Woman to woman: How to increase support to female farmers

How do you reach women farmers? It’s a question that has long troubled organizations that support farmers in the developing world. 

Traditionally, women, who are responsible for producing up to 80% of basic foodstuffs across sub-Saharan Africa, are much less likely than men to get access to advisory services – the trainings and outreach programs that help farmers improve their efficiency and output. This lack of access to support, coupled with a scarcity of resources, means that, around the world, women farmers produce up to 30% less than their male counterparts. 

But new research has shown that it’s possible to begin closing this gap. Farmer-to-farmer extension – that is, using volunteer farmers to provide training for other farmers – can increase women’s access to critical advisory services, according to a study conducted by researchers at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), Bunda College of Agriculture in Malawi, and Michigan State University in the United States. The work is due to be published later this year in the Journal of International Agricultural and Extension Education. 

The researchers surveyed representatives of 80 organizations working in farmer-to-farmer extension in Kenya, Cameroon, and Malawi; they also interviewed more than 350 volunteer farmer trainers in Cameroon and Malawi. 

The results showed that female volunteer farmer trainers (VFTs) – or “lead farmers,” as they are known in Malawi – trained far more women than men did. In Cameroon, women made up 74% of the people trained by female VFTs, compared to 41% of the people trained by male VFTs. The researchers also found that adopting the farmer-to-farmer extension approach made it easier to increase the number of women trainers overall. In Malawi, for example, 40% of the Ministry of Agriculture’s 12,000 lead farmers are women, compared to 21% of the Ministry’s field staff.

Betty Kalyango is a VFT who lives in the Lwengo District in central Uganda. A dairy farmer herself, Kalyango has been working as a volunteer trainer as part of the East African Dairy Development Project (EADD), which has trained more than 2,600 VFTs in Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda – 60% of whom are women.

“Through my work, I expect to help fellow women transform their livelihoods through dairy farming because I can testify to its benefits,” says Kalyango. She adds that being a volunteer farmer trainer has boosted her confidence and given her the chance to increase her interactions with other women farmers. The women she trains have increased their incomes and started to participate in cooperative savings schemes, she says.

Kalyango and other women like her could be the key to reaching more women farmers around the world, the researchers concluded. They noted that policy makers who want to strike a better gender balance in their advisory services should consider adopting the farmer-to-farmer approach.