POVERTY: Better Data Key to Supporting Women Farmers

An accomplished farmer who won the coveted Woman Farmer of the Year Award in 2008, Thabile Dlamini-Gooday wants to uplift the standard of other women in agriculture. She believes that if women farmers were to work together they could fight hunger and significantly reduce poverty among themselves.But she faces one big challenge. "Women farmers are difficult to find because we don’t know one another," says Dlamini-Gooday. Often she runs out of stock and would like to refer her customers to other women farmers. But men end up taking the business because there is no national sex-disaggregated database to help her identify her female counterparts and the kind of products they sell. In fact, says Dlamini-Gooday, government cannot even begin to address the specific needs of women in agriculture because the Ministry of Agriculture keeps no such data. "As women we lack certain skills in farming such as rearing livestock which is traditionally considered a man’s job. But if government does not even know the number of women farmers out there then it cannot address these issues," she told IPS. In most African countries women, make up the majority of the poor, live in rural areas and are subsistence farmers. Yet Swaziland is not the only African country lacking sex-disaggregated data on agriculture. According to United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimates, women make up 60 percent of the agricultural labour force while they produce between 60 and 80 percent of the world’s food crops. These women’s contribution to national development largely goes unrecognised and unpaid. Dr Lindiwe Sibanda, the chief executive officer of the Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources Network (FANRPAN), blames the World Bank’s economic structural adjustment programmes for the lack of disaggregated data. According to Sibanda, the requirement for countries to downsize their agricultural research and extension services under SAPS destroyed the whole infrastructure of data collection. Therefore, Africa continues to plan based on data that is not in touch with people’s lived realities. "In many instances, policies and programmes in rural areas, as implemented at the local level, are not responsive to women’s needs. In part, this is because planners and policy-makers are often not even aware that women farmers face special and specific challenges and those programmes need to be designed with their situations in mind," explained Sibanda.
http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=51510