Agriculture

Kyle Schutter of Takamoto Biogas in Kenya is developing an affordable and reliable 'pay as you go' model to provide a biogas system to women farmers in Kenya. Biogas is a cheaper alternative to traditional fuels, which also take time to collect and utilize, and the biogas system also generates biofertilizer that can increase crop yields by up to 100 percent.

Mumbi Kimathi and a team from Farm Concern International in Kenya will promote farming-related trade between and around villages in rural Africa with their "e-Women Dial-up Initiative." They will develop a mobile phone platform for communications, and for ordering and paying for farming-related materials, products, and services. They will test their approach in 10 villages in Kenya, consisting of 5,000 farmers, and establish a rural distribution network by recruiting vehicle owners to reduce the need for individuals to be mobile.

David Sands of Montana State University in the U.S. will work with Kenyan women farmers to evaluate the performance of a biological control method for eliminating the parasitic weed Striga (witchweed), which can cause up to 80% loss of maize, millet, and sorghum yield in smallholder African farms. Striga is a problem in 43 African countries, and manual weeding is highly time- and labor-intensive. They have previously developed a virulent fungal strain to inhibit weed growth, and shown that it can be easily transported on toothpicks for safe and effective distribution.

James Pimundu and team from Send a Cow Rwanda in Rwanda will test whether educating men and women in Rwanda on gender barriers and social behavior issues stimulates them to use energy-saving stoves for cooking. Although affordable energy-saving stoves are available, they are not widely adopted, possibly because women have limited access to money and lack the power to make decisions. They will train both men and women to inform them of gender barriers in order to reduce inequality.

Brian Lund and colleagues from Oxfam America in the U.S. will work in Cambodia to increase the use of labor-saving weeders by smallholder women farmers there. Rice cultivation is the primary source of food and income for these households, and weeding crops requires substantial time and physical effort. Cheap, easy to use, and effective mechanical weeders have been developed and tailored for smallholder women rice farmers, but they have yet to be widely adopted due to limited marketing and inadequate local fabrication and distribution capabilities.

Sara Delaney of Episcopal Relief & Development in the U.S. and Ghanaian colleagues will promote the use of donkeys with ploughs for draught power to decrease labor and increase productivity of women smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Traditionally, oxen are used as draught animals but they are often unavailable to women due to cost, gender and cultural issues, and their large size makes them difficult for women to handle. The donkey ploughs are suitable for weeding and preparing land for a variety of crops, and can be locally manufactured and maintained.

William Kisaalita of the University of Georgia in the U.S. will redesign a milk churner to make it suitable for women in order to reduce the time and labor needed to make ghee. In many sub-Saharan countries, the morning milk harvested from cattle can be sold in markets, but the milk harvested in the evening needs to be processed into longer-lasting products such as ghee to prevent it from perishing. The current method for churning milk to make ghee is time and labor intensive.

Donna Cohn and colleagues from Hampshire College in the U.S. will develop a cheap and simple threshing machine to more easily and carefully process pearl millet, which is a highly nutritious staple cereal grown in sub-Saharan Africa. To extract the edible grains, pearl millet is currently processed by hand, which is labor-intensive and highly inefficient, causing substantial reductions in yield. They will refine their thresher design, including producing variations for powering it, and field-test prototypes in Ghana for performance.

Tobias Oker and a team from the National Agricultural Research Organization in Uganda will develop a simple plucking tool to more efficiently remove the pods from groundnuts, which is currently done by hand and is labor-intensive and time-consuming for women. They will query farming communities on current harvesting methods to refine their design, and evaluate performance, labor cost, and perceptions in the field using prototypes compared to traditional methods. They will also train users and local manufacturers to fabricate the tools and encourage their use.

Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu of the Smallholders Foundation in Nigeria will improve his Box-in-a-Truck design for extending the lifespan of cassava, which is a major staple food grown by women smallholder farmers, to decrease labor costs associated with cassava processing. Cassava spoils within 24 hours of harvesting, and the traditional method of prolonging life by leaving the crops longer in the ground reduces the nutritional content. He has designed a small, manually transportable truck containing a wire box that is surrounded by moist sawdust and can hold 145 pieces of cassava.