Gender gaps and interventions to address gender issues in agriculture

Abstract

Women contribute enormously in agricultural growth and development through their involvement in crop production, horticulture, animal husbandry, fisheries, natural resource management etc. Inspite of decline in number of women cultivators and increase in number of women agricultural labourer they constitute a significant workforce in agriculture. Region-wise figures show that agriculture supports a very high proportion of economically active women, particularly in Asia and Africa and in India, it is about 65%. Women’s contribution varies across regions, socio-cultural and agro-production systems. On the other hand, the persisting gender gap in access to and control over resources remains an important concern which has not only kept women in a vicious circle of low productivity but also has thrown up questions about inclusive and sustainable growth of the sector. Today, how to bridge the gender gap and empower women with new knowledge and technology is a great challenge, particularly in the context of socio-economic and climate related changes. Importantly, our approach to research has not been gender sensitive and there is a general reluctance on part of a large section of researchers to include gender component in research programmes. Considering the above, the Short Course on ‘Gender Gaps and Interventions to Address Gender Issues in Agriculture' is organized to sensitize stakeholders about the paramount concern of gender disparity in agriculture and realizing the potential roles of women farmers, updating with recent gender analysis tools and to design and develop suitable interventions and approaches for assessment and bridging of gender gap in agriculture. The course was designed keeping in view the requirements of the participants with different backgrounds. The contents included issues related to women in agriculture in various domains of Research & Development, methodologies for strengthening gender perspective in interventions, gender disaggregated data, monitoring and evaluation of gender based R&D projects. All these were compiled to develop this Compendium which, we hope, will be useful for agricultural R&D stakeholders.