Gender

Women-led agribusiness in Samoa reaches global markets

by Taaloga Apa , Isolina Boto , Chris Addison , Emil Jejov and Osseni Senou

Imagine a small women-led organisation in a remote Pacific island nation supplying products sold in more than 3,000 shops in 66 countries. Women in Business Development Incorporated (WIBDI), a non-profit organisation working with 1,000 farming families in Samoa is doing just that, and much more.

Lovin Kobusingye, the accidental entrepreneur

Sharing actionable knowledge helps to turn ideas into reality. The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) has seen powerful returns from bringing together young entrepreneurial thinkers and doers from all over Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

Marthe Montcho: Blogging for social change

Marthe Montcho started her blog, L’Agriculture au féminin or Women in Farming, in October 2013. Despite initially knowing very little about blogging, she quickly became a success as the blog grew in popularity. Montcho’s desire to fill what she saw as an information gap and empower female farmers, particularly in her home country of Benin, led to her winning the Youth in Agriculture Blog Competition (YoBloCo), organised by CTA in 2014.

Three-dimensional knowledge sharing

Leaving an uninspiring office job, Debora Linga received support from CTA to set-up her own NGO, Tribal Peoples Development in Suriname. Thanks to her Saramaccan tribal origins, she is able to truly apply a participatory approach to development. We caught up with Debora to learn how she is generating lasting impact in her local community and how CTA is involving indigenous people in the development of solutions to the issues they face.

Project calls for women entrepreneurs in Africa to build region’s first intelligence network

Wageningen, The Netherlands, 27 July 2018: VALUE4HER a new CTA project will empower women entrepreneurs working in the agricultural sector – agripreneurs – by giving them the skills, knowledge and access to markets, finance and services they need to build their businesses. The project is calling for women-led agribusinesses to register to become part of the first intelligence network targeting women-led agribusinesses in Africa.

EDD 2018: Panel highlights pathways to improve women’s access to ICT in agriculture

CTA leads debate at the European Development Days in Brussels

Gender and open data: Is there an app for that?

Wouldn’t it be handy if you could just switch on that app and see the agricultural (or any other) sector through a gender lens? And what if everyone else also working in the agricultural sector just magically started to use it? Would it make us do things differently, collect different data, push for the release and visualisation of other types of datasets, or would we make sure the data were more equally accessed and used?

Young agripreneurs create markets for farmers in the Congo

To encourage value addition of cassava and provide employment opportunities for local farmers, women and youths in the Democratic Republic of Congo, young entrepreneurs have established eight processing centres across the country.

A passion for porcine production

Accounting for 38% of worldwide meat production, pork is attracting a new generation of African entrepreneurs – bucking the continent’s traditional aversion to the meat.

With Sooretul local products are just a click away

An e-commerce platform in Senegal offers agribusinesses and smallholder farmers access to urban clients looking to buy quality local products.

Don’t leave technology to the men

Dr Eleni Gabre-Madhin, CEO and Founder of blueMoon – Ethiopia’s first youth agribusiness incubator – shares her experience as a woman entrepreneur in Africa’s agricultural sector and stresses the importance that agribusinesses ‘think digital’.

Digitalising agriculture - Bridging the gender gap

Access to digital innovations – from SMS advice services to digital networks that connect women in agribusiness – is enabling women to participate in formal agricultural value chains and improve their livelihoods.

Women and Digitalisation in Agriculture

Research and statistics state that women constitute around 40% of the agricultural labour force in the ACP region and while they make essential contributions to rural economies and the growing advancements in digitalisation - the gender gap in access to information communication technologies (ICTs) continue to widen. This means women farmers, particularly in rural areas, experience difficulties accessing information, financial products and services and markets. They also often do not participate in relevant policy-making.

Women’s agribusiness access index

by Oluwaseun Adedeji , Aurélie Reynier , Michael Sudarkasa and Dorienne Rowan-Campbell

This brief outlines why we need an index to measure and monitor women’s access to the services, markets, policies and other aspects constraining their ability to contribute to and benefit from opportunities in agriculture and agribusiness, especially in the developing world. This would allow policy-makers, women’s development advocates and development partners to better focus their efforts so they make agriculture work for women.

Breaking barriers of access to land for women

by Hellen Mukasa , Aurélie Reynier and Lucia Ogunsumi

This brief looks at the role formal and traditional legal systems in determining women’s access to land and other productive resources and recommends some policy reforms to strengthen the position of women in agriculture and agribusiness.