ZAW CALLS FOR THE EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN IN AGRIC

EMPOWERING women in agriculture is an effective way of enhancing food security, increasing household incomes, and boosting agricultural productivity, Zambia Alliance of Women (ZAW) Executive Director Edah Chimya has said.

Speaking to The Scoop, Ms. Chimya said women farmers were less likely to receive training and tended to make less use of extension services than men.

She said as most of the workforce in agriculture, women were expected to benefit substantially from investments in the sector to close gender gaps in agricultural productivity that stemmed largely from unequal access to and control over land, equipment, financing, technology and markets.

“About 55 percent of Zambian women earn their livelihoods in the agricultural sector, compared to 45 percent of men and most of their production remains at the subsistence level,” Ms. Chimya said.

She stated that access to labour saving technologies was low adding that less than a percent of Zambian women farmers had access to cultivation instruments like a seeders or weeders, and women received less than 10 percent of credit for smallholder farmers and only about 1 percent of agricultural credit overall.

“Women are less likely than men to be paid for their labour, a factor underscored by social norms that uphold men as household providers, promote early marriage, one third of women are married before the age 18 and prescribe disproportionate care responsibilities to women. Therefore, gender gaps in education and literacy also underline differences in agricultural productivity,” he noted.

She stressed that because women were more than half of the agricultural workforce and clustered in subsistence farming, addressing the barriers to women’s greater productivity had the potential to move women into more lucrative production.

“Despite its potential, the contribution of the agriculture sector to economic growth has remained limited as most farmers were small-scale and engaged in subsistence farming,” she said.

She noted that agriculture was mainly rain-fed, non-mechanized and undiversified with maize as the leading crop dominated by smallholder farmers that produced 85 percent of the food crops.

She said productivity challenges in the sector included small land holdings, limited knowledge, and skills in modern, innovative technologies, lack of an adequate irrigation system, poor rural infrastructure, weak rural advisory services, limited access to credit and investment capital, and poor market information systems and access.

“Low levels of agricultural diversification, agro-processing and commercialization have stymied growth in the sector and perpetuated rural poverty,” she added.