Food Security, Productivity, and Gender Inequality - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 288

Third, women farmers' access to credit, production inputs, technical information,
and marketing outlets needs substantial improvement. A range of measures could help,
such as enhancing women's membership in existing credit and service cooperatives,
and, where needed, creating new all-women service cooperatives that provide inputs
and marketing support; gender-sensitizing the providers of technical information to
farmers, with a clear emphasis on reaching women farmers; directly training women
in new farm practices; and creating special service stations with designated officers to
cover groups of villages, whom women could request to provide training, crop informa-
tion, and support for input purchase and marketing (for elaboration, see GoI 2011).
Fourth, agricultural research and development (R&D) efforts would be more effec-
tive if R&D institutions, as well as extension services, worked with a better understand-
ing of women's farming systems, including practices of multicropping. This is especially
needed in parts of Africa, where there are notable differences in the crops grown mainly
by women and those grown mainly by men. Doss (2001), for instance, after reviewing
an extensive literature on African women farmers, covering 25 years, emphasizes the
need for developing technologies and crop varieties that take account of the constraints
women farmers face. Devising effective ways of delivering extension advice on new
agricultural practices is also important (Gilbert, Salaka, & Benson 2002), as are efforts
to design technology dissemination programs that recognize women's constraints and
local contexts. Five agencies in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, helped large numbers
of women adopt improved technology by using existing women's networks to identify
women's needs and reach them quickly; consulting potential beneficiaries to identify
their constraints; developing and selecting appropriate technology to overcome those
constraints; and paying special attention to poorer women (Saito, et al. 1994: 69).
Fifth, the effectiveness of all these measures could be enhanced by institutional inno-
vations in the form of group approaches to farming. There are many potential advan-
tages of women working together in small groups. At a minimum, across a village or
ecological zone, women could benefit through cooperation in crop planning and
pooling their finances to buy inputs, machinery, and crop insurance. Groups can also
improve women's clout with government agencies and thereby increase their access to
formal credit, inputs and information (Braverman, et al. 1991). Most important, groups
can substantially raise women's chances of accessing land by enlarging their financial
pool as well as their bargaining power in land purchase and lease markets. This process
could be furthered by state-subsidized credit to groups of women for land purchase or
lease.
However, it is with group farming, based on pooling owned or leased in land, that we
would expect the most gains in productivity and social empowerment, compared with
single family units. Potentially, it could help small holders take advantage of economies
of scale;14 spread the risks of farming among a larger number; facilitate experimenta-
tion with higher value, more risk-prone crops with larger payoffs; enlarge scope for crop
diversification; allow labor sharing; and bring together a greater diversity of talents,
knowledge, and managerial skills. Labor shortages during peak seasons could also be
overcome more effectively, both because more labor would be available within the group