Given its superior importance of digital agricultural solutions to overcome challenges in agricultural activities, many of the solutions are in face of challenges to scale in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).
The paper analyses the linkages that prevail between women’s empowerment, agriculture and household consumption, through a case study of an initiative for empowerment of women farmers, Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana (MKSP), undertaken by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), which became a government-funded national-level programme in 2010..
AARINENA was established to strengthen cooperation among national, regional and international agricultural research institutions and centers to ultimately support the agricultural sector in its member countries. Women farmers significantly contribute to the agricultural development in the WANA region, but often remain invisible in agricultural research and knowledge transfer.
The findings of a Nigerian case study discussed in this paper indicate that the notion of wives of leisure is really not applicable to most women in Nigeria, as women have always worked. Even those in purdah engage in income generating activities within the confines of the compound. It is therefore wasteful to continue to by-pass or displace women in development. Selective mechanisation of difficult processes in agriculture could become a useful method of integrating women into, and enhancing their contributions to, development.
Women in agriculture are far from the end of poverty, zero hunger, quality education, and gender equality — some of the sustainable development goals that can be significantly improved if we achieve greater participation and better working conditions for women in agriculture.
Women play important roles at different nodes of both agricultural and off-farm value chains, but in many countries their contributions are either underestimated or limited by prevailing societal norms or gender-specific barriers. We use primary data collected in Asia (Bangladesh, Philippines) and Africa (Benin, Malawi) to examine the relationships between women’s empowerment, gender equality, and participation in a variety of local agricultural value chains that comprise the food system.
Farmers in Asia like to grow cassava because the crop will tolerate long dry periods and poor soils, and will produce reasonable yields with little inputs. Most farmers realize, however, that cassava production on slopes can cause severe erosion, while production without fertilizer inputs may lead to a decline in soil productivity. Research has shown that cassava yields can be maintained for many years with adequate application of fertilizers, and that there are various ways to reduce erosion.
Xanthomonas Wilt of Banana (BXW) is a complex problem in the African Great Lakes Region that is affecting the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers. Since the first disease reports from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2001, BXW has been studied widely. The majority of these studies focus on the technological or biophysical dimensions, while aspects and influence of socio-cultural, economic and institutional dimensions only recently started to gain attention.
The main goal of the study is to quantify the effects of a) change in nitrogen fertilization rate, b) adjustment of sowing date, c) implementation of new cultivars, and d) supplementary irrigation on maize cropping systems across six African countries including Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia and Burkina Faso. For this purpose, 30 years (1980-2010) of climate data are used as well as soil and management information obtained from global datasets at 0.5° x 0.5° spatial resolution.