Featured image of Emelia Debrah, 51, a cocoa farmer spreading out cocoa beans to dry, in Alavanyo, Ahafo Region of Ghan. Photo by Bismark Kpabitey, Sankofa Project.
By Sophia Ostler, Senior Policy Manager, Fairtrade Foundation
21 March is the culmination of the sixty-ninth session of the Commission on the Status of Women. Advocates for women’s rights and policy makers around the world have been reassessing their approach to gender equality in a time when aid budgets are being drastically cut, and defense and protectionism is crowding out existing international cooperation priorities.
At Fairtrade we will continue to advocate for women’s empowerment in agriculture. Why?
Because agriculture accounts for 1/3 of global GDP and is the most effective tool to increasing food security and reducing poverty. And 43% of world’s agricultural labour force are women, who at the same time are disproportionally affected by droughts, water scarcity and climate change.
Apart from being designated most unpaid work, they are vastly excluded from access to land and to financial services. Just imagine the extra food the world could yield if women enjoyed equal rights to men.
We have a long way to go before this becomes a reality. In the meantime, these are the things that Fairtrade, as an advocate for women’s empowerment in agriculture, is doing now.
We foster local solutions.
The answer to progress is in local knowledge. We know that large scale development programmes that are imported often don’t apply to new contexts and are too expensive. And women are agents of their own change and can often design their ways to overcome situations of structural disadvantage.
So gender equity efforts should start small work at the local level. The unique Fairtrade Premium is an extra sum of money which farmers and workers receive from companies on top of the Fairtrade Minimum Price, to invest in community or business projects of their choice.
Many Fairtrade farmers and workers have chosen Premium projects that directly benefit women. For example, the Del Campo nut cooperative in Nicaragua uses their Fairtrade Premium to support women’s emerging businesses. With funding from the Fairtrade Premium, women in Cote d’Ivoire have set up a radio stations to share the importance of gender equality.
Fairtrade is also supporting women entrepreneurs through a range of projects designed to train women and support them in taking leadership roles within their community.
There is the Women in Coffee Programme in Kenya which has encouraged the transfer of coffee bushes to women coffee farmers in Kenya, enabling them to earn an independent income for the first time. 300 women from Kabngetuny Cooperative received training on good agricultural practices, and have increased the yield and quality of their coffee as a result.
And there are the women’s schools of leadership, rolled out by some Fairtrade Producer Networks, which upskills participants in business management, and allows them to pitch ideas for women-led micro-enterprises. Many of these women go on to take on leadership and committee positions within their cooperatives.
Finally, directing our resources to incubating local solutions is just one way in which advocates and policymakers, in Fairtrade and beyond, can continue to work with rural women overseas.
Here are five ways in which the global sustainable development community can support equal opportunities for women:
- Move out of the way of innovation. Governments and law makers can play a part in advancing women’s progress by cutting the red tape around tailor-made solutions for sustainable forms of agriculture and architecture.
- Address how some development policies are actively disempowering women. Inclusive policies are not just about incorporating women’s voices into existing policies.
- Take aim at the big picture structural barriers, like the global debt crisis. We need greater lateral thinking in how we frame the issues we campaign for. Climate change, food security and gender inequality are inevitably underpinned by other issues that are less catchy in the advocacy world, such as slowing growth and external debt. Financial shocks have an asymmetric knock-on effect on women in agriculture.
- Prioritise peace efforts. Like financial stability, peace is paramount to gender equality in agriculture. Conflict disrupts the value and food chains and women are the first to be impacted. When there is conflict, women’s innate reflex to be self-reliant in the face of hardship, exposes them to even more threats. A displaced population is food insecure, unable to integrate into established labour markets, at risk of exploitation, exposed to abuse, and often ends up with the worst paid jobs in agrarian life.
- Maintain the momentum for climate action. Stopping climate change may seem like a mammoth quest but any effort to tackle climate change is a step towards increasing the global food security.
Millions of women farmers and workers overseas are individually trying to tackle climate change, desertification, and to overcome their lack of access to land and resources.
The global sustainable development community can learn from their resilience and persevere in their advocacy efforts in a world stripped of monetary development aid.