Usu­ally, the image of a farmer in Africa is of a male. How­ever, women are respon­si­ble for 80% of Africa’s food production.

From All Africa we read this inter­view with Annina Lub­bock of the Inter­na­tional Fund for Agri­cul­tural Devel­op­ment. Lub­buck is asked about gen­der inte­gra­tion efforts in devel­op­ing Africa’s agriculture.

Can you describe what Ifad’s gen­der main­stream­ing efforts entail?

I would say our approach to gen­der has two prongs. We use gen­der main­stream­ing but we con­sider that gen­der main­stream­ing is an instru­ment towards an end; it is not an end unto itself. So that means giv­ing atten­tion to how gen­der is addressed in all aspects of project design, from the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the activ­i­ties, to mon­i­tor­ing and eval­u­a­tion of them, to the man­age­ment arrange­ments. It also means design­ing and imple­ment­ing spe­cific actions that will actu­ally empower women, espe­cially rural women. Our main entry point for improv­ing the sta­tus of women is their eco­nomic empow­er­ment. We think that’s a pre­con­di­tion to all the rest.

It’s also improv­ing women’s decision-making and to improve their over­all well­be­ing. Their labor load con­tin­ues to be so high and ser­vices so poor in rural areas they will actu­ally be con­strained from engag­ing in more pro­duc­tive activ­i­ties and income gen­er­at­ing activities.

To what extent has gen­der main­stream­ing been suc­cess­ful so far?

We did a sur­vey of the per­for­mance of projects on gen­der and what we found is where the projects are hav­ing great­est is suc­cess is in build­ing women’s capac­ity and knowl­edge. After that def­i­nitely the improve­ment of women’s income earn­ing capac­ity. [It has been] less suc­cess­ful in improv­ing women’s deci­sion mak­ing role at the com­mu­nity level because here you have a whole series of cul­tural restraints to deal with, which is stronger in some areas than oth­ers. Of course there are some [com­mu­ni­ties] which are very con­ser­v­a­tive where it’s not really rec­og­nized that women can have a pub­lic role. The pub­lic space is sup­posed to be a man’s space.

Inter­est­ingly, what we found is projects really need to do more to reduce women’s work­load. Very often women have been given more oppor­tu­ni­ties, they’re earn­ing more income, they’re pro­duc­ing more, they’re par­tic­i­pat­ing more, but their work­load has increased. Some­times they accept that because in exchange for that they have a higher sta­tus, they’re more lis­tened to in the com­mu­ni­ties and they’ve got more income to spend for their families.

What are the great­est obsta­cles to achiev­ing house­hold food secu­rity in Africa?

The obsta­cles are mul­ti­ple — from envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, cli­mate change, pop­u­la­tion pres­sure, gov­er­nance, inter­na­tional food prices and so on. But I would say one of the key ele­ments is pre­cisely the lack of recog­ni­tion of the role that women have in pro­duc­ing food, but also in gen­er­at­ing the income with which they buy food. There is so much evi­dence that women use their income dif­fer­ently than men. They tend to use it for the fam­ily and they are the ones who buy the food. Not rec­og­niz­ing this means that women have not received tar­geted sup­port, because women have spe­cific roles and con­straints so the types of ser­vices they get have to be dif­fer­en­ti­ated. This is a major stum­bling block, espe­cially in Africa.

Just how impor­tant women are to food pro­duc­tion in Africa?

Women’s labor is behind 80 per­cent of the food pro­duc­tion in Africa, which is extremely high. It’s higher than in any other region in the world and yet women are doing all of this with a hand tied behind their back. They have the same prob­lems that all small­holder farm­ers have in terms of access to mar­kets, to inputs, to credit, but then on top of that they have their own spe­cific con­straints as women.

[This] means they have lit­tle time to jug­gle between their pro­duc­tive and repro­duc­tive roles, they have less income to finance except micro­fi­nance, they don’t have access to banks because of lack of col­lat­eral, less access to land, less access to ser­vices. Exten­sion con­tacts are very lim­ited and accord­ing to the [Food and Agri­cul­ture Orga­ni­za­tion] only five per­cent of exten­sion con­tacts world­wide are with women farm­ers. Only 15 per­cent of exten­sion work­ers are women, and in some con­texts this is a deter­min­ing fac­tor in actu­ally reach­ing women.

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