Riddled with opportunity: female leadership in agricultural change

March 8, 2013—For International Women’s Day, Andrew Noble, Interim Director of the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems reflects on the importance of the inclusion of women in natural resource management and agriculture.

Women grow feed for their livestock on the grassy slopes pictured above. Waste generated by the livestock is utilized by biogas digesters that eliminate the need for women to spend hours each day collecting firewood.       Photo: Andrew Noble/IWMI

I had the good fortune of working with colleagues from IRD (Institut de recherché pour le developpement) and Institute for Soils and Fertilizers in Vietnam in 2009.  The goal of the project was to improve conservation and the management of the sloping lands in a region north of Hanoi.  As is common with more conserving approaches to managing land and water resources there was the problem of getting community members to adopt these management approaches.  Our traditional approach was to focus on conserving the sloping lands. That had gone nowhere, really because in part conservation measures are costly and labor intensive to implement.

So, we decided to change our approach and look at the household.  We sat down with women household heads and asked what would be the most enabling change that we could implement to influence their livelihoods.  Their response flipped our conservation approach straight onto its head.

They told us that they spend four to five hours per day collecting firewood for cooking and heating the household—this was their biggest concern and the most time consuming daily activity.  We realized that if we could find a way to eliminate firewood collection, perhaps women would be more amenable to implementing conservation technologies and techniques; especially because we saw that the absence of available labor was hindering the adoption of conservation techniques.

The first thing we thought about was getting propane gas. But the problem with gas is the logistics of supply. The next best thing, which proved to be the winner, was introducing biogas into the household system. We introduced very simple, inexpensive biogas digesters into the household.   Since human waste generated from the household wasn't generating enough gas it was decided to put in a small stall-feeding system: two to three cattle, buffalo, or pigs to be stall fed at the household. The waste that they generated was washed into the bio-digester.

The next challenge was producing feed for the stall-fed animals. This led us straight back to our initial objective of managing the sloping lands—you can produce feed on the sloping lands by cultivating grass.  The grass stabilizes the slope, preventing erosion and runoff, while producing forage for feeding the livestock.

The following loop progressed: the households grew forage on their sloping lands, cut and carried it to feed it to the animals, the waste from the household and livestock was fed into a bio-digester and the women had gas on tap to do cooking and heating.

It was a beautiful system. The key, however, was not starting with the conservation measure, but instead going down to the household level and speaking to the women. By changing their daily lifestyles—by eliminating the need to look for firewood—it had huge positive impacts at the household level.  On top of that you had the positive benefits of a grassed slope, increased livestock production, and improved livelihoods.

There is no doubt that the agricultural sector is becoming feminized.  Instead of approaching a conservation problem by looking at traditional conservation measures, we focused on women and the community. Involving women in projects like this is not a new revelation, but is one that we need to bear in mind.  Can we find similar opportunities in the way we think about agriculture today?  Have you found such opportunities? Please share your stories in the comments section below.