Introduction and overview
THE PWEL-ASU EXCHANGE VISIT
The Poor Women’s Economic Leadership (PWEL)- Agriculture Scale Up Exchange Visit was held in Butuan City, Southern Philippines from March 29-April 3, 2009. Participants from eight (8) countries: Ethiopia, Honduras, India, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Vietnam shared their experiences in designing programmes to develop agricultural value chains that are both sustainable and gender equitable – where women are ‘enabled’ to participate and their economic leadership strengthened.
The Exchange also provided the opportunity to visit communities in Agusan del Norte province to meet with individual women and men farmers, producer organizations, local government officials, and private sector representatives that are already doing business with smallholders or are potential partners.
Motivation and Preparation
All participants were involved in either agriculture programmes or women’s economic leadership initiatives; all had encountered difficulties in how to design programmes to achieve significant change for women smallholders in agricultural value chains. From this challenge came the idea of the Exchange Visit. The Exchange supported the development of PWEL strategy for the East Asia region, as well as that of participating countries.
“There are many challenges and one is to be able to make clear, informed choices about selection of markets and products for value chain development to benefit women, and within these value chains to identify key leverage points which will change dynamics in favour of women,” remarked Thalia Kidder, one of the Exchange Visit facilitators.
At the moment,our programmes don’t consistently move women smallholders beyond the products they currently produce, or current roles and markets, which may be low value-added, risky or without potential for growth. When we identify ‘barriers for women’ our analysis is too often limited to households and “culture”, ignoring how market systems and actors may also reinforce these gendered barriers.
The participants did significant preparation for the Exchange by participating in teleconferences and in preparing reading materials to understand both market development approaches and gender analysis.
Each country’s representatives brought a ‘gendered market map’ of a particular agricultural product’s market chains. These maps showed an analysis of where women and men are located in markets, as well as the market services and the policies and practices that will enable or inhibit developing the market.
What does a PWEL programme look like? This was one key question that was discussed in small groups with everyone sharing perspectives and challenging each other.
“PWEL is not about having a women-only project,” agreed one group of participants, “PWEL programmes engage men as well, and create economic opportunities where women can build experience and confidence to make decisions, earn substantially, build capacity to negotiate within their households, engage with the private sector and government authorities.”
Other participants noted their definitions by blogging on the Oxfam East Asia blog site! “Its good to know that PWEL is also about being able to look at and strike a balance between the economic and social dimensions of women’s economic leadership,” Genela Buhia, Oxfam Hongkong Programme Officer said.
“PWEL is not about conventional livelihoods programmes or gender mainstreaming. It is all about how to put women in the center of economic activities and how to transform the market system for it to work in favour of women,” Tharanga Manori Gunasinghe, PWEL Programme Coordinator in Sri Lanka said.
Gunasinghe pointed out that in designing a PWEL programme, it is necessary for implementers to carefully study the choices of markets, partner organizations and the private sector. “How we do it differently means going back and, working with our partners, together develop the analysis on markets to see how these can significantly change the status of women,” she said.