The late Nelson Mandela once said, “Freedom cannot be achieved unless women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression.” In equal measure, a food-secure future cannot be achieved unless women farmers are lifted up as equals to their male counterparts. This is one critical aspect of the fight for food security that’s too often overlooked. Improving smallholder farmers’ lives can be as much about gender as it is about farm machinery, fertilizers, irrigation, and other critical factors. This holds even in the fight against climate change—to help farms cope and adapt, gender discrimination must be overcome.
To be sure, many innovators like those we’re currently funding in Ghana are working tirelessly today to help women smallholder farmers achieve better incomes and better yields as global warming marches on. But female smallholder farmers continue to face challenges that have a real impact on their ability to adequately feed their families and their communities, with or without rising temperatures.
More vulnerable, less adaptable
Multiple investigations into the impact of climate change on farming have found that women farmers are more vulnerable than men.
A thorough study on this question conducted in Ghana clearly revealed “a significant difference in the vulnerability levels of female-headed and male-headed farming households.” The study published in the International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management based this assessment on a climate livelihood vulnerability index (LVI) developed to quantify the disadvantages women smallholder farmers face with global warming in the picture.
“Female-headed households were more vulnerable to livelihood strategies, socio-demographic profile, social networks, water, and food major components of the LVI,” the study said, “whereas male-headed households were more vulnerable to health.”
Better equality, better crop diversification
Farmers everywhere are rightly concerned about global warming. Rising average daytime and nighttime temperatures are hurting sensitive crops. Droughts are noticeably longer and more severe. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, resulting in violent rainfall that can flood fields. Many researchers now agree that women smallholder farmers are more vulnerable to climate change compared to men mainly because they miss out on opportunities to adapt their fields—economic, social, and cultural systems in Africa and Asia don’t afford these opportunities to men and women in equal measure.
“Freedom cannot be achieved unless women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression.”
One way to adapt is through crop diversification.
Smallholder farmers can plant more than one type of crop on their hectares, thereby hedging their bets—climate change could hit one type of crop while others prove more resilient. The problem for women farmers, as one study in China discovered, is that they are less likely to practice crop diversification. “Female-headed households are sensitive to climate change, but their low education, less access to agricultural extension, and weak family decision-making power contribute to their unwillingness and inability to reduce risks by adopting crop diversification,” the study showed.
This isn’t the women farmers’ fault. Rather, as the study in Climate Risk Management shows, women farmers don’t enjoy the same access to lines of credit that could be used to invest in climate adaptation. Government agricultural extension services also tend to overlook or ignore women farmers when launching outreach programs like farm climate adaptation. This means too few women are trained on adaptation and how to succeed with crop diversification.
The researchers also see deeply embedded social constraints holding women farmers back. “In most developing countries, women are passive in implementing crop diversity practices and in decision-making mainly because of constraints due to their social status, as well as capital, knowledge, and inequality when communicating with government, non-governmental organizations, and other farmers,” they wrote.
Promising signs
This great weight felt by women smallholder farmers is tremendous, but it can be overcome.
Knowledge is power, and many governments and nonprofits are fighting climate change first by trying to get as much information about the challenge out to farmers as quickly as possible.
Writing in Climate Policy, one research team explains that women smallholder farmers seem savvier when it comes to digitally delivered climate information (CI) services. “Female smallholder farmers are more likely to adopt digital-based CI, which could also help to narrow the gender gap and empower women,” they found. “It is an important step towards the ubiquitous uptake of CI.”
An important step, indeed, but women farmers need better seeds and tools as well as information.
At Grow Further, we prioritize projects that engage women farmers as well as those that help farmers adapt to climate change. For example, we’re currently funding a project in Ghana to improve the cultivation of Bambara groundnuts, an indigenous bean ready for a changing climate and primarily grown by women. The lead researcher, who oversees a team of plant breeders and other specialists, is a social scientist who has published on gender in agricultural development.
— Grow Further
Photo credit: Farmer Miriam Kitomali inspects a maize crop at a field in Tanzania. True Vision Productions.
