Agriculture

Michelle Winthrop of Farm Africa (Food & Agricultural Research Management) in the United Kingdom will lead a team of community development experts to support 300 women farmers in Ethiopia to access and use existing technologies such as weeders and seed drills that substantially reduce the labor intensity of growing maize and sorghum. There are many cultural and social barriers that have prevented widespread adoption of new technologies in these settings, particularly for women.

Seshie Ahedor of Vivus Ltd. in Ghana will establish an infrastructure to provide cargo motorbikes to rural women farmers for labor-enduring activities such as the collection of crops, and to enable access to remote markets for selling produce. They will set-up mobility collection centers for provision and maintenance, and test on-demand pay-as-you-go versus group-ownership financing models in several villages.

Karime Séré of Intermon Oxfam of Spain, in collaboration with the National Research Institute for Technology and Science in Burkina Faso, will develop more efficient and durable rice husk furnaces and lower-cost rice sorting equipment to reduce the labor intensity of parboiled rice production, the principal livelihood activity of 18,000 Burkinabe women. Rice husk furnaces significantly reduce the time burden of collecting firewood by utilizing rice hulls as a readily available substitute fuel, and also reduce cooking time of rice by around half.

Setegn Gebeyehu of Oxfam America in the U.S. will work with Ethiopian women farmers, the private sector, and the Ethiopian Agricultural Extension System to develop and provide wooden groundnut shellers with substantial labor-saving and economic benefits. By involving all relevant parties in the design and testing process, they aim to develop low-cost, durable shellers that can be locally produced and maintained. This should promote widespread adoption, which has been a barrier to success for other labor-saving devices.

Bert Rivers and colleagues of Compatible Technology International in the U.S. will test whether a recently developed suite of four manually-operated processing devices of pearl millet, which is a major food source in West Africa, is quicker and improves quality and yield compared to traditional methods. This will initially be analyzed in a test site in Senegal or Mali or both, and they will also explore local financing and manufacturing potential for more widespread distribution.

John Gilliland of Vita in Ireland will develop a sustainable financial and social model to implement more efficient cooking stoves in Ethiopia. The stoves, pioneered in Eritrea, substantially reduce timber usage, thereby saving operation time and costs. They will analyze the feasibility of microfinancing as a means of payment, and the logistics of training women in the community to build the stoves, thereby ensuring their longevity. The stoves will be distributed to a selected zone in Ethiopia where they will be evaluated for economic, social, and environmental impact.

Alfred Alumai of Muni University in Uganda, along with Ronald Avutia and Yasin Angua of NilePro Trust, will evaluate the beneficial impacts of a small seeds planter for smallholder women farmers in Uganda. The tool facilitates row cultivation of millet, sorghum, and groundnuts, which saves time and labor associated with weeding and harvesting, and increases production and yield. It was developed with input from women smallholder farmers and has been successfully tested in a pilot study.

Yonghong Wu of the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences in China will develop and test a periphyton biofilm fertilizer in paddy fields in Southern China, as a cheaper and easier alternative to chemical fertilizer. Periphyton is a mixture of microorganisms that grow on submerged objects in water. It is environmentally benign, can store large quantities of nutrients, and inhibit weed growth, making it attractive as a fertilizer.

Vaibhav Tidke of the Institute of Chemical Technology in India will develop a mobile solar powered grain dryer to rapidly reduce the moisture content of grains, which extends storage life. Currently, women dry the harvested grains in the sun, which involves tilting and spreading at regular intervals for up to 45 days, taking up time that could be used for other farming tasks. Open sun drying also reduces quality and is less efficient, leading to significant loss of productivity. He has designed a wheel-loaded movable solar grain dryer that can reduce drying times to one day.

Tomás Chiconela of Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique will help improve rice production in women-run smallholder farms by establishing ducks and azolla plants as environmentally friendly alternatives to fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides. The ducks protect crops from pests and control weed growth, which saves time and energy needed for hand weeding as well as providing meat and eggs to boost protein consumption, and azolla is a proven biofertilizer that acts as a potent organic nitrogen source.