Ada Lovelace Day Post: African women, key to achieving Green Revolution

Dr. Florence Wambugu is the CEO of Africa Harvest and this year's Yara Prize laureate , as a key contributor to the fulfillment of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals “MDG”.

For Africa's Green Revolution to succeed, women must be involved and empowered. It is important for women farmers to be involved in decisions about which technology will drive the Green Revolution. For example, women-friendly technologies that help reduce on-farm workload are likely to be successful. Equally, technologies that increase and tilt ownership of assets to women are likely to get their support.

Africa Harvest believes that the continent must use every weapon in the agricultural arena to fight poverty, hunger and malnutrition. We believe biotechnology is one of the technologies with the potential to greatly empower women.

African women are the glue that binds the society's fabric. Even in today's African urbanized societies, women are the backbone of family and national stability. African women contribute about 70% to food security but despite this, women continue to bear the brunt of an ever worsening food security situation.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, women have less access to education, labor, fertilizers and other inputs that are available to their male counter parts. Despite the enormous contribution women make to agriculture, they are often forgotten and rarely consulted when new technologies are being developed. Researchers maintain that even though women are the pillars of Africa's agricultural sector, they lack technological skills to boost productivity. Empowering farmers especially women is therefore important for uptake of technologies that enhance agricultural productivity. Agricultural productivity is measured as the ratio of agricultural inputs to agricultural outputs. While individual products are usually measured by weight, their varying densities make measuring overall agricultural output difficult. Technology can help women farmers by reducing their workload and increasing their productivity and income.

As such, Africa Harvest believes that women have a very big role to play in Africa's Green Revolution. We successfully focus on the use of technology to improving crops, and we have witnessed the importance of women. For example, the technology transfer of high-yielding, disease-free tissue culture banana has been successful, partly because banana was previously viewed as a 'woman's crop'. The objective of this project was to increase the banana yields and incomes to growers by providing institutional framework as a support to the production programme.

Africa Harvest's TC Banana Program has changed the paradigm where division of labor and male farming system confined women to subsistence food production and men to cash crop cultivation. Banana is today a cash crop; studies show that men--who previously ignored this crop--are showing renewed interest. Africa Harvest has trained women on appropriate technology and also provided business training as well as start up loans and access to market their bananas. This has contributed to the reduction of poverty and provided food, education and better health for many families.

Source: The Free Library