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Gender Checklist: Agriculture : Gender analysis for subsectors
Gender issues in integrated rural development
Key Issues
- Are data about the population(s) in the project area disaggregated by gender (population, socioeconomic characteristics, gender division of labor, and time inputs in the main productive activities)?
- If the project is focused on integrated sectors, such as agriculture, fisheries, or livestock, collect data on the gender division of labor in the agriculture, livestock, or fishery sector.
- Are there significant numbers of female-headed households in the client population?
- What impact will the project have on women’s food production activities?
- Will the project provide support for women’s crops?
- What type of social structure exists in the project area and what groups have access to and control over land, community resources, business, and other resources?
- What other nonfarm income-earning activities do women engage in?
- Do women have property rights? Land rights?
- What type of social organizations or community organizations exist in the project area, and what control do they have over resource distribution, such as the distribution of development project inputs to women in the project area?
- Is there an informal network of women in the project area? If so, what kind of support does it provide to women?
- Do women have access to credit and extension services, agriculture inputs, and livestock and fishery inputs from formal institutional sources?
- Where do women get their capital—moneylenders, traders, friends and relatives? Do women borrow at a high interest rate from moneylenders, traders, or middlemen?
- Who markets the products of women—traders/middlemen or the women themselves?
- What impact will the project activities have on the gender division of labor, on subsistence activities, and on women’s workload, income-earning activities, and access to land, livestock, or common property resources?
- Does the EA have the capacity to develop and deliver services to women?
Key Strategies
- Consult women and men separately in sex-segregated communities in the design of the project’s main components, to ensure that women’s priorities, needs, and motivations, as well as men’s, are reflected in the project framework.
- Include women and men in the project area in planning the project.
- Address the water, sanitation, energy, and fuel needs defined by women.
- If the project activities include drinking water facilities, ensure that women participate in the design of the site selection activities for water pump, and are included in training in operation and maintenance work.
- Ensure that the project’s extension delivery system will reach women as well as men farmers and farm workers. Look into the need for female extension workers.
- Ensure that any training is equally accessible to both women and men. Consider setting targets.
- Consider establishing separate women’s farmer groups.
- Design training to develop women extension workers.
- Avoid using intermediaries (husbands, brothers, etc.) to reach women participants/beneficiaries.
- Ensure that project inputs are provided to support women’s agricultural activities.
- Include food security components in the project.
- Develop design features or components to provide women and men with equal access to project activities.
- Ensure that the gender division of labor in agriculture, fisheries, and livestock is not altered in a way that might adversely affect women.
- Ensure that women’s existing roles in income-earning activities are strengthened through the project.
- Develop strategies for women to form groups, or strengthen the existing network for dealing with issues that affect women’s livelihood.
- Ensure that women workers in the rural informal sector are paid fair wages (for project activities in agriculture, agribusiness, fisheries, infrastructure, and construction work).
- Ensure that cooperatives/credit unions or other institutions formed under the project include women members.
- Ensure that support for women’s craft and other home-based industry includes all the steps through credit utilization, business management, and marketing. Consider promoting cooperatives for women’s products to increase women’s economic participation and improve women’s incomes.
- Ensure that the project design includes mechanisms and strategies to promote and facilitate women’s active involvement in all phases of the project.
Box 8 contains a discussion of some key gender-related issues that were taken into account in one area development project.
Box 8 Agriculture Area Development Project in the Kyrgyz Republic
The project preparatory technical assistance analyzed gender concerns that would affect the project’s success in improving agricultural productivity and reducing poverty. A social survey and farm surveys identified rural women as being highly disadvantaged as a result of the economic transition because of various factors including high unemployment, lack of access to social services, their increasing preoccupation with family care giving, the increasing number of female-headed households with larger dependent children, and the possibility of women being bypassed in land allotment to private farmers or being ignored in new producer organizations and marketing arrangements.
The project was designed to address these gender concerns. Women’s access to land allotment under the new laws would be closely monitored. Equal opportunities would be provided to women farmers, particularly female-headed households, to join and participate in new farmer organizations to be set up under the project. Women farmers would be particularly encouraged to participate in training programs under the project to develop their capacity to adjust to new farming patterns, prepare business plans, and gain better access to credit.
The benefit monitoring and evaluation addressed the gender effects of the project, including women’s ownership of land, their access to and membership in producer organizations, their participation in training and the types of training they are given, changes in women’s incomes compared with men’s, and the social position of female-headed households.
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