Advancing gender equity justice through care-inclusive farmer field and business schools

 

Tanzanian women spend an average of four hours daily on unpaid domestic work, in contrast to one hour for men. Gendered inequalities are also present in the agricultural sector, where although women constitute nearly half of the agricultural workforce, a significant productivity gap remains. In rural areas, women are often expected to work as unpaid family farm labourers and their productivity and income from agricultural activities is constrained by limited access to men’s labour, low income to invest in productivity-enhancing inputs, and pressure to prioritize subsistence crops over cash crops.

This project aims to address these interconnected issues by providing access to affordable, time-saving technologies and care infrastructure, redistributing unpaid care work within households through gender dialogues, and transforming community structures through collective investments and engagement with government departments.

The project will implement the farmer field business school (FFBS) approach in the Iringa District in Tanzania. FFBS enhances small-scale women farmers’ productivity and profitability through a gender-transformative, market-oriented and nutrition-sensitive training curriculum. This practical approach fosters knowledge-sharing, experimentation and peer learning, and incorporates feedback mechanisms for communities to hold their extension service providers accountable. The project will also address the intersection of care work, gender norms and power dynamics and how these drive differences in household earnings, expenditures and decision-making. It will also generate evidence at the intersection of food systems and unpaid care work, which can inform the development of gender-responsive agricultural policies and programs.

The project is supported under the Scaling Care Innovations in Africa partnership co-funded by Global Affairs Canada and IDRC. Scaling Care Innovations is a five-year partnership aimed at scaling tested and locally grounded policy and program innovations to redress gender inequalities in unpaid care work in sub-Saharan Africa.