The need to focus on women and technology
This International Women’s Day is all about empowering women to end hunger and poverty. Women play a vital role in food production in developing countries. In fact, 43% of the agricultural workforce are women. Yet they have very limited access to resources such as land, credit and agricultural training and information compared to men.
I was therefore happy to attend an event in parliament on the 7th March on ‘Effective Solutions for Agricultural Development through Empowered African Women Scientists’. The event concentrated on getting women into leadership positions within science and technology and building their skills and confidence within the agricultural sector. It also places the spotlight on the need for research into aspects of agriculture that are important and helpful to women farmers.
Woman using her technical skills to make pots in Sudan
I listened to the stories of two African women scientists, Dr Sheila Ommeh from the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya and Christine Mukantwali a senior scientist from Rwanada. Both women are AWARD (African Women in Agricultural Research and Development) fellows. Both women have invested considerable time in researching sustainable agricultural solutions to help their communities and have acted as role models for girls in local schools, encouraging them to get interested in science.
It was great to hear about the importance of getting more women into science. However, this got me thinking about the wider topic of women and technology.
Technology is a vital element for any community. It plays a significant role in food security, agriculture and small scale production. Women use technical skills and knowledge in their daily activities; they continually innovate and adapt technologies in response to things they face in their everyday lives. However, their role and technical skills are often overlooked and undervalued.
There are four main reasons why women are less visible in the application of technology than men:
- Firstly, much of women’s work is unpaid. Women have responsibilities for child care and subsistence tasks and this means it is less visible in national statistics.
- Secondly, is the cultural perception of what constitutes ‘technology’. Women carry out a considerable number of technical activities every day. For example, they farm, process crops, weave, sew, collect wood and water, tend to small livestock, fish and look after children. These activities are mostly domestic , small scale and considered un-technical.
- Thirdly, the perception of what comprises technology is mostly in the realm of ‘hard’ technology- that of equipment, like computers or machinery, but ‘soft’ technology is usually overlooked. Soft technology comprises the skills, concepts and knowledge needed to use the ‘hard’ technology. Women often have a lot of skill but use less complex equipment (e.g. in food processing).
- Fourthly, the fact that few women are involved in agricultural extension work, research and development or technical development planning has meant there has been little challenging of assumptions made about the nature of productive roles and responsibilities and assumptions that have undermined women’s roles and technical capacities.
The spotlight on women in science should open up and include the empowerment of those women that use technology day in and day out. Practical Action’s ‘Discovering Technologists’ training guidelines is aimed at increasing the skills of those involved in technology development, working in the agricultural development sector. The training is an empowering process whereby women can realize that their knowledge is not only technical but also valuable, and this realisation leads to women themselves consciously exploring, strengthening and sharing the expertise that they have.
No Comments » | Add your commentLeasing land for food
2011 Blog Action Day on 16 October – World Food Day – is, naturally, themed around food
The hill and mountain districts of far and mid-western Nepal have been hit by persistent food insecurity. The agricultural produce is not sufficient for household consumption in many areas of the country due to high dependency on subsistence agriculture, very small land holdings, inequality in land holdings, low productivity, limited agricultural infrastructure, use of traditional tools and lack of appropriate technologies.
In my recent visit to one of the Practical Action’s project sites in mid-west Nepal I saw a ray of hope where people were continuing the land leasing approach for food production introduced by Practical Action.
A women land leasing group (Jhumka Land Leasing Group) sharing their experiences in mid-west Nepal
Practical Action, with support of the European Union, implemented a food security project in this area, focusing on a land leasing approach targeting smallholder farmers who owns less than 0.05 hectare of land or are landless.
The project has supported the group of small land-holding or landless farmers in accessing the land through a land leasing approach. The project has also people in accessing various appropriate agricultural technologies, extension services, agri-infrastructures and linking with markets.
A survey indicated that the proportion of project households having food sufficiency for less than three months has been decreased to 6.7% from 58.3%. The study also revealed that the food sufficiency for three to six months, six to nine months and more than nine months have been increased to 41, 33.8 and 18.5% from 28, 10.7 and 2.9 per cent respectively.
The smallholding farmers, who I met recently, were very happy and were continuously practicing the plastic house technology and micro irrigation technology in their leased land. They were receiving support from the local agro-vets and local resource people developed by the project. It is encouraging that from the selling of the vegetables and other agricultural produces, they were able to buy some pieces of land on their own where they can grow more produce to fulfill their food need.
With this evidence, I think the land leasing approach can be a sustainable approach that can be replicated elsewhere while working with the smallholders or landless farmers to secure or improve their food security conditions.
5 Comments » | Add your commentTime to act to alleviate food insecurity
2011 Blog Action Day on 16 October – World Food Day – is, naturally, themed around food
World Food Day gives us an opportunity to not only reflect but also to rethink how we can, in our capacities, feed the world.
Feeding the world is one of today’s biggest challenges for many countries, especially in the greater Horn of Africa where more than 11 million people face starvation. In recent months, millions went hungry and countless malnourished children died. Many are still without food today. This was, and still is, without doubt, a major world crisis. In Kenya, nomadic pastoralists living in the fragile northern parts of the country are particularly at risk. Women, the old and children under five are worst affected.
The region has suffered from more intense recurring drought and flooding over the years. The affected populations who have witnessed the negative effects now associated with climate change know the consequences of these natural and man-made disasters. The levels of malnutrition and famine have reached their highest percentages.
The distressing experiences of their tales haunt those who dare spare some time to ‘feel them’. One such statement is from Kausa, a 50-year-old grandmother, we met in Elwak, northern Kenya, two months ago.
“As a woman, it hurts to see my children cry with hunger,” she said. “It’s more painful as a mother to tell them that I don’t have any food to give them.”
The sheer need of this situation only confirms my belief that Practical Action’s long term development work, which is reaching out to these vulnerable communities to increase their resilience to climate change and drought, is needed now more than ever.
We know that pastoralism will be seriously affected by climate change but on the degree and locations of these impacts we are less certain. But unless we put in place adaptation to climate change, many millions of the poorest already negatively affected by food insecurity and other challenges will continue to suffer the most.
Tackling food insecurity/hunger requires more than just increasing livestock production and farm outputs. We should all aim to produce sufficient food to supply the full nutritional requirements of the human species whilst attempting to live in harmony with the natural environment and its finite resources.
Simple calculated steps on the choice and use of appropriate technologies can, and always will, yield good results. A vital step is to empower these vulnerable communities and groups to take control and increase their own food production. And to do this, we have to combine the best of all approaches to sustainably to improve the food security situation.
For the pastoralists, whose mainstay is best suited for the fragile ecosystems they inhabit, it is time to put in place pro-pastoralist policies and interventions that will lead to the industry being not only profitable, but competitive, more resilient, better able to provide environmental benefits and give greater choice, innovation and value to producers for them not to rely on relief aid.
Sustaining the above wishes will of course require huge commitment and continued effort by all stakeholders over the long haul. There are no quick fixes. But we know that we can defeat hunger by investing in: interventions that improve food production, marketing and the market systems, and their supply chains that in the long term will empower them to produce more and earn an income that can be used to cater for basic healthcare, education to ensure food security in the future.
2 Comments » | Add your commentInvesting in agriculture to alleviate hunger
2011 Blog Action Day on 16 October – World Food Day – is, naturally, themed around food
Food is a basic human need. Yet for many people across the world, this basic human need is not that easy to come by.
Putting food on the table is a struggle for small scale farmers and pastoralists with little income or natural resources. It seems ridiculous, doesn’t it, that the very people who grow food or rear livestock for food are those that go hungry? Why? Lack of agricultural knowledge and investment, little access to credit, little access to markets, growing competition for land and price volatility.
What is more, where the climate is changing year on year, there are no spare resources to adjust or adapt practices in order to reduce the impacts of droughts, floods and other extreme weather events.
Mothers queue for hours at Mandera District Hospital to get food
I was recently in Mandera, north western Kenya, where I came face-to-face with the terrible reality of drought, and the devastating impact it’s having on families and children.
People hadn’t eaten for days, yet when asked what they needed, not one person said they needed food. In fact, any food aid they received went to their livestock. What they needed was rain so they could grow their crops and feed their livestock.
So it was good to see Practical Action working with agricultural communities to cope with drought by helping to develop drought resistant crops, protect livestock and conserve precious water.
High up in the Andes in Peru, the temperature can drop to as low as -35 degrees centigrade and there is practically no vegetation. Practical Action works with communities to grow food that will survive these harsh conditions.
And in flood prone places like Bangladesh where it’s impossible to grow crops, Practical Action has developed a technology to allow farmers to grow food on flooded land.
We work with entire market systems, often focusing on helping poor farmers and producers to build their abilities to engage with people they do business with and get better deals for themselves and their communities.
Investing in farmers and pastoralists like this ensures not only can they put food on the table but they can also earn more money – working themselves out of poverty.
4 Comments » | Add your comment
CREST awards go global with Practical Action
At the British Science Association’s festival on Tuesday we launched our brand new Global CREST Challenges as new project ideas for students taking part in the CREST award scheme.
In her introductory speech at the STEM in Education evening Katherine Mathieson , Head of Education at the British Science Association introduced Practical Action as one of their key new partners. She said our CREST awards added a new dimension to the CREST award scheme that she was confident would be popular with schools throughout the UK.
CREST awards are given to students who do in depth project work with the support of a mentor on an area they are interested in. Our resources give them ideas for projects relating to science and technology in the developing world. Project areas are divided into five themes
• Water
• Food
• Energy
• Transport
• Shelter
Projects can involve up to 70 hours of work so this is a really high level of engagement for students. To support them we are pointing them towards Practical Answers’ technical briefs, technical information provided by Practical Action to real engineers working in developing countries around the world. Representatives of other organsiations were also impressed with our new resources.
”Part of what we are about is developing partnerships between research scientists and people in developing countries. I really like the idea of work of this nature being developed at a schools level”
David Dickinson, Director SciDev.Net
Please do take a look at our awards and promote to any schools you may have links with.
One third of the worlds food goes to waste!
One third of the world’s food goes to waste!
I am shocked by this statistic from a newly published report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). 1.3 billion tons of food produced for human consumption is wasted each year. Hugh amounts of effort and resources just thrown away. It’s obscene! This energy, resource, this food, is vitally needed.
The FAO estimate that on average each of us in the rich countries of Europe and the USA wastes between 95 and 115 Kgs a year. That’s upwards of 15 stone a year. I had to check the calculation from kg to stones thinking it’s more than lots of people weigh – can’t be right – but it is.
The World Health Organisation estimates that poor malnutrition is associated with 50% of deaths amongst children. While other figures from UNICEF show that a quarter of all children under 5 in the developing world are malnourished which in turn causes the death of 5.6 million children under 5 each year.
Its this contrast which is obscene.
Even in developing countries there is food waste of on average between 6 and 11 kg per person. The reasons for this waste in the developing world include ‘technical limitations in harvesting techniques, storage and cooling facilities in difficult climatic conditions, infrastructure, packaging and marketing systems’.
I could say so much about Practical Actions work on for example zeer pot clay fridges, improving links with markets, etc. But in reading the report (and having just finished reading it I am still shocked) the feeling I’m left with most strongly is the injustice. We in the rich world have the food, we have the technology; in the developing world hungry people don’t have food and they don’t even have the technology they vitally need to protect the meagre supplies they have. This is technology injustice. We must reduce waste but we must also work to help people access the technology they need to protect their vital supplies of food.
To read the full report go to http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ags/publications/GFL_web.pdf
2 Comments » | Add your commentImagine you are a 14 year old boy or girl…..
…..and think about how closely you agree with the statement ‘I should only eat food grown in my country ’ was something the President of the West African Farmers Federation ( ROPPA) was asked to do at the kick off meeting for a new EC project on African Agriculture called EuropeAfrica2.
Along with about 20 other attendees he took part in an activity called a belief circle. Designed by Practical Action Education it will be one of a number of educational activities to raise awareness of how food choices we make in Europe affect farmers in Africa. It’s a three year project and Practical Action will be working with partners from Belgium (VECO) and Italy (Terra Nova) to produce material for schools which can be adapted to fit the needs of a number of European countries.
A belief circle can be used to stimulate discussion on a number of issues related to international development including sustainability in engineering. Looking at the enthusiastic response of the president of ROPPA it certainly stimulates engagement!
No Comments » | Add your commentBlind faith – Biotech scientists’ report skews off target
The UK’s Foresight report, Global Food and Farming Futures, delivered by the UK’s Chief Scientist John Beddington on 24 January 2011, provides few surprises and offers no new proposals.
It could have been different and saved the taxpayer a lot of money had government and the scientific establishment not been so ‘willfully deaf’ about recognising and taking forward the findings of the World Bank and UN sponsored global scientific assessment of the future of agriculture – the IAASTD reports (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development) – approved by the UK government and 57 others in 2008.
IAASTD confirmed the proposals of the small-scale farmers’ movement La Via Campesina for securing future food and realising food sovereignty. It found that small-scale, more agroecological and organic production methods, based on local knowledge and especially women’s skills and protected from damaging globalised markets, were the way forward to avert hunger, improve equity and restore the environment now and in the next 40 years.
What the Foresight report does do, though, is make the almost desperate plea that for UK science to be involved in what it claims is globally relevant research for food and agriculture the UK must embrace GM foods – a somewhat odd conclusion given that most people in the world eat GM-free food produced locally by small-scale food providers – farmers, livestock keepers, artisanal fishers. Perhaps that is the motivation for investing so much time and money in the Foresight process – to force acceptance of GM foods in the UK? Once accepted, and it does not matter if the GMOs proposed by Beddington et al are ecologically attuned or patented or not, it will open the floodgates for the Monsantos and Syngentas to swamp British and European agriculture and our food system with their single gene and rather ineffective seeds and the GM food products that result. Watch the documentary “Food Inc” and its portrayal of the dysfunctional GM dominated US food system that forces farmers to brink of existence, if you want to know what could lie in store
The way forward, as we are informed by the small-scale food providers themselves, is to secure future food through biodiverse, climate-resilient, ecological practices of the majority of local food providers, protected within the framework of food sovereignty. These are the most productive methods using land and water efficiently, increasing agricultural biodiversity and maximising ecosystem functions in every locality. If UK science could get off its biotech pedestal and find ways of supporting social movements, that are working to strengthen their members’ local, diverse small-scale food systems, then it might become relevant.
Practical Action has first-hand experience over more than 40 years of working with small-scale food providers of their ability of to grow enough food for themselves, their communities and provide excess for the market. What they say is their priority is to have protection of their rights: to have access to, and to be able to grow, food, using their GM-free seeds and livestock breeds; to access and use their land and the water they need for their crops, livestock and fish ponds; to have exclusive access to their coastal fishing grounds, which should be protected from industrial fishing boats; and to have their markets protected from speculators and underpriced imports. They want these rights guaranteed in the framework of food sovereignty, and research to support their ecological food provision, so that they can continue to feed the world. Now, there’s a challenge for UK science and for the UK government in its advocacy in international negotiations.
Patrick Mulvany, Senior Policy Adviser, Practical Action
Brussels, 24 Jan 2011
Preserve and survive
I spent some of last weekend making marmalade – an excellent activity for a cold winter day. Listening to Sir John Beddington on the Today programme this morning talking about ways of reducing food waste set me thinking about my weekend’s labour.
Many of our favourite foods have come about because of mankind’s need to preserve a glut of ingredients in an edible format that will keep. Yogurt, bacon, cheese, pickled onions and of course jam have all been developed in response this need.
In rural Africa, the absence of refrigeration makes food preservation techniques all the more vital. Practical Action has been disseminating information on simple food preservation and processing techniques for many years. Fascinating and useful technical briefs are available on Practical Answers on a wide range of items from ricotta cheese to pineapple jam.
The zeer pot is another simple technology, promoted by Practical Action, that helps to extend the life of fruit and vegetables, making the crucial difference to poor families in Sudan.
The answers to feeding the growing population of the planet do not always lie in the laboratories of the rich world, sometimes we need to be reminded of the simple techniques that have been used for centuries by farming communities to preserve the fruits of their labour.
No Comments » | Add your commentWorld Food Day
“Feeding people is easy” says Colin Tudge in his eponymous book – so why do we live with the scourge of hunger?
There is currently enough food in the world but greed limits access. Now, nearly one billion people go to bed hungry each night while both the livelihoods of small-scale farmers, pastoralists and fisherfolk who provide food for most of the world’s peoples, and the environment upon which they depend are being trashed. Enough food is available today but is not distributed equitably. More could be made available for the world’s growing population but only if we embrace localised, ecological production methods – our current lurch into industrial food is unsustainable. We need a radical change in our food system, one that prioritises people’s need for food produced sustainably and as locally as possible. World Food Day, on 16th October, provides an annual reminder of this scourge and our obligations to change the system.
From bottom to top we need change…
Practical Action has worked for many decades with poor communities that are adapting technologies such as compost making, floating gardens and different forms of rainwater harvesting to secure their food supplies. We engage with movements of small-scale food providers, such as La Via Campesina, the global peasant farmers movement, in their call for food sovereignty – increasing control of localized food systems. And we join them in lobbies of governments and international agencies to call for the radical changes needed.
We have the opportunity to promote a better food system. Since the 2007/8 speculation driven global food price crisis and the riots in 30 countries that sparked a rapid response from many fearful governments, food and agriculture have been at the top of the political and news agenda. There are many proposals, meetings, conferences, programmes that are meant to find solutions… but will they?
In September, Governments met in New York to wring their hands over their abject failure to move towards realising the Millennium Development Goals – one of which is to halve hunger.
In October, they meet in Rome to set in motion a new system for governing global food and agriculture so that hunger is eliminated, rural livelihoods secured and the agricultural environment restored, but vested interests will undermine this.
Later, they meet in Nagoya, Japan to lament their failure to halt biodiversity losses yet if they ensured the necessary changes in food and farming towards more ecological and biodiverse production that would reverse these losses and keep biodiversity alive on-farm.
And in December, they meet in Cancun to stem climate change; little will be agreed, yet millions of the world’s small-scale food providers have climate-friendly solutions that will be ignored. While global governance is needed, at present it is not delivering: shadowy corporations, more interested in capturing markets and ecosystems to fuel profits, keep the solutions at bay.
With the heightened popular interest in food, now is the time to take action, contesting the inaction of governments and unreservedly promoting the diverse and productive food system driven by millions of small-scale producers that we know will deliver – food sovereignty. Following in the footsteps of our prescient founder EF Schumacher, who called for a multiplicity of local solutions proliferating into an unstoppable movement for change, Practical Action is committed to help realise this
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