Community Development Issues

An Extract from the Study on gender Perspective in Bean Farming in Arumeru District

Subordination of the women bean farmers seems to be contributed to by many things. One and the foremost is the fact that women bean farmers do not own land, are comparatively less accessible to other resources like money, modern tools and also agricultural information, which could have helped them to improve their cropping practices. Cultural barriers have a great influence in such a way that rural women themselves seem to accept the position they are in at any cost.

One of the strengths that rural women bean farmers have is the fact that they are hard workers and that quality needs to be boosted by some help like credit, technical services, access to extension and legal rights and appropriate technologies, to enable them produce more for the benefit of their households, communities and a nation at large.

Major weaknesses towards development of the women bean farmers are: inaccessibility to and lack of control over land resource, inaccessible to modern farming methods and tools, inaccessibility to irrigation water, lack of decision making power, limited time as a result of extra workload and lack of power towards rural women organization.

Recommendations

Recommendations to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security
Due to the fact that the role of research is now changing, from doing on station trials, to meeting farmers and undertake on farm participatory technology development and dissemination, there is a great need to employ more researchers so that both tasks can be achieved successfully. The current situation makes researchers to work under pressure because of many responsibilities.
There is also a need to improve the extension system such that it can improve its delivering systems to the farmers. It is common to find that majority of the extensionists in the rural areas have never attended any training, other than the basic course they received. The implication of this fact is that the extensionists remain outdated in terms of new technologies developed by the researchers. A need to strengthen the link between researchers, extensionists and farmers is of great importance. Other motivating factors such as transport, housing and working conditions should be considered.

Recommendations to researchers and development workers
The bean improvement programmes that has been initiated should consider the importance of gender consideration with a new outlook. There is great need for promoting bean varieties which can contribute to income generation to women, instead of strengthening a feeling that all what women need, are varieties which are intended for food. In this way women farmer groups can help to reduce their disadvantageous position.

Women bean farmers have very limited opportunities to improve their cropping practices. However, it is thought that efforts to reduce these hindering factors to women bean farmers can help release them from such problems. It is also thought that strategies to liberate women should not involve women in isolation, but rather as an integral part of the whole community.

The approach used to reach farmers by crop departments individually is also an area of concern. Collaboration is needed between researchers, agricultural crop and input marketing agencies, organizations dealing with agricultural improvement projects and local authorities. In this way duplication of work and/or “piece meal” delivery to farmers will be minimized.

Every development worker is supposed to bear in mind about how gender sensitive his/her programme is. By so doing, slowly we will be trying to reach gender needs of men and women in our communities. On the other hand, local governments should ensure that local extensionists reach both men and women farmers without bias.

Recommendations to policy makers
Policy statement on gender issues is very clear but its implementation is a problem. It is not enough to state that the Ministry recognises contribution of women and would improve their conditions, but much more important is to put into practice those plans of actions. The problem of land acquisition among women farmers is very historical one but less effort is done to ensure equal accessibility to land by both men and women. The land tenure system has to be made clear and fair enough so that women bean farmers can acquire land of their own. Policy makers should put more emphasis on extending credit facilities to rural areas as well so that farming practices can be improved, instead of having many credit schemes being concentrated in urban areas.