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NUTRITION AND FOOD SECURITY PROJECTS
Initiative in Tanzania and Kenya
Enhancing the Gender Impacts of DEG/GTZ’s Cotton Development Program in Sub-Saharan Africa
Building Assets and Strengthening Women’s Property Rights
Initiative in Tanzania and Kenya
ICRW provided gender input to TechnoServe’s Coffee Initiative in Tanzania and Kenya. The goals of the initiative are to increase the incomes of 180,000 small-scale farmers in East Africa by helping them to produce higher quality coffee with potential to sell in the global market. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the initiative offers help with investments in and setting up wet-mills to process coffee mechanically, training in agronomy, business and coffee quality improvements. Project activities are based in farmer business groups in Tanzania and cooperatives in Kenya. ICRW’s recommendations were designed to enable women, who along with men grow and market coffee, to participate in project services and to derive benefits. ICRW recommended ways to offer women full membership in cooperatives, increase their roles in leadership, improve their participation in training programs and enable them to receive the income from coffee sales. Women reported that the receipt system used to record delivery and payments for coffee enabled them to have better control over income earned than the informal marketing system it replaced.
Enhancing the Gender Impacts of DEG/GTZ’s Cotton Development Program in Sub-Saharan Africa
ICRW is collaborating with the German development agencies DEG and GTZ on a cotton development project that seeks to improve yields and incomes of 265,000 small-scale farmers in Benin, Burkina-Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Malawi, Uganda and Tanzania. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the project is working with private ginning companies to increase cotton productivity and quality. It provides small farmers inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides and training to use them safely and effectively. Depending on the country, the project offers training in improved farm and soil management practices, organic farming and business management. ICRW is designing country gender strategies and making recommendations to ensure that project services, training and benefits such as income reach both male and female farmers, as both are involved in growing and selling cotton.
Building Assets and Strengthening Women’s Property Rights
Secure rights over land, assets, and the income from using them increases women’s economic empowerment and ability to break out of poverty. With funding from an anonymous donor, ICRW is working with partners in Ugand to build the capacity of local and grassroots organizations to raise awareness of women’s property rights, change social norms, and improve access to justice for poor and marginalized women and men. ICRW is also working with partners in Uganda and South Africa to conduct research on gender and property rights, develop methods to better measure what decisions and control women and men have over assets, demonstrate linkages between property rights and domestic violence, and advise program and policy leaders on how to ensure women’s ability to exercise their property rights. Our efforts provide the necessary information and practical tools to catalyze efforts to empower women to claim their rights to property and leverage that property for the well-bing of themselves, their families and their communities.