WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. government on May 20 will unveil its forward-looking implementation initiative to tackle global hunger and food security at the Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security. The International Center for Research on Women’s (ICRW) Rekha Mehra, director, economic development, and David Kauck, senior gender and agriculture specialist, are available to comment on what this initiative could mean for low-income women farmers who rely on agriculture to meet their own and their family’s needs and for economic advancement. ICRW is a co-sponsor of the symposium.
Mehra leads ICRW’s research, program and policy work on agriculture, employment and enterprise development, and property rights. She has more than 25 years of international development programmatic and research experience in 15 developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean and was a senior gender specialist in the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Group. Mehra specializes in agriculture and food security; economic empowerment; employment and enterprise development; and assets and property rights.
Kauck is a social scientist, development practitioner and policy analyst with more than 25 years of international experience. His areas of expertise include agricultural development and social change in agrarian societies; food and livelihood security; assessment of the patterns and causes of rural poverty; and public policy and comparative politics.
Both Kauck and Mehra recently returned from consultations in Kenya where women farmers, the organizations that work with them and local technical experts discussed their needs and what worked to improve their agricultural productivity and marketability.
For more than 30 years, ICRW has explored how and why to involve women in agricultural development efforts as farmers, farm workers, agricultural businesswomen and entrepreneurs. Our research helps development organizations, policymakers and others find practical ways to enhance women’s roles in agricultural production and trade, thereby improving their incomes and livelihoods.
Notes to editors:
1. Investing in women farmers promises to yield a double dividend: better food security and greater economic growth. Watch ICRW’s short video “Small Farmers, Big Solutions” on how this can be done.
2. The Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security will be held in Washington, D.C., on May 20. All queries about attendance should be directed to Lindsay Iversen at the Chicago Council at liversen@thechicagocouncil.org
Women usually tend to the coffee trees that pepper the lush fields of Kenya's central highlands - one of the world's most fertile farming regions. But women rarely reap the returns. In the village of Maura, however, there is an exception. Her name is Martha.
A small-scale coffee farmer, this married mother of four has been maintaining a half-acre of coffee bushes for nearly two decades since she inherited the land from her father. She's an anomaly in that sense, since land ownership is traditionally passed on to men. But that custom is changing. "In the past, coffee was a man's crop, and women had no role whatsoever," Martha says. "Now you see women taking more leadership positions."
For Martha, that means earning income from the fields she maintains and having access to local growing cooperatives, through which all Kenyan coffee must, by law, be traded. Most cooperatives are dominated by men, but Martha is yet another exception in that she leads her own 29-member cooperative. She works with other women such as Rosemary Murangiri to increase their yields, improve the quality of their coffee beans and track their progress.
In developing countries, women like Martha do much of the work on farms - planting, harvesting and processing. The situation is no different in Kenya, where the majority of coffee produced here is exported.
For Martha, the money she earns from her coffee sales allows her to buy more nutritious food, better health care and school supplies for her children. Indeed, more communities worldwide recognize that women's contributions in agriculture not only increase crop yields, but also alleviate hunger and improve families' nutrition.
Such outcomes only further fuel Martha's motivation to succeed. "When a woman gets money, [she is] focused on specific things [she] wants to achieve," she says. "She can get it and spend it all on building a household."
