According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), if female farmers received as much training and access to other inputs as men, they would be 20–30% more productive than they are at present. In other words, better training for women and access to inputs would lead to higher crop yields and greater food security.

“Gender imbalance in agricultural extension is a significant problem,” says Steven Franzel, leader of the World Agroforestry Centre’s research on rural advisory services. “On one hand, women make up just a small proportion of the extension staff in most developing countries. On the other, they have less access to extension compared to male farmers.”

Steven and his colleagues recently assessed whether farmer-to-farmer extension approaches – in other words, the provision of training by farmers for farmers – has helped organizations to increase the proportion of women trainers providing extension services. The research involved interviews with representatives of 80 organizations who use farmer-to-farmer extension in Kenya, Cameroon and Malawi.

They found that in some organizations farmer trainers had a dramatic effect in terms of raising the proportion of women providing extension services. For example, in the East African Dairy Development (EADD) Project in Kenya, less than 10% of the professional trainers are women, whereas 25% of the 852 farmer trainers are women. In the EADD project in Uganda, 5% of professional trainers are women and 33% of over 1000 farmer trainers are women. In Malawi, just 21% of the Ministry of Agriculture’s field staff are women, while 40% of the country’s 12,000 volunteer farmer trainers are women.

“One of our most significant findings was that although men and women trainers train roughly the same number of people during the course of a year, female volunteer trainers train a lot more women,” says Steven. In Cameroon, for example, 74% of the farmers who were trained by women were women, whereas just 41% of those trained by men are women. This suggests that involving women in extension programmes has the potential to improve agricultural productivity and food security, especially when they are targeting other women.

References

Franzel S et al. Does farmer to farmer extension increase women’s participation and access to advisory services? Lessons from Kenya, Cameroon and Malawi. Journal of International Agricultural and Extension Educatio. (in press)

Simpson B, Franzel S, Degrande A, Kundhlande G, Tsafack S. 2015. Farmer to farmer extension: issues in planning and implementation. MEAS Technical Note. Modernizing Extension and Advisory Services Project, USAID. https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=bWVhcy1leHRlbnNpb24ub3JnfHB1YmxpY3xneDo2ZTQxMDViZjQ5OWQyNjRi