“If you care about the poorest, you care about agriculture. Investments in agriculture are the best weapons against hunger and poverty, and they have made life better for billions of people. The international agriculture community needs to be more innovative, coordinated, and focused to help poor farmers grow more. If we can do that, we can dramatically reduce suffering and build self-sufficiency” — Bill Gates at the International Fund for Agriculture Development, 2012.
Women are versatile. Their importance to humanity is unquantifiable. Apart from women ensuring the existence of the human race through procreation, they greatly contribute to the feeding of the world’s population through agriculture.
Women contribute largely to agriculture by providing labour for weeding, planting, harvesting and processing of agro products resulting in 70 per cent of food crop production in the country. Sadly, female farmers in Ghana, particularly smallholder farmers, realise insignificant benefits from their investment.
In Ghana, for instance, women constitute about 52 per cent of the workforce in the agricultural sector, with a high rate of illiteracy, thus, limiting their ability to access and adopt improved agricultural technologies.
According to the 2012 World Development Report (WDR), the World Bank (WB) estimated that if female farmers in Ghana had the same access to fertilisers and other agro inputs as their male counterparts, the overall maize yields would increase by almost one-sixth for the country.
Page 17 of the book: “Insights: Africa’s future…can biosciences contribute”, states that “One key solution to this threat of worsening hunger in Africa and other continents is to increase investment in poor farmers, especially women”.
Statistics
The 2013 report of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS) indicated that 30 per cent of the country’s households are female-headed with low income levels that make them vulnerable to economic shocks.
Furthermore, the Food and Agricultural Sector Development Policy (FASDEP) II categorically states that gender inequality in the agricultural sector has undermined the achievement of sustainable agricultural development because programmes and projects are not systematically formulated around different needs of women and men.
In recent times, the agricultural sector performance has been poor in terms of annual growth rate and its contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country.
According to the book: “Closing Funding Gaps in Agriculture: Implications for Food Security in rural Ghana” which was prepared by Send-Ghana, an NGO, in the three regions of the north — Upper East, Upper West, and Northern regions —about 680,000 people, representing 16 per cent of all households, are estimated to be facing food insecurity.
The book further indicated that in 2009, about 1.2 million Ghanaians, representing five per cent of the country’s population, were classified food insecure and two million people, representing eight per cent classified as being vulnerable to becoming food insecure.
Challenges
Available statistics point to the fact that food crop production in the country faces a lot of challenges. For instance, many farmers, majority being women, have challenges having access to improved seeds, lands, credit facilities, ready market, and storage facilities.
Other challenges faced by Ghanaian farmers include the lack of agricultural technology and inputs due to inadequate investment in the agricultural sector, low crop production, and lack of processing and marketing opportunities for farm produce.
However, chief among the challenges facing the country’s agricultural sector is the neglect of female farmers who constitute a large portion of the players in the country’s agricultural sector.
Policies
In the foreword he wrote to the book: “Gender and Agricultural Development Strategy II (GADS II), the Minister for Food and Agriculture, Mr Fifi Fiavi Kwetey, said, “The Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) recognises the tremendous contribution of women and men in the agricultural sector over the years, and has developed and implemented projects and programmes to address the felt needs of farmers, especially women, to ensure gender equity”.
According to him, the GADS I, constituting phase I, was developed in 2001 to address the gender inequalities in the agricultural sector, adopting gender mainstreaming approach to gender equality.
The GADS provided the framework for achieving a gender-sensitive, equitable and efficient agricultural sector.
The President of the Ghana Agricultural and Rural Development Journalist Association (GARDJA), Mr Richmond Frimpong, has appealed to the MoFA to train more female extension officers in order to enable female smallholder farmers to have access to extension education.
He said due to some cultural practices in some communities in the country, female farmers who were married could not access the services of extension education from the male extension officers as a result of their customs.
He said, and added that “extension education is very critical to the survival of every farm”.
He said the lack of access to farmlands, credit facilities, ready market for farm produce, and storage facilities for the female farmers made it difficult for them to expand their farms.
“Smallholder female farmers are very important, especially when it comes to ensuring food security and sustainability in the country, because most of these vegetables we consume on the markets are produced by the smallholder female farmers”.
Support
In an interview, Mr Raymond Wekem Avatim, the Director of SEND-Ghana’s Livelihood Security Programme, said female smallholder farmers could be supported to improve their livelihoods when gender disparities were properly addressed.
He said the workload on women in their homes did not permit them to expand their farms, adding “For women to be more productive in their farming work, men must support them because they have a lot of workload in the family and the community”.
Mr Avatim said more than 86 per cent of the agricultural work that happened in the families were done by the women but they got little income from such ventures.
Farmers
For Mariama Alhassan, a 48-year-old farmer based in the Savelugu Municipality in the Northern Region, “It is not easy to get money to pay the tractor operators to plough our lands for us”.
She added that as part of measures to raise money for their farm work, some of the female farmers had formed cooperatives to help themselves because the banks did not give them credit facilities.
