Policy focus urged for women farmers

A new survey report has called for reorientation of government spending and policy to focus more on women farmers in other to ensure food security.

Other key issues explored in the survey were average agricultural land use sizes by gender; access to, control over, and ownership of productive resources disaggregated by gender. Others include: number of males and females employed by the agricultural sector, both primary and secondary; and sources and levels of incomes for diverse groups in the sector among a host of others.

The report also called on government to formulate and implement the necessary legislation and regulations to stop discrimination in land ownership and tenure against women.

In addition, the report said government should guarantee equal rights to land for men and women regardless of their civil status, and implement policies and programmes that facilitate women’s access to and control over land for agricultural purposes.

Extension services should be overhauled to make them gender-sensitive through increasing the number of female extension agents, setting up gender-sensitive learning and evaluation mechanisms among others.

The report also found that women had low access to credit, urging government to establish a women’s Enterprise Fund to help target credit to women farmers who cannot access credit facilities from the financial sector.

The recommendations were captured in a baseline survey on gender and agriculture in selected agro-ecological zones of the country, based on indicators of the Gender and Agricultural Development Strategy (GADS) and the overall agricultural sector Monitoring and Evaluation Framework.