How agroecology empowers women and promotes gender equality

What is it really like to be a woman farmer? Many might picture a woman tending to her own fields: she is reaping a bountiful harvest, preparing healthy food to feed herself or selling the produce at a profit at a nearby market. In truth, for many women the reality is quite different – particularly in the countries of the Global South, where SWISSAID operates.

Due to a lack of money and access to credit, rural women work their family’s fields with only the most basic tools, poor-quality seeds and fertilisers. Their knowledge to cope with the increasing droughts, pests or unpredictable weather extremes is limited. This responsibility of feeding their families every day with meagre harvests and having to make ends meet even in times of crisis is immense – and creates a sense of powerlessness.

Climate change, political instability and underlying poverty significantly exacerbate this plight. Often, however, it is societal, patriarchal norms that systematically restrict women. Ultimately, this harms not only them but the whole community, slows down the entire economy and incurs high social costs.

The fact is: women make an enormous contribution to agricultural systems in the Global South. Women harvest eight out of ten food items on our plates – yet of every ten hectares of land, not even one and a half belong to them. In many places, more women than men work in agriculture. According to the FAO, we are leaving a huge potential untapped: if women farmers were given the same access to resources such as land, trainings and credit, 150 million fewer people would have to go hungry thanks to the additional yields.

To overcome these gender barriers, SWISSAID uses a comprehensive agroecological approach based on 14 principles. Agroecology is particularly well suited to empowering rural women. Why?

• Agroecology relies on home-made organic inputs and local seeds, which are more affordable for smallholder women farmers than industrial seeds, chemical fertilisers and pesticides.
• Agroecology centres traditional knowledge about seeds – and thus the role of women, as they are usually the ones who maintain and pass on this knowledge.
• Agroecology promotes the cultivation of diverse, nutritious food for personal consumption, thereby supporting a responsibility that often falls to women.
• Agroecological knowledge is shared through networks; providing women farmers with opportunities to get involved in their communities and support one another.

In short: agroecology is far more than just an ecological farming method. It makes women farmers more independent, strengthens their voice in decision-making processes, ensures equal access to land and resources, and calls for a fairer redistribution of care work between men and women.

What sounds straightforward is, however, often a complex, lengthy process. For ‘Bibi Fatima’, a women’s group from the Indian state of Karnataka, this process has been underway for over eight years. Their brilliant idea: to re-cultivate long-forgotten but climate-resilient traditional millet varieties, thereby providing their families with a healthier, more secure diet. This also led to the creation of a seed bank, freeing them from having to buy expensive synthetic seeds every year, and a small production facility for grinding millet flour. They also learnt to make their own organic fertiliser – which they even sell on nowadays.

The path to this success, however, was fraught with obstacles. At first, some women had to get their husbands’ permission to leave the house. Others had to pre-cook meals for their family before dawn. If a child was ill, this automatically meant their absence from the weekly meeting. These tensions reached a peak when the women gained their own income and, with it, prestige and influence. Many husbands felt their role as head of the family was being undermined. At the same time, conservative communities exerted pressure to uphold traditional gender roles.

SWISSAID and our partner organisations provided the women with simple tools such as hand ploughs and solar panels to ease their work and offered trainings in agroecology and marketing. However, the barriers encountered in practice also show that technical solutions alone are not enough. Gender dynamics must be challenged: who really controls the income? Who is allowed to make decisions? How is the work in the households distributed?

It is therefore a key aspect of all our projects to inform women about their social, economic and political rights. To support them in accessing land rights. To offer workshops so that they can build leadership skills and self-confidence and help shape local decisions. Last but not least, we work with the men to raise their awareness of gender roles and what shared responsibility in the household looks like – because sustainable change can only be achieved together.

We are convinced: gender equality in agriculture is far more than a question of fairness. It is the prerequisite for a crisis-resilient future. By giving women farmers access to critical knowledge and resources, we are strengthening the most important pillar of global food security.

Images: Sri Kolari (India), Saywa Katarhy Masaquiza (Ecuador), Ricci Shryock (Guinea-Bissau)