Bridging the divide between women and men farmers in Ethiopia

BRIDGING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN WOMEN AND MEN FARMERS IN ETHIOPIA

by Sarah McMullan and Caitlin Kieran | August 4, 2014

Ethiopia_women

Source: Flickr (Kate Holt/AusAID)
Women at the AusAid-supported Hamlin Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Women make up about half of the labor force in Ethiopia. While their contributions are plentiful, women and girls face discrimination when accessing —and making decisions regarding— education, agricultural information and inputs, land, and other assets to aid food production. “If women and girls are left behind, we will never develop,” said Adugna Waggra, Deputy Director General at the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR). 

Waggra delivered these remarks at a workshop earlier this month that brought together people from diverse organizations to streamline joint efforts to close the gender gap in Ethiopia. The event, organized in partnership with the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture’s Women’s Affairs Directorate, the EIAR, the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), IFPRI’s Research for Ethiopia’s Agriculture Policy (REAP) project, and the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM), drew a crowd of 70 professionals all working towards gender equality in various capacities.

Change will not occur overnight, according to Waggra. “We have to gradually change the human mind,” he said, adding that development actors must be sensitive to the Ethiopian culture. Tracking change will highlight which interventions have been successful and which areas need improvement.

Over the past two decades, the Ethiopian government has started to chip away at gender inequality. An overhaul to the Family Code in 2000 provided equal rights to spouses in terms of land ownership, inheritance, and marriage. The government also introduced a requirement that land certificates include the names and photos of both husbands and wives.

Still, the laws have not triumphed over deep-seated social norms that reinforce discrimination against women—especially in agriculture. James Warner, IFPRI Research Coordinator for REAP, and Leulsegged Kasa, Research Officer for REAP, shared data analysis based on the Central Statistical Agency's (CSA) annual Ethiopian Agricultural Sample Survey (AgSS) showing that female-headed households tend to own less land, operate smaller farms, and harvest lower yields than do male-headed households.

“It is necessary to understand the potential differential impacts of agricultural interventions on women, men, girls, and boys,” said Cheryl Doss, a development economist at Yale University and the leader of PIM’s strategic gender research. Dr. Rehima Mussema, Gender Research Director at the EIAR, identified the status and prospects for gender mainstreaming in Ethiopia’s Agricultural Research System, and emphasized that more work is needed to understand the inequalities between men and women, and how to remedy them.

“Gender analysis can illuminate productivity differences between male and female farmers, patterns of food consumption and expenditure, the constraints faced by individuals working within each node along a value chain, and who is exposed to shocks and their sources of vulnerability,” she said, adding that simply comparing male- and female-headed households renders women living in male-headed households—the majority of the world’s women—invisible.

On the second day of the workshop Doss, assisted by Caitlin Kieran, PIM’s Senior Research Assistant on gender, led an interactive workshop on the challenges and benefits of sex-disaggregated data collection and analysis. The participants displayed an impressive amount of data collection and analysis experience and gender expertise. Participants broke into groups to identify relevant research questions, the gender components of the questions, and the data necessary to address them.

“I gained a lot from the workshop about the various complexities involved in collecting sex-disaggregated data. I have also learned a great deal about important research and policy questions in relation to gender and the types of data needed to design gender sensitive policies and programs.” - Meron Belay, Gender Technical Advisor, T2FS/DFAP Program, Save the Children International, Ethiopia/Addis Ababa.

Participants agreed that future data collection should pay more attention to the situation within households to better reveal the gaps between men and women. “Gender issues are complicated, interwoven with culture, economics, social issues, religion….there is a propensity to make mistakes by having a simple number. How can we improve the data that are collected?” Warner asked.

“The workshop presentations and panel discussions imparted me with ideas on how to improve my work on collection, analysis and use  of  sex disaggregated data and gender sensitive indicators .’’ - From Hannah Nyota, Research Analyst, ReSAKSS-ECA, ILRI.

Moving forward, the ATA, with technical assistance from the IFPRI-REAP project, plans to develop gender-based agricultural indicators for the next phase of Ethiopia’s Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP-II). Such indicators are essential for monitoring progress toward achieving gender equality. As Songporne Tongruksawattana, a climate economist from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) stated, “It is genuinely important that agricultural research for development be gender-responsive and equitable.”

 

This article was jointly written by Sarah McMullan from IFPRI’s Markets, Trade, and Institutions Division and Caitlin Kieran from the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets and originally published on the IFPRI.org blog.