4. Innovating for Resilient Farming Systems in
Semi-Arid Eastern Kenya
• Objectives:
– Understand traditional food systems and drivers
of food insecurity
– Scale up the adoption and assess the impacts of
agricultural innovations prioritized by farmers
– Increase household consumption of highly-
nutritious, traditional food crops
– Strengthen links to input and output markets
– Contribute to the formulation of resilience-
focused policies
5. Integration of gender in all project
activities
• Gendered objectives
• Gender strategy
• Orphan crops and indigenous chicken:
Women’s enterprises
• 2/3 gender balance in farmer groups and
project activities
• Gender disaggregated prioritization
• Training and farmer-to-farmer learning
• Monitoring and evaluation of impacts
7. Gender survey: Adoption of
agricultural innovations
The objective of the study was to investigate the
process of adoption by women smallholder
farmers and how this is influenced by both
endogenous and exogenous factors (e.g.,
household division of labor and limitations on
women’s mobility).
8. Gender survey: Adoption of
agricultural innovations
(n = 405)
PPATE SPATE Non-participating
187 136 82
FHH MHFM MHH
66 57 280
By farmer group type
By household type
SPATE
SPATE
SPATE
9. Results
• We examined all stages of adoption decision-
making, or the ‘adoption cycle.’
• This included decision to adopt a crop,
ploughing, planting, weeding, harvesting,
marketing and use of income.
• Ongoing analysis considers other post-harvest
aspects including household consumption.
10. Gendered participation in green gram enterprise by
group-type and household-type
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Enterprise choice
ploughing
weeding
harvesting
marketing
income use
Women’s participation in green grams
enterprise across household type
FHH MHH MHFM
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
Enterprise choice
ploughing
weeding
harvesting
marketing
income use
Women’s participation in green gram
enterprise across farmer group type
PPATE SPATE Non project
11. Gendered participation in maize enterprise by group-
type and household-type
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
Enterprise choice
ploughing
weeding
harvesting
marketing
income use
Women’s participation in maize
enterprise across farmer group
type
PPATE SPATE Non project
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Enterprise choice
ploughing
weeding
harvesting
marketing
income use
Women’s participation in the
maize enterprise by household
type
FHH MHH MHFM
12. Gendered participation in mango enterprise by group-
type and household-type
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
Enterprise choice
ploughing
weeding
harvesting
marketing
income use
Women’s participation in mango
enterprise across group type
PPATE SPATE Non project
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Enterprise choice
ploughing
weeding
harvesting
marketing
income use
Women’s participation in mango
enterprise by farmer group type
FHH MHH MHFM
13. Discussion
• We would have expected that in working with
groups in which majority of members are
women, and in dealing with what are traditional
subsistence or food crops, that women would
emerge as highly empowered in all aspects of the
enterprise, including decisions over use of
income.
• This has not been the case. Women invest more
labor than men but reap fewer rewards in terms
of income. Why do they continue to farm these
crops?
14. Non-priced benefits?
• Income is not the only incentive for farming
activities:
• Sufficient provision of food for the household
• Provision of nutritious, culturally appropriate
foods for the family.
• Ability to save seeds (selection, innovation)
• Building social capital (gifts, contributions)
• These are benefits that women control more than
men
• Ecological services: hummus, compost, nitrogen-
fixing
15. Reduction of hunger is priceless…
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
January February March April May June July August September October November December
PPATE BEFORE PPATE AFTER
Percentage of households without sufficient food in given months, in 2011 and 2013
16. Farmer groups serve as an important form of
social capital for women
• In all categories, women
participate in groups
more than men. This
emphasizes the social
capital that women build,
maintain, use and rely
upon to strengthen their
capacities as well as to
compensate, to some
degree, for lack of access
to key assets (including
income), through sharing
of labor and resources.
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
ppate males
ppate females
spate male
spate female
np male
np female
% of farmers participating in
farmer groups
17. Conclusion
• Overall, we found that women adopted ‘orphaned’ or
‘high value’ traditional food crops robustly, alone or in
cooperation with husbands or other male relatives.
This was in contrast with fruit tree crops.
• The results lead to a blurring of lines between what are
known as men’s and women’s crops.
• Group-work offers a socially-networked pathway
towards improving household food security. When one
woman farmer gains knowledge and experiences
positive results, she is also likely to share with many
other women in her social networks, enhancing the
scaling-up of knowledge and technology adoption.
18. Acknowledgements
Thank you to our funders, IDRC/DFATD; our
institutions, KARI and McGill; the project
research team and especially to the farmers of
Eastern Kenya.
A special thanks to the University of Alberta and
all the organizers of the Dialogue.
Notes de l'éditeur
Project partners: KARI, McGill, KEMRI, MoA, FreshCo, Cascade
Project Objectives:
Better understand traditional food systems and drivers of food insecurity
Catalyze the adoption and assess the impacts of agricultural innovations prioritized by farmers and assess mechanisms for scaling up these resilient farming practices
Increase household consumption of locally-produced food and improve levels of nutrition and health, especially among hunger-prone women and children
Strengthen links to local and external input and output markets to allow women and men to diversify household livelihoods
Contribute to the formulation of resilience-focused policies to improve food security, livelihoods and environmental sustainability in the semi-arid regions, and to disseminate findings.
Decision-making processes at the household level, from choice of technology, to provision of labor for various agronomic steps, to marketing, were examined for four field crops (sorghum, maize, green grams, cowpeas) and two fruit tree crops (mangoes and pawpaws) in order to elucidate the underlying gender dynamics at play in the adoption process.
This paper compares adoption of agricultural innovations among members of the primary farmer groups in the project (PPATEs = Primary Participatory Agricultural Technology Evaluations), the secondary project farmer groups (SPATEs = Secondary Participatory Agricultural Technology Evaluations), and members of farmer groups not associated with the project. Our survey further divided households into three categories: male-headed, male-headed-female-managed and female-headed. This categorization helped us to explore gender differences in farmers’ adoption patterns and outcomes.
Adoption is a cycle not a one-time decision. Considering the whole cycle illuminates gendered inequities that may impact women’s adoption choices:
We view adoption as a cycle, that takes place over seasons. It may begin with a ‘decision to adopt.’ But the adoption decision requires action, including ploughing, planting, weeding and harvesting, processing sale and/or preparation for consumption. In the new season, the same decision-making and labor cycle begins again. As a crop may enter a market or a nutritional ‘value chain,’ the links in these chains begin on the farm, in the fields and in the household.
It is this complex of decisions, resources and activities that instantiates the adoption cycle. Women’s typically low rate of adoption is far from a dysfunctional development phenomenon or lack of proper knowledge and attitude. It is more firmly grounded in women’s experience of various crops’ successes and failures and their balancing of resources, time and labor to contribute to their households’ daily subsistence.
Green grams are an emerging cash crop in the smallholder farming systems in Eastern Kenya. Women participate robustly in decision-making over choice of enterprise (crops), and in labor provision for ploughing, weeding, harvesting and marketing. In terms of share of income from sales, women fare less well in relation to men in their households.
When we look at farmers involved in various types of farmer groups, women in groups most closely associated with the project are more involved in marketing activities than others. However, this does not carry through in terms of their control over the income from those marketing activities.
Looking more deeply into the question, when we disaggregated by household type, we see a very clear distinction in women’s power over use of income. Only in female headed households do women maintain significant control over incomes, as compared to women in male-headed female-managed households, and especially in comparison to women in male-headed households.
Maize is a subsistence crop, the staple food crop in Kenya. It is also a highly marketable crop.
Similarly to green grams, women participate in all phases of crop production. And women in farmer groups most closely associated with the project show a particular strength in marketing of the crop. But again, their use of income is less equal. This is especially evident when we disaggregate by household type.
Mangoes, like other tree crops, are permanent crops which have long term productive capacity and tend to require permanency of tenure. Therefore men are more likely to be responsible for this enterprise. But once the decision to adopt this crop is made, women’s labor is heavily relied upon in mango production and marketing. Again, use of income is more firmly in men’s hands.
Our
In focusing on the rationale behind women’s adoption decisions, we discovered a potential key driver of adoption in ‘non-priced values’ (e.g., nutritional, ecological, institutional, educational), and located innovative measures of women’s empowerment in groups organization and in the geographic niches most soundly associated with the radius of mobility that women typically enjoy.
analysis of the data is continuing in this direction.
Survey respondents compared the period before the start of the project in 2011 and the twelve months culminating in the month of the interview (February 2014).
For the PPATE farmers, the number of households reporting shortage of food fell for all months after the project.
For the SPATE farmers the number of people without enough food reduced slightly in the period after the project.
For the non-project farmers, in several months (May, June, September and November), more people did not have enough food in 2014 than in 2011.
It has also long been noted that whether pursuing women’s engagement in a traditionally-male livelihood activity, such as goat-rearing, or improvements in a typically-female pursuit, such as cultivation of diverse varieties of bananas, when money begins to flow, men tend to become more interested in taking over the marketing aspect of the activity.
To ensure that women gain their fair share of the benefits, both priced and non-priced benefits should be counted. Thus ‘fair share’ of benefits may involve sharing of cash income, but also enjoyment of non-priced values such as nutritious meals and supportive social interactions.