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Tag: gender

Inspiring change through agricultural training: Women’s stories from Bangladesh

Written by Nur-A-Mahajabin Khan on . Posted in Features.

More than 40% of the global agricultural labor force is made up of women, and in the least developed countries, two in three women are employed in farming. Yet, despite being the largest contributors to this sector, women’s potential as farmers, producers and entrepreneurs is frequently untapped due to gender inequalities, limited access to farming assets and inputs, low participation in decision-making spaces, and lack of financing and capacity-building opportunities.

Tackling these gendered barriers is critical not only to help women achieve their highest economic potential, but also to feed an increasingly hungry world. Before this year’s Women’s History Month comes to an end, read the stories of three Bangladeshi women—Begum, Akter and Rani—to find out how the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) are empowering them to become decision-makers in their communities, learn new skills and knowledge to boost their incomes, and advocate for bending gender norms across the country.

Embracing agricultural mechanization has improved Begum’s family finances

Rina Begum lives in Faridpur, a major commercial hub in southern Bangladesh. Before starting a business, her financial situation was precarious. Her primary source of income was her husband’s work as a day laborer, which brought in very little money. This, coupled with the lack of job security, made it hard to support a family.

Rina Begum started out in business as a service provider, hiring agricultural machines to farmers.

About five years ago, Begum’s interest in agricultural mechanization was ignited by the farmers in her town, who were earning extra money by investing in farm machinery and hiring it out. Her first foray into the business world was buying a shallow irrigation pump and setting herself up as a service provider. Next, she saw her neighbor using a power tiller operated seeder and decided to try one out for herself. Finally, after taking part in a potential machinery buyer program run by CIMMYT under the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia – Mechanization and Irrigation (CSISA-MEA) and funded by USAID, she took the bold step of purchasing a seeder and adding it to her inventory of machines available for hire.

While her husband learned to operate the seeder, Begum put her business and accounting skills to good use, taking on an essential role in what ended up being the family business and establishing herself as an entrepreneur. Her work defied the established social norms, as she regularly interacted with the mechanics and farmers who came to her for mechanized services. Moreover, she occasionally stepped up alongside her husband to repair and maintain the machines. All this earned Begum a reputation as an experienced service provider, operator and mechanic, and turned her into a decision-maker and a role model to her family and community.

In 2021, Begum used her business profits to pick up the bill for her daughter’s marriage. “I know this job inside-out now,” she says, “and I’m really proud to have paid for the wedding myself.”

This taste of success fueled Begum’s appetite to expand the business even further, pushing her to take part in another training offered by CIMMYT, this time in mat-seedling production. Moreover, Begum, who plans to grow seedlings to sell on to rice farmers this year, has applied for a government subsidy to buy a rice transplanter, which can be hired out for use with mat-seedlings, and increase her stock of agricultural machinery.

With her new skills, Akter is advancing gender equality in Bangladesh’s light engineering sector

At age 18, Nilufar Akter (pictured top) passed her high school certificate and soon after married Rezaul Karim, the owner of a light engineering workshop in Bogura, a city in northern Bangladesh, that manufactures agricultural machinery parts, with a workforce mainly composed of men. Akter’s ambition was to go out into the workplace and make her own money, so when Karim asked her to work alongside him, she agreed and soon became a valuable part of the business. Her primary responsibilities were inventory management and marketing, as well as business management, which she found more difficult.

Reza Engineering Workshop began working with CIMMYT in 2020 as part of CSISA-MEA, an initiative that supports light engineering workshops in Bangladesh with staff development, access to finance, management, and business growth. Under this project, CIMMYT organized a management training at the Bangladesh Agriculture Research Institute (BARI), which Akter attended. With the confidence these new skills gave her, she went back to the workshop and introduced a few changes, including building a computerized finance management system and updating the stack management. Moreover, she also established a dedicated restroom for female employees.

“We need human resources to maintain things in the business—and women can do a fantastic job”, Akter says. “We had no idea what good source of strength women workers would be for the factory. Therefore, if we provided them with adequate facilities, we could create jobs for many women who really need them”, she adds.

Akter’s current priorities are workshop safety and occupational health, two issues she’s tackling using the knowledge she learned in the CIMMYT training. Recently, she’s created some occupational health and safety posters, and established a series of workshop rules. “I used to think I wasn’t cut out for light engineering because it was primarily male-dominated, but I was mistaken”, Akter confesses. “This industry has a lot to offer to women, and I’m excited at the prospect of hiring more of them”, she adds.

Producing better quality rice has boosted the income of Rani and her family

Monika Rani lives in Khoshalpur, a village located in Dinajpur district in northern Bangladesh, with her husband Liton Chandra Roy and their two-year-old child. They farm just a quarter of a hectare of land, and Liton supplements their income with occasional wages earned as a day laborer.

Monika Rani wanted to increase her family’s income to provide better schooling opportunities for her children.

Rani was looking for ways to increase their income so they could give their children an education and a better life. During last year’s boro rice-growing season (December to May), she and her husband joined the premium grade rice production team of CIMMYT as part of CSISA-MEA. The market value and yield of premium quality rice is greater than other types, so when Rani heard that she could make more money producing that variety, she decided to make a start right away. CIMMYT provided her with five kgs of premium seed for the 2021-22 winter season and trained her in premium quality rice production technology and marketing, which she followed to the letter.

Through hard work and persistence, Rani and her husband avoided the need to hire any additional labor and were rewarded with the maximum yield possible. She dried the premium quality rice grain according to buyer demand and sold 1,600 kgs, in addition to 140 kgs to farmers in her town.

“Knowing about premium quality rice production has tremendously changed my future for the better,” Rani explains. “I had no idea that, through my own hard effort, I could have a better life”, she added.

Cover photo: Nilufar Akter is using the knowledge she gained in CIMMYT training to focus on workshop safety and occupational health in her business.

Jannatul Ferdous Asha

Written by Leslie DomĂ­nguez on . Posted in Uncategorized.

Jannatul Ferdous Asha is a Machinery Development Officer working with CIMMYT’s Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) program in Bangladesh. She joined CIMMYT in 2019.

Asha completed an undergraduate degree in agricultural engineering and a masters degree in farm power and machinery at Bangladesh Agricultural University.

Researchers urged to use common gender keywords to improve data impact

Written by Sarah McLaughlin on . Posted in Features.

A common approach toward data structuring is needed to improve access to gender research across agriculture data repositories, a recent report by the CGIAR Platform on Big Data in Agriculture suggests.

Simply adding the keyword ‘gender’ in database descriptions will improve the findability of gender agricultural research, which currently is hard to find due to the inconsistent use of keywords and tagging, said the report’s author Marcelo Tyszler, a (gender) data expert with the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in the Netherlands.

“The data is there. We just can’t find it all! A lack of consistent keywords when tagging research is leading to holes in searches for gender research across CGIAR, the world’s largest network of agricultural researchers,” he says.

“A more systematic and sharper use of keywords when describing datasets will improve findability in searches,” Tyszler states.

As part of the Findability of Gender Datasets report, researchers used a range of keywords, including ‘gender’, ‘women’ and ‘female,’ to search repositories for gender-based data across CGIAR agricultural research centers and compared the search results with a reference list of gender datasets provided by scientists. The results showed that a number of the datasets in the reference list were not found using these search terms.

The results uncovered important inconsistencies in the description of gender research, especially in terms of how data is structured and the detail of documentation provided in CGIAR repositories, says co-author Ewen Le Borgne, a KIT gender researcher.

“Poor data management limits the impact of research to be found, read and incorporated into new research projects,” Le Borgne says, invoking the age old saying, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Ibu Rosalina arranging a Kacang Panjang bush. (Credit: Icaro Cooke Vieira/CIFOR)

The researchers used the findings to promote a standardized approach to tagging and describing their research.

“To improve findability and the impact of data, the gender community should develop a list of commonly agreed keywords that can be used to consistently describe gender research data sets,” Le Borgne explains.

Any dataset containing ‘sex-disaggregated’ data should indicate so in the keywords, said Tyszler.  This is also important for non-gender researchers, to broaden the scope of their impact.

“By facilitating the tagging, findability and accessibility of quantitative and qualitative gender data we hope to facilitate mixed methods research by providing opportunities for both qualitative and quantitative researchers to exchange insights and create a stronger dialogue,” he explains.

Moreover, across the CGIAR there is a wealth of gender specific qualitative data collected through focus groups, interviews and other participatory research. As CGIAR continues to advance gender research efforts, big data is unearthing exciting opportunities for understanding and acting on the relationships among gender, agriculture, and rapidly digitizing economies and societies. However, varied approaches to data management is restricting access, thus limiting the impact data can have when other researchers aim to reuse results to gain deeper insights.

Moving beyond the ‘gender’ tag

Lubuk Beringin villagers cut off palm nut fruits at Lubuk Beringin village, Bungo district, Jambi province, Indonesia. (Credit: Tri Saputro/CIFOR)

Not surprisingly, ‘gender’ was the most common keyword used to describe data found in the study. Although it is essential for researchers to add the ‘gender’ keyword to research descriptions they must also go further in describing what the dataset represents, the researchers indicated.

“‘Gender’ is not precise enough a keyword to find all relevant gender-focused datasets. However, our search shows very few details as to what, about gender, is studied in each project,” says Tyszler.

Studies in other fields, for example nutrition, seem to have much more granularity in the description, with keywords including, nutrient intake, nutrition policy, micronutrient deficiencies, etc. We need a movement like this in gender research, he explained.

Better keywords should be a minimum, but it is also possible to consider the identification of a set of smart ‘gender metadata fields’. These would be input elements that need to be filled in that could ensure all CGIAR datasets properly assess gender dimensions, which would boost the visibility of gender research.

Working as part of the CGIAR Socio-Economic Data Community of Practice, the gender researchers support the exchange of gender-focused data collection tools, with standardized focus groups and interview questions, to improve the potential for comparing different datasets.

Since 2018, the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture and CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research have been collaborating out of mutual interest, to identify ways to unlock the big data potential of gender research.

Together they aim to take a much more active role in shaping up how gender data can be better analysed and reveal new insights, said Gideon Kruseman, the lead of the CGIAR Socio-Economic Data Community of Practice.

“We are promoting a standardized approach by bringing together gender data experts with other socio-economic and even biophysical scientists that may not know how to best engage with gender research and data,” Kruseman explains.

Access the full Findability of Gender Datasets report, which was funded through a 2018 grant to KIT Royal Tropical Institute, by the Community of Practice on Socio-Economic Data with co-funding by the CGIAR Gender Platform.

Cover photo: A woman helps to install a drip irrigation pipe on a farm in Gujarat, India. (Credit: Hamish John Appleby, IWMI)