promoting gender equitable opportunities in agricultural ... - weman

ACCESS TO LABORWomen typically dedicate significantunpaid labor to agricultural incomegeneratingactivities, and in manyplaces, they carry the burden ofdomestic responsibilities as well.Their contribution to producingmarket and food crops is a critical,often unmeasured, labor input inmany value chain programs.Like land, women’s access to labor isoften mediated by their relationshipswith men through marriage andkinship, and they are furtherconstrained in hiring labor by theirrelatively low incomes. Intrahouseholddecision-making plays an importantrole in defining their rights to call onfamilial labor and for shaping howwomen use their own labor. Withoutaccess to additional labor, women’stime-poverty becomes a significantconstraint on productivity.STRATEGIESAssist project participants to work out cooperative labor arrangementsor to use collective resources to overcome labor constraints.box 2In different projects in Tanzania, project participants spoke about findingcreative ways to overcome some of their labor constraints.✪✪ A seaweed cultivation project on the coast helped a producerassociation to get loans from a local bank and to purchase boatsto transport their harvests to the shore instead of carrying them inbags on their heads.✪✪ In a horticultural project, some participants worked on adjacentplots in rotation to help one another meet labor needs. Otherscooperated with neighbors who were not project participants,asking them for help at weeding and harvest times when labor wascritical and helping them on their village plots at other times.Source: INGIA-VC Interviews in Tanzania, April 2009.29