Empowering Women

In some countries, women lack the right to own land, are regarded legally as minors, and cannot get a bank loan without the approval of a male relative. If a woman’s husband dies, she could lose all the assets she’s accumulated during the marriage. To continue farming the land she and her husband held, and to feed her children, she may have to marry one of her husband’s male relatives.¹

The low social, economic, and political status of women in many parts of the developing world, particularly rural women, contributes to high rates of food insecurity and malnutrition, including child malnutrition. A child’s well-being is inseparable from her mother’s. Mothers, as the primary caregivers of children, are the critical link that determines what foods children eat and when. Women’s pivotal position should inform the priorities of Feed the Future.

Above, we argued that Feed the Future should focus on small farmers. In effect, this is nearly the same as targeting women, because women do most of the farming in the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, women perform 60-80 percent of the agricultural labor—but they own just 2 percent of the land² and receive only about 5 percent of farming information and services.³

A young mother in Temeke, Tanzania, prepares a meal for her family at the end of a day’s work.

Traditionally, those designing agricultural development programs have assumed that men do most of the farming. Adapting assistance to women’s needs must take priority in program design. Agricultural extension services, for instance, should take women’s childcare responsibilities into account. It would make little sense to schedule training outside the village for women without also organizing child care.

“Without specific attention to gender issues, programs and projects are likely to reinforce inequalities between women and men and may even increase resource imbalances,” report Agnes Quisumbing and Lauren Pandolfelli in their 2008 study Promising Approaches to Address the Needs of Poor Female Farmers. The homestead gardening project in Bangladesh illustrates one way to address a constraint facing women when designing a development program. The program worked, explain Quisumbing and Pandolfelli, because “it was designed in response to local gender norms. In Bangladesh, where men and women do not mix openly in public, women were able to successfully adopt improved vegetable technologies because the vegetables could be cultivated on homestead land, meaning that women did not have to risk a loss of reputation by working outside of their homesteads.”⁴

Gender and Culture

Effective programs cannot simply dismiss culture and traditions. For change to take root, its benefits must be made clear to the community. In the Punjab Province of Pakistan, for example, a school feeding program earned fathers’ permission for daughters to attend school because the whole family benefited. The program, run by the World Food Program in conjunction with the government, provided girls who attended school with a four-liter tin of fortified cooking oil every month. That is the equivalent of more than two days of a man’s wages—a huge incentive in a region where poverty, as well as tradition, runs deep.

“When [my husband] says there is no need to educate girls because they will never need to earn a living, I point out the oil we receive helps us run the house, and then he falls silent,” said one mother, positively gloating. “Of course it is very important to us that our daughter is being educated. I am not literate and this handicaps me.”⁵

Education offers a means of escape from hunger and poverty, resulting in higher wages, better health outcomes, lower maternal and child mortality rates, lower fertility rates, and less sexual abuse and exploitation.⁶ An educated woman is also likely to want her own daughters to get an education. Between 1970 and 1995, gains in women’s education were associated with a 43 percent reduction in child malnutrition.⁷ Women spend a larger share of the money they control than men do on improving household conditions, including buying food. One study from Brazil showed women were 20 times more likely than men to spend the money they earn on their household.⁸

In rural areas it’s common to see women—and girls—walking with a vessel of water strapped to their backs or atop their heads. Women bear the responsibility of supplying household water needs and caring for family members who get sick from drinking unclean water. In sub-Saharan Africa, at least half the rural population has to travel a kilometer or more to the nearest source of potable water.⁹ A 2001 World Bank study in Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia found that women spend between five and 28 percent of their time gathering water or firewood for fuel.¹⁰ The hours that these chores consume every day is one of several reasons that girls in Africa attend school at lower rates than boys. Thus, investments in water infrastructure in rural areas will help solve several interrelated problems.

Women in the Lead

To make real progress against gender inequality, women need to participate in reforming laws that perpetuate discrimination and inequality. One place where this is happening is Rwanda. In 2008, 56 percent of the legislators in Rwanda’s parliament were women, while the global average is just 15 percent.¹¹ From parliament down to the grassroots, women have played a key role in rebuilding the country after it was shattered by three months of genocidal violence in 1994.¹²

During the genocide, so many men were killed or fled the country that when peace was restored, women heavily outnumbered men. Under these circumstances, Rwandans accepted that women had to be granted more social, economic, and political freedom. Gender equality was enshrined in the country’s constitution. Government land reform and credit programs specifically targeted struggling women farmers, many of whom brought up children alone after their husbands were killed.¹³ Out of necessity, an entrepreneurial generation of women emerged. For example, women are credited with the remarkable transformation of the nation’s coffee sector. Symbols of womanhood are also changing. In the capital city of Kigali, a statue that depicted a woman with a jug of water on her head and a child on her hip has been replaced by one of a woman without a jug who holds the hand of a young boy who walks alongside her.¹⁴

Studies show that gains in women’s education are associated with multiple benefits from higher wages to lower maternal and child mortality rates to less sexual abuse and exploitation.

[Women] will perform as well as men if they are given the right education, incentives, access to financing, property, and land,” said Agnes Matilda Kalibata, the Minister of Agriculture,¹⁵ whose appointment to head this important ministry says a great deal about the country’s commitment to overcoming gender inequalities. Educated in Africa and the United States, Kalibata received her doctorate at the University of Massachusetts.

Rwanda may also be a model for post-conflict reconstruction. “Rwanda’s economy has risen up from the genocide and prospered greatly on the backs of our women,” says Kalibata. “We are becoming a nation that understands that there are huge financial benefits to equality.”¹⁶ The agricultural sector employs 90 percent of all Rwandans¹⁷—both men and women—so both sexes must work together to drive improvements in food security.

Issues