Gender policies critical in Agroecology

Women farmers at the just ended 2019 Zimbabwe National Seed Fair. A lot of people and organisations fear gender and feminism because it is associated with angry people who hate men and yet that is incorrect. Ecofeminism in Agroecology is another lens that needs to be interrogated in order to achieve gender inequality and strengthen women farmers. Photo: Samantha Jim/Fambidzanai Permaculture Centre

Gertrude Pswarayi – Jabson, the Country Coordinator for PELUM Zimbabwe says organisational gender policies are critical in breaking structural barriers to building the Agroecology movement in Africa. Gertrude made these remarks reflecting on a workshop that she attended in Uganda titled, ‘Workshop on gender and food security: polices and experiences.”

“There are deep structural barriers that have to be broken to bring gender equality and equity, especially issues to do with land ownership, asset ownership, access to credit and finance, decision making and allocation of roles in the homestead,” says Gertrude.

Unless organisations have gender policies and gender sensitive food security policies, gender related barriers will continue to undermine the Agroecology movement.

“Agriculture is operating within a patriarchal society where gender roles determine who does what. In such a society, women hardly make decisions. What Agroecology movement builders need are policies that takes into cognizance the empowerment of women so that they are viewed as farmers and not mere labourers,” says Gertrude.

“The men are the ones who go and buy the seed, the women plant and weed. When it comes to marketing the men go and market and they take the money and go and drink. But when you empower a woman to take part in those activities left for men, you are beginning to involve women as farmers rather than just as labourers,” adds Gertrude.

However, gender policies are not merely biased towards empowering women but are rather about creating equality and equity in the homestead to facilitate stronger and tightknit family relations.

“PELUM Zambia association shared their experience on how they are involving men in women’s activities using the gender analysis tool. At the end of the day the labour distribution becomes clear, the men usually realise that women are doing more unpaid labour than them and that realization helps them want to help their women. Putting a value on unpaid work helps men to appreciate what women are doing which is not paid for in monetary value such as cooking, feeding the children, washing clothes,” says Gertrude.

The workshop on gender and food security: polices and experiences was organised by PELUM Uganda in partnership with Bread for the World and Development Links Consultancy. It was held in Uganda from 09 to 12 September 2019 and attended by seven PELUM Country Working Groups namely Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Eswatini, Tanzania and Ethiopia. Its purpose was to allow discussion of the gender and food security polices developed by Bread for the World, share experiences and knowledge and map a way forward for strengthening gender in food security within PELUM Association.

“The policies developed by Bread for the World can be used as frameworks to review the PELUM Zimbabwe gender policy and develop a food security policy that can be used in the implementation of programmes. At the same time we hope that as we continue working we will be able to also support PELUM Zimbabwe members to develop or review their gender polices because there is no food security without gender,” says Gertrude.