From Africa Recovery, Vol.11#2 (October 1997), page 10 (part of special feature on Agriculture in Africa)

Women farmers, the 'invisible' producers

African women are campaigning for more official support

Women farmers in Africa may be poor and illiterate, says Ms. Celina Cossa, president of the National Farmers Union in Mozambique, "but at the same time we are the principal force in the struggle against misery, backwardness and dependency." In many countries across the continent, rural women are pressing for a higher profile, to match their preponderant role in the cultivation and processing of the continent's food. Yet despite some progress in recent years, state agricultural programmes and facilities in most African countries do not yet reflect this reality, and rural women generally remain the continent's "invisible" producers.

According to official labour force statistics issued by the World Bank and other institutions, 42 per cent of the economically active population involved in agriculture in Africa is female. But the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) suggests that such figures greatly underestimate women's actual role, since there is a tendency to register women in farm households as housewives, although most carry out a wide range of productive activities on top of their heavy load of domestic work. The FAO found, in a survey of nine African countries in 1996, that women's contribution to the production of food crops ranges from 30 per cent in Sudan to 80 per cent in the Republic of Congo, with estimates for other countries tending toward the higher end of the scale. In some, women also work extensively in cash-crop production.

The FAO estimates that in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, 31 per cent of rural households are headed by women, mainly because of the tendency of men to migrate to cities in search of wage labour; in Latin America and the Caribbean only 17 per cent of rural households are headed by women, and in Asia, 14 per cent.

Despite this substantial role, observes the FAO, "women have less access to land than men; when women do own land, the land holding tends to be smaller and located in more marginal areas. Rural women also have less access than men to credit, which limits their ability to purchase seeds, fertilizers and other inputs needed to adopt new farming techniques."

Only 5 per cent of the resources provided through extension services in Africa are available to women, notes Ms. Marie Randriamamonjy, Director of the FAO's Women in Development Service, "although, in some cases, particularly in food production, African women handled 80 per cent of the work. Of total extension agents at work in Africa today, only 17 per cent are women."

Gradually, especially since the turn of the decade, national mechanisms have been established in numerous African countries to better address the concerns and needs of women, with focal points in the ministries of agriculture and other key institutions. Many of them, however, suffer from limited financing and personnel.

Meanwhile, rural women have been organizing themselves to a much greater extent. In most of the countries surveyed by the FAO, there has been some growth in the number of non-governmental organizations and women's associations involving or working with rural women. Sometimes these are mixed organizations, but frequently, rural women prefer to belong to groups run by women. In Benin, for example, only 8 per cent of rural women belong to formal cooperatives, but an estimated 90 per cent participate in traditional women's savings and credit groups. "An important reason for this apparent imbalance," notes an FAO report on rural cooperatives, "is that they keep control over their own money and can use it flexibly when it is channeled through women's groups."

According to Ms. Comfort Olayiwole, principal of Nigeria's Samaru College of Agriculture, "women's groups and projects are no longer isolated ventures, easily ignored by government or community members. Women are organizing themselves into a formidable political and social movement."

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BOX 1:

Women gain more land rights in Mozambique

Amid considerable controversy and after two years of debate and revisions, a new land tenure law was adopted in July by Mozambique's parliament. Among other things, the new law stresses the equality of men and women in obtaining land titles. Traditional land tenure practices, according to the Council of Ministers, discriminated against women's access, prompting an initial effort to remove references to "customary" law. But opposition parliamentarians from the Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo), the former rebel movement, objected to these clauses, as well as to the retention of state ownership of land, with individuals granted use and occupancy rights.

The two main farmers' associations strongly supported the law, while numerous civil organizations lobbied for various amendments. The final draft compromised by reinserting a clause on customary practices, but it specified that these could not violate constitutional guarantees of gender equality. In addition, a new clause was added stating that inheritance of land must be "independent of sex." Commented Ms. Janete Assulai, a lawyer for the Rural Organization for Mutual Assistance: "Our society is accustomed to putting women in second place. We must shift the mentality. It is important to repeat gender equality in all new laws to accustom people to the new thinking."

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