Technology Development and Women’s Empowerment: The case of the forage chopper for smallholder dairy farmers in Uganda
Florence Lubwama Kiyimba
National Agricultural Research Organization, Uganda
In Uganda as well as in many other countries, labour-saving tools have been advocated as important in increasing productivity,especially during the peak season,and improving the quality of life(NARO 2001; MAAIF 2005; Carr and Hartl 2010). According to Carr (2010), women have been specifically targeted in the development and dissemination of these technologies because they are seen as central to overcoming rural poverty.Although many development efforts have assumed that women would benefit if designs simply took into account their roles (Doss 2001), research conducted by the author shows that considering women’s roles alone is not sufficient. Sometimes, new technologies have failed to save women’s time and have worsened their social and economic conditions.
Developing tools to improve women’s wellbeing poses a much more difficult challenge because women are part of a socio-technical system. In Uganda, most of the existing women’s empowerment strategies target women from a social stratum.They rely on an institutional environment in which women are considered either to operate independently, have a job or have direct access to economic resources and facilities. The context assumed for designing women’s empowerment policies is not necessarily the same for every Ugandan woman.
Engineers have always assumed that by considering women in technology development and dissemination processes, this will guarantee use of the labour saving tools and consequently reduce time spent on agriculture related activities. However, existing processes which focus on the technology and the problem it is intended to solve, without necessarily giving women a role in the development process, have little chance of succeeding. Thispaperdemonstrates how women can be incorporated in reshaping technological solutions.Theargument is made that if labour saving tools are to be used for women’s empowerment, an integrated approach is needed that is grounded not only in engineering but also in the sociology of gender, and insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS).
A technographic approach was used, focusing on a socially active labour saving toolto explore how technologies contribute to the empowerment of women.Technography has been proposed as an interdisciplinary methodology for the study of technology in everyday social situations(Richards 2003; Kien 2008; Jansen and Vellema 2011). The research focused onthe authors’ experience inco-designing a forage chopper[1],[2]aimed at reducing women’s labour burdens, and empowering them.However, it was discovered that the realities are more complex. High labour demands, coupled with a lack of sufficient land for forage production and forage scarcity during the dry season, means that available forage must be efficiently used, and waste minimized.
Traditionally, the farmers chop forage into smaller pieces with a “panga”(a machete),for easy consumption by the animals. In addition to low output capacity and lack of uniformity, thismethod is tedious, time consuming and quite dangerous to the operator. The forage chopper was developed by the National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) to make thearduous task of forage production easier. Using this as a case study, an integrated approach was applied for rationalizing the design process, by focusing on how the different elements of the socio-technical system might be better organized to ensure that labour saving tools work for rural women. This involved four techniques (or approaches) namely;(1) organization of feedback from users, (2) reconfiguring the users, (3) following the domestication process, and (4) enhancing technology uptake and use for the broader goals of empowerment.
One possible way of rationalizing the design process lies in the way feedback is organized between designers and targeted users. Very often the network of engineers does not recognize the other social entities in the socio-technical system. In a study carried out by NARO, on the design process of agricultural engineering technologies and what needs to be done to improve the interaction between technology designers and users,it was observed that,for technology development to provide workable innovations, there is need to rethink the design procedures. In the development of the forage chopper for instance, users’ participation was limited to needs assessment and evaluation of the finished innovation. There was no users’ involvement in the planning and designing of the intervention. Design is a collaborative effort where many people play a role but in this case, representation of society during the design process was poor.Users and designers should interact effectively to incorporate societal issues alongside technological ones, so as to broaden researchers’ practice. This can be done by allowing for observational feedback as users interact with technology. However, the designers’ ability to facilitate effective feedback in the design process starts with their training background.One possibility of improving the process would be for engineering students to be exposed to participatory methods in their training programmes.
Another approach to rationalizing the design process lies inimproving the way designers configure users. Many development interventions use “woman” as a label without analyzing the social construction of gender to reveal how men and women are assigned certain traits and attributes that may or may not limit their development. Designers always have expectations of how the technology will be used, by whom and in what context. By so doing, they construct a “virtual” user, based on her working environment. The context of the actual users of the forage chopper was examined to gain an understanding of how this influenced the uptake and use of the machine. This involved a gender analysis of the activity profiles for smallholder dairy farmers; resource access and control profiles and analysis of the socio-economic context within which Ugandan smallholders carry out farming. This sociological analysis opened up the context of the actual user to understand how activities are organized and how these combine with other entities.It was evident that within the socio-techno system,women and machines combine or intertwine to determine usage and outcomes. Women users are not fixed entities in terms of composition and activities, and their interaction with technology is structured by dynamic factors relating to both technology and society.
Armed with a knowledge ofthe role of the users and on ways of reconfiguring users, it is still necessary to know how “use” is framed when the technology is released. Social practices of technology use cannot be fully anticipated in the design phase; they only emerge during the integration process of the technology. This makes it necessary to follow through with the users when the new technology is introduced, to understand how it is used.The term“domestication process” for labour saving technology, and its implications for wider socio-technical configurations was used. The relevance lies in the fact that processes of interpretation and integration of technologies by users are influenced by the social formation, circumstances and cultural conceptions of households. Hence the way users are organized in terms of activities and composition, the community resources available to the different users, their ability to mobilize these community resources, and eventually the way all these intertwine with the technology, determine actual usage.
Technology is embedded in the wider socio-technical configurations according to various stabilizing and directive forces. It is, therefore, necessary to examine the strategies needed to improve processes of technology uptake and effective use to achieve the desired impact of labour saving technology for women. Focus should be on the social, material and institutional context for effective implementation of the policy objectives of women’s empowerment. Mechanization that reduces women’s drudgery in agriculture is one step towards their empowerment, but increasing the efficiency of use requires a detailed understanding of the context when embedding a new machine in an existing production system. It also demands coordination among different developers. Policy implementation requires careful analysis of the target group in its context (e.g. women in resource-poor settings, in the case of women empowerment policies), and also requires incorporation of a proper analysis of the material environment (including use of tools and technology), and hence a new approach by engineers.
In spite of the complexity of the structural relationships linking technology and the social organization of users, the design process for labour saving tools can still be rationalized to better support policies and strategies aimed at women’s empowerment. Rationalizing the design process requires new knowledge and skills for the engineers. The analyses of the users’ social context and the material environment point to the need to move beyond design and development of technologies for women, and for engineers themselves to become “engineers of the social”. In conclusion, there is need to look at the development of technologies for women in Uganda differently. Instead of focusing exclusively on women as individual entities, technology development and dissemination processes should focus as much or more on the social and material context, in order to achieve the goal of technologies that are of truly transformative potential.
Carr, M. and M. Hartl (2010). Lightening the Load: Labour-saving Technologies and Practices for Rural Women. Warwickshire, International Fund for Agricultural Developmenr (IFAD) and Practica Action Publishing Ltd.
Doss, C. R. (2001). "Designing Agricultural Technology for African Women Farmers: Lessons from 25 Years of Experience." World Development29(12): 2075.
Jansen, K. and S. Vellema (2011). "What is technography?" NJAS - Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences57(3-4): 169-177.
Kien, G. (2008). "Technography = Technology + Ethnography: An Introduction." Qualitative Inquiry14(7): 1101-1109.
MAAIF (2005). Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture: Eradicating Poverty in Uganda. Ministry of Agriculture Animal Industry and Fisheries. Entebbe, Government Publishers.
NARO (2001). Study in support of transfer, adoption and dissemination of labour saving technologies in Masaka and Wakiso districts of Uganda. FAO/AEATRI. Kampala, Food and Agricultural Organization and National Agricultural Research Organization.
Richards, P. (2003). Technography: Notes and Methods. Wageningen, The Netherlands.
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[2] Manual forage chopperTraditional hand chopping