J.21_ICAN_Gender_Analysis_Annex_J_Final_feb_2017.docx

J. 21 ICAN Gender Analysis - February 2017

Gender Analysis Women are responsible for half of the world’s food production and in most developing countries they produce between 60 and 80 percent of the food. Yet, women continue to be regarded as home producers or assistants on the farm and not as farmers and economic agents on their own merit. Women receive a small fraction of assistance for agricultural investments; women in Africa receive less than 10 percent of small farm credit and 1 percent of total credit to the agricultural sector. Empowering women farmers is vital to lifting rural communities out of poverty, especially as many developing nations face economic crisis, food insecurity, HIV/AIDS, environmental degradation and increasing urbanization.[footnoteRef:1] [1: USAID Food security and Gender fact sheet]

Women face constraints related to access to, control over and ownership of businesses and productive resources such as land and credit. There is limited employment of women in skill-based industries and this constrains further women’s income potential. Women are also marginalized in skills development, access to financial resources, employment in non-agriculture sectors and inheritance rights. Only 27 percent of registered land is owned by women. Although 70 percent of the women are engaged in agriculture, less than 20 percent control outputs from their efforts. Women comprise of the majority of labor force in the Agriculture Sector while men form the majority of the labor force in the Industry and Service Sectors. Female headed households comprise 80.5 percent of the agricultural subsistence workers compared to 67.5 percent of the male headed households. However, plots managed by women produce 17 percent less per acre on average than plots managed by men or jointly by other family members.[footnoteRef:2] [2: Uganda National Development Plan (NDP II) 2015/16 -2019/20]

Women and girl’s low levels of education and their lack of voice in decision making tend to lead to work overload, ill health and keep them in abusive marriages and suffer from gender based violence. According to the State of the Ugandan Child, 45% of the uneducated girls become pregnant compared to 16% of girls with secondary education. Furthermore, 3 out of 10 girls aged 6-15 years drop out of school due to early marriages. Gender Based Violence (GBV) in all its manifestations (physical, sexual, FGM/C, emotional and psychological) remains a critical human right, public health and economic concern with 56 percent of women citing having experienced physical violence by the age of 15 years while 28 percent women aged 15-49 citing having ever experienced sexual violence compared to 9 percent of men in the same age group[footnoteRef:3]. The situation analysis on children in Uganda (UNICEF, 2015) indicated that 77.7% and 82% of primary and secondary students respectively, reported experiences of sexual abuse in schools. The UNICEF Uganda 2013 report revealed that 60% of girls and 61% of boys had never reported any case of abuse due to fear of being victimized by perpetrators. 67% of perpetrators were found to be male teachers [3: UNHS 2009/10]

Women are responsible for nutrition in most homes, including the purchase and preparation of food. However, because of traditional norms, they often have limited access to education and control over resources. When given the opportunity to manage household finances, studies show that women are more likely than men to spend on their family’s nutritional needs, healthcare and school fees for children. Therefore, empowering women to increase access to and control over resources is critical to attaining food security in the developing world.

Financial services, such as credit, insurance and savings are more difficult for women to access. Women are less likely to own assets that can serve as collateral. Legal and social rules and norms can inhibit women’s ownership and management of bank accounts. Rural women’s access to financial resources is also limited by biased lending practices that emerge when financial institutions in the area consider them smaller, less experienced and therefore less attractive clients and some institutions lack the knowledge to offer products tailored to women’s preferences.

Uganda’s extension system is through the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) and according to the legal act that established NAADS, the program was to pay more attention to women, people living with disabilities (PLWDs) and young people who were considered to be those most affected by the economic reforms of the 1990s. Despite the overwhelming participation of women in farmer NAADS groups, men still retain a significant control over NAADS processes and actual decision making even in supposedly women’s only groups. Some of the factors found to undermine women’s participation and control over NAADS are the low literacy rates among women (6.9 million Ugandans are illiterate with 5.5 million female and 1.4 million males, UNHS 2009/10) and the lack of or limited control and ownership of resources like land.

Extension services providing good and timely information on new technologies and techniques help farmers when deciding whether or not to adopt an innovation and can lead to significant yield increases. Yet, the provision of extension services in Uganda remains low for both women and men and women tend to make less use than men of extension services. Even when women have access to extension services, the benefits may not be obvious. The manner in which extension services are delivered can constrain the way women farmers receive information on innovations. Women tend to have lower levels of education than men, which may limit their active participation in training that uses a lot of written materials. Time constraints and cultural reservations may hinder women from participating in extension activities such as field days outside their village or within mixed groups.

Lack of voice: Female exclusion from public spaces within some cultures and limited mobility in public and/or distant spaces due to cultural restrictions in other societies constrains women‘s opportunities for economic sustainability, household food security enhancement and gender equality. Women often require permission from male family members to travel beyond their neighborhoods, including accessing clinic or hospital services. Access to food security programming, such as extension services, may be prescribed to women because of mobility constraints. In many instances, women are not allowed or expected to express themselves freely and their views are not taken seriously. Yet in households where the couple works together as a family seem to be much better off than where they work separately.

Insecure or weak rights to land, non-land assets and financial services, as well as restricted access to entrepreneurship have several negative development implications. For example, these discriminatory social institutions reduce income-generating opportunities and lower decision-making power for women within the households, increase food insecurity for women and their children and make women and families more vulnerable to poverty (FAO, 2011; OECD, 2014c)[footnoteRef:4]. [4: FAO (2011), The State of Food and Agriculture – Women in Agriculture: Closing the Gender Gap for Development, Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, available at: www.fao.org/docrep/013/i2050e/i2050e.pdf.

OECD (2014c), “Social Institutions and Gender Index 2014 synthesis report”, OECD, Paris, available at: www.oecd.org/dev/development-gender/BrochureSIGI2015- web.pdf.

In such instances, the following interventions may be necessary to reduce gender disparities in communities and at the household level.

· Strengthening women’s access to land and ownership of assets;

· Strengthening women’s voice in household decision-making over expenditures and assets;

· Increase gender-sensitive labor saving technologies (rainwater harvesting, protected springs, gravity water, energy saving stoves, access to cooking fuel, etc.)

· Increase family planning uptake

· Literacy and numeracy training for men and women especially women farmers.

· Design the right policies to empower women

The objective of ICAN activity is to sustainably improve the livelihood security of the targeted vulnerable households in selected districts. The activity will undertake gender-sensitive activities along the value-chain of activities such as:

· Gender sensitization to foster intra-household cooperation in order to promote gender equality with regard to asset and resource access;

· Support the building and development of more women and youth owned enterprises

· Strengthening organizational capacity of key women’s business associations so that the associations can take a more active role in community-level participation and decision-making;

· Building networks and mentoring opportunities to support entrepreneurship activities for women;

· Increasing support for female agribusiness owners by connecting female entrepreneurs to national, regional and international markets; and

· Linking women with local banks or financial institutions so they can gain access to and utilize finances.

· Linking women to appropriate services like nutrition, health, and family planning.

· Develop strategies for male specific engagement.

According to the USAID Youth and Agriculture Assessment (2014)[footnoteRef:5], most Ugandan youth are engaged in some sort of agricultural activity. Although they did not see agriculture as a primary income-generating activity, youth were interested in agriculture as secondary income generation. Many youth seek pathways to the workforce that allow them to ‘keep a foot in the door’ of agriculture, especially as many youth believe that they will one day return to their parents’ land. [5: Feed the Future Uganda Youth Leadership for Agriculture Activity: Gender analysis and Baseline Assessment March 31, 2016. ]

Several factors have conspired to make success in agriculture more difficult for female youth. They are less likely to own the land that they work or to have progressed beyond primary school level. They have less access on the whole to productive assets, access to finance, and access to agricultural extension services. In general, youth access to land and other productive assets varies depending on a number of factors, including customary practice, ethnic group, etc. Of these factors, gender is perhaps the most significant. Because female youth are expected to move away from their families once they marry, male youth are more likely receive access to land, other productive assets and payment for their work. Even when young women have a legal claim to land; it can be difficult for them to enforce it, because they frequently lack the education and financial resources to pursue a legal claim.

This activity will undertake activities along the value chain to ensure youth targeting and responsiveness to agriculture;

· Form or engage groups that create safe spaces for youth especially female youth to participate and take leadership for agricultural development especially for rural youth, female youth and youth with disabilities.

· Engage young men in a dialogue about cultural norms and masculinity

· Link youth to digital financial services and credit especially for rural youth.

· Promote and adapt farming as a business for youth.

It is important to ensure a detailed strategy for addressing gender and youth specific constraints and ensuring that women and youth participate and benefit equitably from activity impacts. The value-chains should explore innovative approaches to fostering the development of agriculture-related enterprises for women and youth, providing entrepreneurship and marketing training and developing businesses and financial management skills. The activity should advocate for gender sensitive interventions to benefit both male and female members equitably focusing on activities that will also include measures that will increase access to information by female farmers, increase gender equity in decision making on farms, improved women’s access to training in agricultural inputs safe handling practices, and increase adoption of new technologies by female and youth farmers.