USAID/ETHIOPIA FEED THE FUTURE

GENDER ANALYSIS

Introduction

One of the principal objectives of the Feed the Future Initiative (FTF) is the economic empowerment of rural women. “The Initiative acknowledges that reducing gender inequality is an important contributor to eradicating global hunger and recognizes the fundamental role that sdfwomen play in achieving food security. These include women’s access to and control over agricultural assets and how that impacts upon the agricultural value chain. And, it includes input into agricultural research; equal access to inputs and technology as agricultural producers; gender-appropriate extension packages and delivery; improved access to land and other productive natural assets; reduced gender barriers to financial services; and increased knowledge for men and women enabling them to participate in and obtain appropriate returns from the agricultural system.”[1] In implementing FTF programs, missions will strive to achieve these goals by improving the potential of farmers and agriculture entrepreneurs, especially of women farmer, to increase their income and well-being through increased agricultural production.

Rural Women, Agricultural Employment and Land Tenure Issues

Ethiopian women play a major role in agricultural production, as they provide most of the labor on small farms and do most of the hoeing, weeding, transporting, processing, storing and marketing of agricultural products. However, their access to resources and control of the same is mediated through men, either their fathers or husbands, and their agricultural contribution goes largely unrecognized. Although women often have access to assets, they rarely have control over them. Women also play a large role on livestock management, horticulture and processing of animal by-products.

Rural women engage in activities that have low barriers to entry but are also of low profitability. Women face different and more basic constraints than men, linked to issues such as access to water, access to credit and low demand for their product. In contrast, men are concerned about constraints associated with more sophisticated activities, such as transport costs, road suitability, access to markets and inputs, and market information.[2]

Lack of access to credit is a major constraint in women’s success in their agricultural pursuits, since it hampers their capacity to purchase the necessary inputs and services. According to the Ministry of Women, women's access to agricultural sector credit stood at 12 percent of total credit allocated.[3]

Another major determinant of gender disparity is lack of access to land.

The Land Reform of 1975 nationalized all rural land in Ethiopia and allocated it to farmers on a use-right basis through a local government. Land is allocated based on family size, and may be further re-distributed as families move, divorce, or die.

When women move to the husband’s place upon marriage, he is likely to be the one with his name on the land certificate while she will not get her name there unless he agrees to that. This will also imply that she is not entitled to half of the land upon divorce or death of the husband.[4]

A priority of the government has been the correction of gender inequalities in access to land as a way of addressing rural poverty. Recently, large programs of land certification have been implemented in the major regions of the country with the aim of reducing tenure insecurity. While evaluation of these programs is ongoing, available evidence suggests that, as with earlier efforts to reform land ownership, informal institutions are mediating the impact of policy initiatives.[5]

Both qualitative and quantitative evidence highlights that land ownership is traditionally considered to be reserved for men. According to the Agricultural Sample Survey of 2006/2007, the number ofmale owners is almost five times as high as the number of female owners (9.6 million vs. 2.3) and men on average hold larger plots (land per capita i s 1.12 hectares for male vs. 0.71 hectares for female holders).

Issues Related to Pastoralist Systems

Women play a significant role in pastoral systems. Men tend to migrate with most of the cattle leaving women behind with the responsibilityof caring for the household, which often includes a farming plot, as well as children and livestock that was left behind. Women also play vital roles in livestock production and management, trading, and maintaining support networks.

Even though women play such a central role in maintaining their source of livelihood and their households, development policy and practice have often failed to understand the significance of women’s valuable role in pastoral livelihoods.[6] Though there have been some improvements, many pastoral development interventions still target men as the recipients of animal husbandry training, veterinary medicines and other benefits.[7]

Women in pastoralist communities tend to be excluded from public decision making processes, and experience high levels of violence and ill-health. A recent government study carried out by the Ministry of Agriculture highlighted that in all pastoral regions of Ethiopia, there are more men than women. The highest gap is in Afar region, where the population ratio was found to be 136 men to100 women, followed by Somali region, where the ratio is 118 men to 100 women.[8] It is likely that high maternal death and violence against women in these regions contributes to this disparity, including female genital mutilation in its most virulent forms, and abductions and early marriage, which remain common in those areas.

Other Employment/Entrepreneurship

Women’s opportunities to function in the market are hindered by their limited skills and greater burden of household responsibilities. As a result, women face lower activity rates, lower employment rates and higher unemployment rates than men. They are also disproportionately concentrated in unpaid or flexible jobs that offer lower earnings and less security.[9]

Women entrepreneurs are concentrated in non-farm enterprises that do not require high start-up capital (median start-up capital of male-owned enterprises is five times higher than that of female owned ones). Therefore, women’s non-farm activities are characterized by being smaller and having a lower level of productivity than those managed by men, particularly in rural areas. According to the World Bank, the median revenue of female owned enterprises is 5.6 times lower than male-owned enterprises in rural areas. Women’s firms also have lower value added per worker than men’s firms.[10]

In the formal urban sector, women entrepreneurs have a profile of education, economic circumstances and access to financial services quite different from either rural or urban small scale entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs with businesses in the formal urban sector are much more educated and successful in running their businesses than their male counterparts. For instance, 37 percent of managers in female-owned businesses have a graduate degree compared to only 18 percent in male-owned businesses. This suggests that to succeed women undergo a more difficult selection process in the market.

When women manage to establish a business, their activities also tend to exhibit better performance than male-owned enterprises. In fact, female-owned enterprises have a significantly larger size (measured by the number of employees) at start-up and grow faster than male owned enterprises. Overall, the average number of employees at start-up and at the time of the survey was 24 and 54 for female-owned enterprises compared to 13 and 20 for male-owned enterprises.

Evidence on the severity of constraints that women face in the entrepreneurial worldpoint to a variety of obstacles, such as:

Obstacles at start-up: Women entrepreneurs are few, and rather than running their firms in sole proprietorship they mostly concentrate in partnership enterprises. The constraints which might particularly affect women in sole proprietorship include lack of networks, poor access to finance to start a business, or other factors such as gender-specific differences in propensity to take risks, social expectations about gender roles, family trade-offs and time constraints.

Operational constraints: Female-owned enterprises are more vulnerable to corruption and crime than those owned by men. Moreover, a survey of firms in Ethiopia found thatin female- owned businesses, 4.9 percent of senior management’s time was spent in dealing with requirements imposed by government regulations compared to 3.6 percent in male-owned businesses.[11] Although corruption does not have a statistically significant impact on the productivity of businesses, it does have a statistically significant negative impact on the productivity of female entrepreneurs.

Financial constraints: Access to finance affects women entrepreneursdisproportionately. The performance of female entrepreneurs is highly andnegatively affected by access to and costs of finance. In securing financing, women face somewhat higher interest on their loans and collateral requirements. Furthermore, banks often require women to provide indications of support from their husbands, such as marriage certificates or joint signatures on the loans, while men do not face similar requirements.[12]

DO1 – Food Security and Rural Incomes Improved.

DO1 answers to the US President’s Initiative to Feed the Future (FtF) that aims to transform agriculture and respond to the nutritional deficiencies found around the world. It also responds to one of the GOE Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP) 2010/2011-2014/15 that prioritizes agricultural development and sets the steps and parameters to achieve this through their five year Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to end Poverty (PASDEP).

FTF is at its core an agriculture strategy for both market oriented production (value chain-oriented) and a sustainable small-holder subsistence farming program for small farmers in more challenging environments. For the programs proposed by the FTF to be successful will require an enabling environment that promotes greater participation by the private sector. This would include more private sector actors having access to and the capacity to compete within the entire value chain, a financial sector with the willingness and ability to meet the demands for new lending and new credit instruments, a trade regime capable of supporting and promoting Ethiopian exports as well as reducing barriers for needed imports, and a market information system capable of providing timely and accurate information. [13]

The Ethiopia FtF strategy proposes two interlinked focus areas that will drive food security and nutrition objectives. The first is an Agricultural Growth Program (AGP), a GOE/multi-donor project to promote broad-based agricultural growth in the productive parts of Ethiopia. The program will strengthen marketing and agribusiness development of key value chain commodities thru the private sector. USAID will focus on specific marketing and agribusiness interventions such as post-harvest aggregation, quality standards, access to finance, private sector-led aggregation, and private sector-led technology transfer.

The second program, will aim to link vulnerable populations into economic opportunities and provide sustainable livelihoods for the chronically poor. This program will reach at least 50,000 smallholder farmers or pastoralists, through innovative approaches, and aims for sustainability in three years. The incentives for the participants will follow a push-pull approach to keep the smallholders motivated and reward them for their efforts. This program has many aspects in common with the Food for Peace programs that the mission also manages.

At the higher levels of the value chain, women face innumerable obstacles related to their lack of capacity to maneuver the systems, lack of knowledge of business practices and lack of networks to facilitate their actions atstart-up. They also face innumerable operational and financial constraints. For instance, women have difficulty accessing funds and permits for start-up, often have to present marriage licenses and documents indicating husband support in order to get loans, and their costs and levels of harassment in securing permits is usually higher than men’s.

The value chains selected, dairy, meat and maize, were chosen for their market growth potential, highest number of farmers involved in production, nutritional impact, job creation potential especially for women, and links to vulnerable populations.[14] These are also highly concentrated in regions with a potential for linking productive and vulnerable Ethiopia, such as Oromia, Amhara, and SNNP.

Comments Regarding Gender Aspects of DO1:

Most of the issues that rural women face, both those engaged in subsistence farming as those in commercial farming have already been discussed throughout the literature.[15] It is not that the issues women face are not known,but that most of the solutions are difficult to achieve and require time, patience, and resources to be solved. At the household level, women do the bulk of the work but have little say on the gains from that work. We also know that women are time and resource poor. Apart from their agricultural work, women are responsible for their families and households, as well as work in the community. Any new activities, such as attending trainings or meetings, will add to their time burden. In addition, gender dynamics in the household denote a power system in which the male is dominant and any change would be perceived as a threat to male power, often with dire consequences for women.

A key point related to women’s constraints and needs is that these are all interdependent, meaning that they depend on one another for their fruition. Thus, lack of land tenure often means women cannot offer collateral for loans, join rural producer organizations, and therefore cannot take part in decision-making processes. Women entrepreneurs face daunting and difficult constraints, ranging from constraints at start-up andaccessing financing, to a variety of operational constraints. For women transitioning from agricultural producers to higher levels in the value chain, the obstacles include accessing market information and obtaining support from networks such as marketing associations to facilitate their performance.

There are a few examples of programs that have had some degree of success in integrating smallholder women farmers in agricultural programming or that have worked with rural households as a unit, to improve their livelihoods and their agricultural productivity. USIAD/Ethiopia’s EMPOWER Program had several components, including one to train female extension workers and agricultural researchers. The most significant component of the EM?OWER Program, ONFARM, addressed the needs of smallholder farmers through access to improved agricultural inputs, reduction of post- harvest and food processing losses, and efficient food management systems at the household level.[16] USAID/Ethiopia’s Ethiopia Land Administration Project (ELAP) has provided rural farmers throughout the country with land certificates, allowing them security and encouraging investment. For women, ELAP provides them with stability, allowing them to focus on agricultural productivity without concerns about their property being taken from them. Similarly, female dairy farmers are able to improve their productivity through the Ethiopian Dairy Development Project, which offers trainings and technical assistance on dairy farming technologies and improved nutrition. This assistance has helped women dairy farmers take advantage of the assets they have access to, improve their productivity, and improve their status within their households and community.

The Gender Informed Nutrition and Agriculture Program, funded by USAID/W and implemented by the Food Science and Technology Department of Makerere University, in Uganda, demonstrated that an integrated nutrition education and agricultural development initiative, coupled with improved hygiene and food safety, could reduce prevalence of underweight children within a short time.[17] The Agricultural Support Programme, funded by the Swedish International Development Agency and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, promoted entrepreneurial approaches among smallholder farmers by working with the households, including the older children, and treating farmers as farm managers rather than beneficiaries. Variants of this program have been implemented in Malawi, Uganda and Zambia.[18]

To address some of the constraints in USAID’s efforts to increase agricultural productivity and improve the nutritional status of rural populations, and in consultation with others working on addressing gender issues in agriculture and food security programming, the following set of “gender equitable principles” have been developed as overall guidance for reviewing existing programs or designing new ones.

Principles for Gender Equitable Agricultural Growth and Nutrition Programming

  • Overcome gender-based constraints to agricultural productivity
  • Identify agricultural practices and technologies that will reduce producers’ and processors’ time, financial, and labor constraints, with special attention to constraints faced by women
  • Promote approaches that foster equitable (though not equal) resource allocation practices between men and women in the family farm enterprises.[19]
  • Address the distinctive needs of women
  • Design financial services to meet women’s savings and credit needs
  • Work with the private sector to facilitate the entry and retention of women workers.
  • Encourage the private sector to invest in upgrading women’s skills (e.g., literacy, management training).
  • Design systems of resource allocation to explicitly reward women’s unpaid contributions to household production.
  • Encourage men and women partnership in development interventions/enterprises done in the household or community level to foster mutual support.
  • Improve the resiliency of vulnerable rural populations
  • Strengthen the ability of households to manage their multiple agro-enterprises to meet both food and cash needs.
  • Design agricultural programs to build women’s and men’s access to productive assets (e.g., land and other natural resources, equipment, and buildings).
  • Include safeguards in activities to protect and sustain women’s ownership and management of productive assets, e.g., providing guarantees of tenure security or ensuring that women’s groups directly control access to their property.
  • Design equitable access to the rewards from agricultural enterprises
  • Design commercial payment mechanisms to ensure that both men and women have access.
  • Foster approaches that improve household budgeting practices and encourage savings.
  • Engage men and women in improving nutrition of all household members
  • Encourage behavior change activities to improve household nutrition through better allocation of household income.
  • Design programs to improve women’s nutritional knowledge and practices and enhance men’s awareness of improved practices.
  • Foster equitable participation in decision-making processes at all levels (e.g., community organizations, producer associations, local government)
  • Engage women’s advocacy groups in policy reform.
  • Improve participation of women in the full range of association leadership roles.
  • Reform organizational or community governance structures (e.g., bylaws and constitutions) to promote women’s substantive participation and/or substantive attention to their needs.
  • Promote the use of gender analysis by policymakers and policy analysts as a tool to improve the enabling environment
  • Ensure that attention to gender inequalities is integrated into agricultural policy research.
  • Offer trainings to assist policy makers in understanding the differential gender impacts of policy.
  • Improve knowledge of the performance of USG investments in supporting women and reducing gender inequalities in agricultural and nutrition programs.
  • Require baseline surveys that collect sex-disaggregated information.
  • Require identification of a set of impact indicators in project monitoring and evaluation plans.
  • Monitor progress (or reversals) of program impacts on men and women.
  • Conduct impact assessments to measure how USG investments have affected women and men differently.
  • Strengthen capacity and confidence of USAID personnel in all offices to lead gender-equitable agriculture and nutrition programs.
  • Build requirements for gender integration into new assistance and acquisition requests (contracts and grants).
  • Develop substantive core training in regions or in Washington for all USAID staff to understand the gender analysis, gender equality, and the characteristics of gender aware development programming.[20]

Recommended Interventions to Consider in the Context of FTF