May 8, 2018
Fatima Ahmed and Nanase Tonda - Zenab for Women in Development, Sudan
Within the ever-increasing paradigm of promoting gender equality, the subconscious perceptions amongst policymakers and practitioners tend to be that women farmers in rural areas are the victims of gendered violence – and that local grassroots NGOs have limited capacity in bringing about scale, impact or sustainability compared to international bodies with greater resources.
This is particularly the case in Gadaref, Eastern Sudan – the country’s key rain-fed rural agricultural state, where over 70% of women work tirelessly on less than 5 feddan and face various challenges. They often cultivate depleted soils without access to sufficient extension services. With limited mitigative or adaptive measures, they confront increasing climatic shocks, namely unpredictable rainfalls, high temperature and frequent droughts. This has led to fluctuations in crop yield and market price, creating more uncertainty. Women farmers in Gadaref face severe systemic discrimination perpetuated by deeply-ingrained patriarchal gender relation, whereby 60% of land acquisition is arranged through family inheritance – which is tacitly meant for men. If women were to rent land, the affordable land size would be no bigger than 5 feddan due to limited economic mobility. Moreover, it is not realistic for many women farmers to manage bigger land given the disproportionately increasing household burdens as many men are migrating to cities for alternative work. Further, developmental projects across the country are usually led by large-scale international organizations and the line ministries, whereby the efforts by small-scale local organizations are oftentimes being silenced.
Experience of Zenab for Women in Development (ZWD) challenges this. Seeing women farmers as ‘game changers’ to climate change, ZWD has built resilient livelihoods of over 53,400 people – nearly 6000 households headed by women smallholder farmers – in 58 villages through increased agricultural productivity, food security and household income. This is an approximately USD 400,000 over 10-year integrated livelihoods programming, having expanded its reach from just about 500 women farmers in 2006. It has provided climate resilient agricultural input package (containing improved seeds characterized as short-season and drought resistance, fertilizers, herbicides, necessary hand-tools and machinery), hands-on training on the input package usage and climate resilient agricultural techniques (mainly water harvesting and soil conservation), access to finance (credit, savings and insurance) and access to market (linkages to local buyers at a competitive price). For implementation, ZWD has worked closely with different stakeholders, namely the Ministry of Agriculture (including Agricultural Research Corporation), financial institutions, private sector, farmer associations and development agencies.
With its proximity to local communities, ZWD as a local NGO has successfully established and mobilized 78 farmer associations, which collectively enabled access to climate adaptive and mitigative interventions listed above. This was how ZWD enabled access to finance for women farmers for the first time in Sudan. Banks have certainly built strong trust in women farmers for their high repayment rate.
Based on ZWD’s empirically-informed understanding around how critical it is for women farmers to secure ‘time’ to spend at home, it prioritizes to ensure that time spent on farm is minimized through increased machinery usage by training male drivers for machinery to conform local norms. Voluntary actions are emerging where farmers establish community-based machinery delivery system, in which men and women farmers work together to maintain and utilize communally owned machinery. Sense of solidarity for change is forming.
The results have been an increase in farming productivity per feddan by 518 % (from 1.1 sack to 5.7 sack [1]) and seasonal income by SDG 58,000 [2] over the past 10 years, enabling farmers to enroll their children to school, feed the family and attend social gatherings. Using the ‘train the trainers’ approach, ZWD also sensitizes farmer association leaders in climate-smart agricultural practices. Our estimates is that 38 % of farmers in East Sudan have now shifted from the traditional slush-and-burn methods to adaptive-mitigative farming, such as crop rotation and water harvesting, as a result of effective knowledge dissemination within the farmer communities.
It is ZWD’s such gradual yet impactful foot steps that have been recently acknowledged recently at UNFCCC COP23 through the Momentum for Change Lighthouse Activity 2017: Women for Results Award. The ZWD’s experience therefore reaffirms how a small-scale organization can yield impact, scale and sustainability by addressing systemic constraints that hinder the ability of women farmers as agents of change to fight against hunger and climate change.
[1] 1 sack = 50kg
[2] USD 1 = SDG 12 (on average, from 2006 to 2016)
