Rural Women and Science: Enabling and Excluding Factors Marcela Villarreal, Ph. D

Rural Women and Science: Enabling and Excluding Factors

• Marcela Villarreal, Ph.D.

• Director Gender, Equity and Rural Development Division

• FAO

• Women in Science

• Bibliotheca Alexandrina, October 23-24, 2007

Focus on rural areas essential for effective science

• Focus on rural areas essential for effective science

• Societies advance at the speed of the slowest
• Source of knowledge (gendered)

• 75 percent of the world

• poor live in rural areas

• Women: Over-represented among the poor

Making Science benefit People

• Education

• Health

• Policy

• Mechanisms of exclusion

Top Five Causes of Death: U.S.A

Top Five Causes of Death: South & East Asia

Top Five Causes of Death: Africa

Days of work lost to disease, 2005

HIV and AIDS

HIV prevalence in adults in sub-Saharan Africa, 1986-2001

HIV/AIDS affects Food Security

• Loss of agricultural labour

• Impoverishment of household

• Loss of knowledge and skills

• Children taken out of school
• Institutions
• Plant diversity, genetic resources

• Social safety nets undermined

Impacts of HIV/AIDS

• Decline in land cultivated and range of crops

• Increase in cost of hired labour

• Deflated land prices

• Shift to less labour-intensive crops

• Decreased agricultural productivity

• Increased malnutrition

• Increased food insecurity

• Rural development undermined

Gender and land in sub-Saharan Africa

• Land rights governed by social institutions such as marriage

• Levirat: protects male rights to land
• Type of marriage

• Male privileges on land

• Customary prevails over formal

HIV/AIDS impacts on land

• loss of land rights including inheritance rights

• shifts in tenure

• distress sales and shifts in ownership

• changes in land use:

• significant decreases in amounts of land cultivated
• shifts in the types of crops cultivated

Zambia: Household Membership in Cooperatives

Zambia: Average Land Size by Household Type

What to do?

• Understand mechanisms of exclusion

• Address them in policy making

• Link agricultural research with adoption taking into account the specificities of the population: rural, gender, indigenous

• Safeguard local and indigenous knowledge

• Formulate specific policy to ensure that rural women will benefit (need data)

Thank you

Agriculture Sector strategy

• REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY, UNDERLYING CAUSES

• Labour saving technologies and practices

• Low input agriculture; new varieties

• Knowledge systems (orphans)

• Gender issues in particular access to land

• Nutrition and food interventions

• Innovative micro-finance activities in the rural sector

• Capacity building of relevant local and national institutions (including CSOs and MoA)

What to do?

• Research gender, land and HIV/AIDS in different contexts

• Promote the formulation, adoption and enforcement of statutory law that ensures gender equality in the access to, ownership of and right to inherit land

• Ensure equal rights regardless of the type of marriage

• Improve public policy to reach more effectively the most vulnerable

• Promote the legal empowerment of rural women and orphans

• Promote community based approaches that create or reinforce self-esteem and other life skills