Why women still lag behind in agricuture

A saying goes that if you teach a man to farm, his family will eat, but if you teach a woman to farm, the community will eat!  In Kenya, thousands of people migrate from farms to cities in search of work, and the majority of the migrants are men. As a result, women have always been on the front lines of the fight to sustain family farms. 

When 30-year-old Mukene Thyaka married the man she remembers as "handsome and stylish," he assembled the bride price: four goats and ten chickens. The animals represented an age-old custom meant to compensate Thyaka's father for losing the labour of his daughter.

In the decade since, Thyaka has hardly seen her husband, who long ago left their hot and dusty village for an even hotter and dusty Mlolongo, Nairobi, where he believes there's a chance to land a fortune someday. Instead of toiling for her father, she has laboured for her husband, fetching water, hauling firewood, ploughing the land, generating the food for the family, and bearing and rearing the children.

.

Keep Reading

• Gender Pay Gap: Women earn 18 less than men

Like Thyaka, thousands of women in rural Kenya are subsistence farmers. They produce without ploughs, oxen or tractors. Despite contributing about 50 per cent of the agricultural workforce in food production, processing and marketing, a report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) says women farmers are still exceptionally disadvantaged. 

Political indifference

Political indifference and social constraints such as lack of adequate training and education, farm ownership, lack of inputs and machinery mean that productivity on female-run farms is significantly lower per hectare than on farms managed by men. Caroline Adhiambo never attended school. Her parents were not too keen on her education. She can barely read or write, although her husband can. She lives in Alego, Siaya, and her husband is a cook at a primary school in Nakuru. He visits twice a year, and they have five children. Adhiambo rarely receives a dime from her husband, and she dare not ask. She has little expectations of a better life. But her resignation to fate does not stop her from recognising just how hard her life is. 

 "Everything is difficult," Adhiambo says. "Digging in the farm is especially tedious. I don't like it at all, but I must do it to sustain my children."

Adhiambo shares her world of never ending fatigue with her children. "Sometimes the rains fail, and all the digging yields nothing. The crops get infested or, for some reason, yield less than expected, but always, the effort I put in is hardly worth it. I wish I could afford fertiliser and hire a labourer to help me, but my husband rarely sends any money home."

Women's low standing continually frustrates their rise out of poverty and hunger. Many women face forced evictions by their in-laws, especially after their husbands' death or separation. Conflicts, destruction of homes, family and community structure often leave women extremely vulnerable. Further, a chronic lack of documentation along with legal and customary discrimination block women from accessing land rights.

According to FAO, women just represent 12.8 per cent of the world's agricultural landholders. In Kenya, the Federation of Women Lawyers, has previously estimated that less than five per cent of all land title deeds are held jointly by women with men, and roughly two per cent of land titles in Kenya are held by women alone. This, despite the World Bank reporting that women run more than three-quarters of Kenya's farms.  Aside from land ownership, like in Thyaka and Adhiambo's cases, women lack the necessary education and training, financing, technology and tailored support to explore their full potentials in agriculture. A report by FAO states that closing the gender gap in agricultural inputs alone can lift 100–150 million people out of hunger. Conversely, the existing gender gap costs the economy 15 per cent of Gross Domestic Product.