the need to explore the opportunities for adoption of agroforestry. The finding I wish to highlight here is the difference across gender in interest and perceptions about benefits from agroforestry –women are less certain about what agroforestry entails, and therefore are less interested in adopting agroforestry practices. This difference seems to be originated in the different channels of information that men and women have access to –while men have formal and informal learning channels, women rely mostly on informal channels. The implication is that formal agricultural extension services, which are not currently reaching out to women, must be tailored to inform women or otherwise agroforestry practices may spread at a slower pace than desired.

During the “Climate change –resilience, mitigation, and adaptation” session, we discussed how climate impacts efficiency of subsistence farming in Ethiopia, the effect of the Sloping Land Conversion Program on Chinese farmers’ vulnerability to climate change, and how capital assets enable resilience to water scarcity among small farmers in Indonesia. Francisco X. Aguilar, who is Professor at the Department of Forest Economics in SLU, and co-authors have explored the association between rural livelihood capitals (natural, human, social, financial, and physical) and the avoidance of, adaptation to, and inability to withstand water scarcity among 200 small farmers in South Sulawasi, Indonesia. Their findings illustrate not only heterogeneity in the association but also the relevance of social and human capitals as assets to enable resilience. In particular, physical and natural assets in the form of irrigation infrastructure and direct access to water sources were saliently associated with resilience to water scarcity; factors associated with capacity to adapt were more nuanced with social capital being closely linked. Years of farming experience as a form of human capital asset was strongly associated with resiliency.

DevRes aims to explore the challenges that require societal transformation in order to accomplish the 2030 Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As illustrated by the couple of findings I have highlighted here, DevRes 2021 delivered insights that we have taken with us in our pursue to design policies that empower citizens of low-income countries to accomplish by their own means the 2030 Agenda and its SDGs.