Empowering women to fight hunger.

By: Ma. Ceres P. Doyo
Philippine Daily Inquirer
February 29, 2012

March being Women’s Month, it behooves us to celebrate the efforts of the women who are actually and busily working on the ground to produce food for the world. They touch, dig and caress the earth to make it yield flower and fruit. They are a class all their own. They are the unsung heroines who have gone beyond rocking the cradle. They work from seeding time to harvest time, from the rising of the sun to its setting.

Fecundity becomes them. They are key to food security.

From the International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI) comes the good news on the launching of the “groundbreaking index” to empower women to fight hunger. The “Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index” (WEAI) is a first. It is “the first measure to directly capture women’s empowerment and inclusion levels in the agricultural sector.”

The WEAI focuses on five areas: decisions over agricultural production, power over productive resources such as land and livestock, decisions over income, leadership in the community, and time use. Women who have adequate achievements in four of five areas would be considered “empowered.” The Index also takes into consideration the empowerment of the women as compared with the men in the same household.

The Index is being piloted in three countries—Bangladesh, Guatemala and Uganda—which have diverse socioeconomic and cultural contexts and will track the change in women’s empowerment that occurs as a direct result of the US’ Feed the Future initiative to address global hunger and food security. The Index will be used for performance monitoring and impact evaluations across Feed the Future focus countries.

The Philippines is not included in the Index. But a Philippine NGO was ahead in this department.

Some years ago Centro Saka Inc. (CSI) did a study of women in agriculture in the Philippines.  CSI had observed then: “The exclusion of women food producers from official statistics and industry profiles means that they are likewise invisible in rural development processes.”

CSI published “Who are the Women in Agriculture?”  by Maria Daryl L. Leyesa in its 2008 Rural Development Review. The CSI study answered the question, “How empowered are the women in agriculture?”

There are statistics and graphs galore, but the human side is revealed in the women’s answers to questions that are close to home. Among the interesting findings were about gender issues and the women’s aspirations—for the self, family, farm, community and nation.

Read full article @ opinion.inquirer.net