Women
play a vital role in rice production systems and rice value chains in Africa. Yet in many countries and communities, they
lack equal access to technical knowledge and technologies and control over
assets and productive resources that are essential to improve their households’ food security and livelihoods.
AfricaRice
strongly believes that closing the gender gap in Africa’s rice sector will
maximize its impact on food and nutrition security and poverty alleviation. The
Center has long been associated with the participatory varietal selection (PVS)
approach, where special attention is given to getting feedback from women
farmers.
“Our
focus is to increasingly move towards gender-responsive research and reduce
existing gender inequalities in rice farming and rice value chains,” stated Dr
Gaudiose Mujawamariya, AfricaRice gender specialist. “Knowledge, criteria,
needs and preferences of men and women farmers/users will be given importance
at all stages of the research cycle.”
“The
adoption of this strategy will help us to better integrate gender issues in the
whole rice research-for-development cycle for an effective and sustainable
impact on actors’ livelihoods in Africa,” said Dr Harold Roy-Macauley,
AfricaRice Director General.
As
part of its activities, AfricaRice is assessing gender gaps in access to
information on improved agricultural practices, which is critical to enhance productivity
and marketing opportunities.
A
study by Zossou et al. titled
‘’Gender gap in acquisition and practice of agricultural knowledge: case studyof rice farming in West Africa,” revealed that the most quoted source in
acquiring knowledge and information on rice farming technologies
was ‘colleague farmers,’ implying the importance of social capital for rural
African farmers.
The
analysis also showed a significant gender gap in the level of knowledge and use
of rice farming technologies in Côte d’Ivoire and Niger, with greater advantage
for men over women. In Benin, on the other hand, women farmers seem to have
better access than men to agricultural knowledge sources. No positive impact
was however observed on their level of use of rice techniques. This maybe
because of the vulnerability of women to poverty and lack of financial support.
The
study recommends that, as a complement to formal extension approaches, interactive
rural learning approaches, such as farmer-to-farmer videos, could be adopted to
help farmers understand the underlying principles of improved technologies and
enhance their ability to adopt and or innovate with local or limited resources.
“Video
seems to be a powerful tool to solve the problem of participant selection bias
in conventional training and to dilute the leadership power issue within farmer
organizations,” the study concluded.