GENDER AND PARTICIPATION IN
AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT PLANNING
KEY ISSUES FROM TEN CASE STUDIES
Acknowledgements
The ten case studies synthesized for this paper result from the work of so many people, over so many years, that it is impossible to acknowledge them all. However, it is worth recalling that the principal actors were the farmers, women and men, who shared information about their constraints and opportunities for equitable and sustainable livelihoods. A second important group of actors were those rural development and extension agents who, together with project staff, were responsible for facilitating the processes described here. A third group of actors were those who analysed, synthesized and wrote about these experiences, those who edited the original case studies, and those who translated them into English, French and Spanish.
A special acknowledgement goes to the Government of Norway who provided the financial support for the preparation of this paper as well as for all of the case studies.
This review of ten case studies. produced for the Workshop on Gender and Participation in Agricultural Development Planning: Harvesting Best Practices sponsored by the Women in Development Service of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and held in Rome, 8 to 12 December 1997, was written by Jeanne Koopman, International Consultant, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
The opinions expressed in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Planners throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Near East are increasingly called upon to engage in "bottom-up" participatory planning that will benefit women as well as men. In fact, however, gender-responsive participatory agricultural planning is rarely practised. Why? One important set of reasons revolves around the question of method. It is not clear just how to conduct participatory planning or how to change current planning procedures to make them more responsive to gender and other differences among farmers. But, as the projects represented at this workshop amply demonstrate, progress is being made.
This paper reviews ten case studies written about FAO field projects that tested methods and tools for gender-sensitive participatory agricultural planning. The projects' shared goal was to facilitate gender-responsive agricultural planning. Three important challenges influenced how these agricultural development projects were implemented: the lack of disaggregated information appropriate for gender and socio-economic difference-responsive planning; the inadequate mechanisms to link or scale up the priorities of women and men farmers to district and national planning processes; and the lack of capacities, at all levels, to institutionalize gender-responsive participatory agricultural development planning. The projects developed and tested participatory methods to address these challenges.
This review focuses on project successes and difficulties in four areas: producing gender-disaggregated information relevant to planning; training agricultural officers and field staff in participatory methods; linking farmers' priorities with planning processes; and promoting institutional change.
The paper is addressed to workshop participants, agricultural planners and all those who are interested in participatory, gender- and socio-economic-sensitive approaches to agricultural development. Its two objectives are to:
· facilitate workshop discussions in which we can learn from the best practices and the problems revealed in the project case studies;
· promote a wider dialogue on how best to pursue the goal of increasing the responsiveness of agricultural planning to the priorities of different groups of women and men farmers.
The next section sets a framework for these discussions by briefly describing the major processes involved in agricultural planning and by indicating what we mean by "gender- and difference-sensitive participatory agricultural planning".
The following sections' comparative analysis of the projects is organized around the issues that each case study considered:
· the policy environment;
· the "entry point" or where the project entered the agricultural planning process;
· the tools and methods used;
· capacity building, especially training in gender- and difference-sensitive participatory methods;
· the gender information produced;
· linkages with planning processes and related organizations;
· institutionalization.
The paper concludes with a review of best practices.
Although there are important linkages between agricultural policy-making and agricultural development planning, the focus in this paper is on agricultural planning per se.
Agricultural policy-making Policy-makers are the elected or appointed officials, high level civil servants and, in some cases, aid donors who wield the political and financial power to: · set goals for the agricultural sector (such as growth, food security, regional equity); · develop strategies to pursue these goals (such as giving priority to export crops, commercial farms, smallholders); · set price, input, credit and land policies designed to induce farmers, technicians and others working in the sector to take decisions that will achieve the policy objectives. |
Agricultural planningPlanners develop national, regional, district or investment plans and projects as well as line agency programmes that are compatible with the goals, strategies and policies set by policy-makers. Planners may be economists, social scientists or technical specialists employed in the planning units of the ministry of agriculture or its various line agencies, such as extension or livestock services, or in national or international development NGOs and agencies. Managers may also be involved in planning, especially in programme planning for line agencies. |
There are official government planners, but planning also takes place in international organizations (e.g. FAO) as well as in private agencies, NGOs, commercial establishments and on individual farms. Thus, to some extent, everyone involved in the sector is a planner. Nonetheless, to be clear, we will reserve the term "planner" for the government planner and use the term "stakeholder" to designate all other actors and interest groups in the agricultural sector.
Stakeholders Stakeholders are all persons and organizations who stand to gain or lose from a particular policy, programme or project. Many people and groups have a "stake" in the results of agricultural planning, including men and women farmers from different socio-economic, ethnic or age groups, livestock owners, commercial farmers, agricultural wage labourers, fishers, employees and owners of agricultural processing or marketing enterprises, farmers' organizations, elected officials, civil servants and representatives of international agencies. |
Farmers Farmers, as referred to in this paper, are men and women who engage in small-scale, livestock, crops and fish production and processing as their primary economic activity and who have limited land, capital, educational and labour resources. |
In the 1960s and 1970s, macroeconomic national planning was highly promoted and widely practised. National plans set growth targets, broke them down by sector, analysed macroeconomic constraints on growth, and developed national and sectoral strategies. Large-scale public, parastatal and private-sector projects were often included in the ubiquitous five-year plans, but projects were rarely planned in detail since their funding was usually not yet assured. The lack of planners trained in project preparation was an important constraint on overall agricultural planning (FAO, 1984: 8). Large projects were often included in the plan specifically to attract international financing.
The national and agricultural sector plans often included price, input, research and extension policies designed to promote rapid economic growth. The emphasis on growth kept the focus on better endowed regions, large commercial enterprises and export sectors, sometimes exacerbating regional and local income differentiation and often failing to alleviate poverty (Labonne, 1988; FAO, 1985). The smallholder subsistence sector was generally neglected.
This situation changed in the 1970s when major donors began to favour a new breed of integrated rural development (IRD) projects. IRD projects included both social and economic activities and usually focused on the smallholder sector, sometimes even on subsistence-oriented farming systems. The major objective, however, was still to increase the amount of marketed output. Nonetheless, there was a new focus on targeting specific population groups - the poor, the landless, women and youth - with a wide array of services. In some cases, especially in Latin America, these groups were expected to participate in the design of the services they needed (Young: 1993: 47). In most cases, however, participation was not carried down to the village level, and most "services" targeted at women were related not to their productive activities, but to health, education, water supply, etc., that is, to women's reproductive concerns.
A new form of rural development research, the farming systems research and extension approach (FSR/E), was also developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, bringing a call for interdisciplinary and more participatory methods to the agricultural research establishment. The impact of FSR/E on agricultural planning and on major agricultural sector projects, however, was limited. This was because most large-scale agricultural projects either targeted or in practice worked mainly with so-called "progressive farmers", who were almost invariably better-off male smallholders or larger commercial farmers. Furthermore, FSR/E was rarely able to integrate all members of the farm household into its analysis or to consider male-female relations at the intra- or interhousehold level (Young, 1993: 52).
Nonetheless, feminist critics of male-biased development projects found inspiration in the FSR/E approach for their work in developing gender analysis. So did the proponents of participatory methods who were seeking ways to make project planning more "bottom-up" (Young, 1993: 47-48). The result was the beginnings of the gender and agricultural literature and the gender and planning literature, as well as the beginnings of a process that was to transform many of the methods and tools of rapid rural appraisal (RRA) into a method that became known as participatory rural appraisal (PRA).
In the 1970s, concern with both poverty and inter-regional disparities also led to the emergence of decentralized, area-based agricultural planning (regional and/or district planning), beginning in India and other parts of Asia in the 1970s and moving to Africa and other parts of the developing world in the 1980s (FAO, 1985; Labonne, 1988). The objectives of area development planning combine growth with poverty alleviation and regional "balance" or equity. Participatory planning methods, however, have rarely been used in decentralized planning processes. Like national plans and projects, regional and district plans, as well as integrated rural development projects, have usually been developed in a top-down manner (Maetz and Quieti, 1987; Belshaw, 1988; Bendavid-Val, 1990 and 1991).
The debt crisis of the 1980s shifted the emphasis of government policy (with considerable prodding from international creditor agencies) back to growth, an objective that was pursued by focusing development efforts on regions, farm enterprises and crops with the highest "growth potential", i.e. private-sector commercial agriculture and export crops. This time, however, growth was to be pursued by changing the structure and reach of the government itself, specifically by reducing government and shifting many of its functions to the private sector. Thus, IMF/World Bank-led demands for stabilization and structural adjustment led to widespread reductions in government budgets and staff. Major efforts at national planning were discouraged.
The resurgence of policies to favour commercial and export agriculture again exacerbated disparities among regions and households. Eventually, the serious negative effect of many "adjustment" policies on the poor was recognized. This stimulated interest in local area planning and generated proposals for microprojects to alleviate poverty. Among the methods advocated to plan both medium- and small-scale area-based projects were RRA (Conyers, 1993: 108-9) and, more recently, PRA.
The tools of RRA were used mainly with village leaders and local informants from district line agencies, resulting in a strong male bias. The same was true of the earlier efforts to use PRA, although this is changing. However unintentional, a male bias has also permeated in regional and district planning (Maetz and Quieti, 1987: 37-8; Bendavid-Val, 1990: 7 and 1991: 49).
From the late 1970s, evaluations of the negative effects of growth-focused policies and projects on women produced a feminist critique that was soon extended into a comprehensive critique of planning itself (Palmer, 1979; Buvinic, 1986). The critique was often accompanied by suggestions for new ways to engage in planning, complete with a set of tools for gender analysis and gender-sensitive planning (Overholt et al., 1984; Poats et al.,1988; Young, 1988; Feldstein and Poats, 1989; Ostergaard, 1992; Moser, 1993; Young, 1993). This, of course, is the work from which the projects represented in this workshop have drawn both inspiration and methods.
During the 1980s, increasing concerns with poverty and the need to understand its effects from the point of view of local communities led to a reworking of the methods of RRA into a new set of planning tools called PRA.1 The feminist development community quickly realized the power of PRA methods for highlighting gender issues and in the 1990s produced the PRA/GA literature (Feldstein and Jiggins, 1994).
The mainstream agricultural planning literature, while promoting decentralized area planning for poverty alleviation and participatory methods for a better integration of local priorities into area plans, has rarely taken the gender-focused literature into account (FAO, 1986; Maetz and Quieti, 1987; Belshaw, 1988; Bendavid-Val, 1990 and 1991). A few works mention the importance of women, but do not integrate gender analysis into the body of analysis or into the methods advocated. This is reminiscent of the way "women's components" were attached to projects that otherwise ignored gender issues.
In the real world as well, gender analysis has rarely, if ever, entered the planner's tool kit. Neither, in fact, has PRA, except in a very preliminary manner that tends to confine participation to the official village leadership. Current decision-makers and senior planners have been far more highly trained in the technical aspects of projecting supply and demand, setting targets and allocating resources, than in taking socio-economic and gender differences among farmers into account in agricultural planning. Our case study experiences confirm that many people from this older generation of decision-makers are sceptical of bottom-up planning and especially of the need to integrate gender analysis into agricultural planning processes. Several case studies also remarked that agricultural officers and field workers had never previously been exposed to either PRA or gender analysis.
The projects have demonstrated the relevance of these tools for gender-responsive planning. The next challenge is to work out how planning procedures can be adapted to become more responsive to the information the tools can generate. With that challenge in mind, the remainder of this review focuses on the major features of different types of agricultural planning.
The structures, processes and relative importance of the different levels of planning differ from country to country. Any project attempting to work with this system needs to study it in its local context. Nevertheless, a basic familiarity with the common features of most agricultural planning systems can help us determine where and to whom the information produced by gender-sensitive participatory processes can be directed in order to increase the responsiveness of planning to gender and other differences among farmers.
Development planning, including agricultural planning, may be divided into two basic categories: centralized and decentralized. In a centralized planning system all major policy, planning, programming, and budgeting decisions for the sector as a whole and for subsector line agencies are made at the national level. In a decentralized system, responsibility for a large number of planning, programming and budgeting decisions is devolved to regional and/or district levels. A separate regional or district planning apparatus may be formed to develop an area-based investment plan. The decentralization of planning and agricultural administration tends to bring problem analysis and planning closer to regional and local realities.
Because the decentralization process is spreading geographically (at present, particularly in Africa) and intensifying in areas where it has long been advocated (in parts of Asia and Latin America), and because it is a form of planning that is often introduced with an explicit goal of increasing farmers' participation in planning, its main outlines are reviewed here.
In a decentralized system, the national level focuses on setting goals and targets and on formulating agricultural policies to guide government agency programming and project planning and to influence decision-making in the private sector. National planners also provide budgetary and technical support and coordination, monitoring and evaluation services for lower levels of planning. They are often involved in designing large-scale projects at national and regional levels.
Regional or area planning is the middle level of a decentralized planning system, charged with aggregating and coordinating plans and programmes initiated at lower levels and attempting to reconcile them with the policy and budget constraints set at the national level. Regional planners may also be involved in the design and implementation of nationally designed projects operating in the region. Regional planners usually provide technical and administrative assistance as well as training for district planners and for institutions involved in local planning and project development.
District planning takes place in subsector line agencies, as does district extension programming, and in multi-agency institutional or community settings where local projects are designed and implemented. At this level, elected local councils, NGOs, private organizations and farmers' organizations often participate in project and programme planning alongside district planners and line agency technicians. In the past, the lack of funding for more independent programming and planning at local levels has inhibited district planning but, as government administrative decentralization has been increasingly pursued, more funding decisions are being passed down to regional and district levels. A more binding constraint on local area planning, especially on integrated rural development planning (which may involve crops, livestock, natural resource management, research, extension, credit, marketing and social sectors in a single project) has been the lack of experience in working in multidisciplinary teams and a lack of appropriate planning methodologies (Maetz and Quieti, 1987).
Village- or community-level planning is still rare. As decentralization takes hold, however, village planning may well become increasingly important. It has two basic functions: providing information for higher planning levels by means of participatory problem analysis; and setting community priorities and action plans that can be carried out either independently or with some outside assistance.
The increasing importance of decentralized planning is one of three main elements in the current context of agricultural planning.
Major elements in the current planning environment · new constraints, especially a squeeze on operational funding and the loss of staff in a wide range of government agencies as a result of structural adjustment; · new approaches, government administrative decentralization and regional and district interdisciplinary planning; · new demands, for participation, bottom-up planning and taking women into account. |
While all these elements do not necessarily fit all countries, and every element is not necessarily new in all contexts, they are common enough to constitute a relatively new planning environment. This environment presents an important opening for gender- and socio-economic difference-responsive, participatory agricultural planning.
The challenge to planning to become more participatory has several sources. Among the most compelling is the failure of many development projects and programmes to meet their objectives when farmers fail to respond as expected. The old habit of blaming farmers' ignorance and backwardness has lost its appeal, especially in the face of evidence that many farmers, such as the resource-limited, many women farmers and some pastoralists, face constraints that make it impossible for them to respond as expected. In addition, successful community development programmes based on participatory planning, implementation and monitoring processes have demonstrated that rural communities are indeed interested in development and will work to make plans and projects succeed as long as those plans respond to local priorities. Finally, the push for democratization has added an important political dimension to the demand for more participatory, bottom-up planning.
The admonition to take women into account also stems in part from the lacklustre performance of projects that have ignored women's roles in farming systems. Two decades of gender-sensitive project evaluations have resulted in a growing recognition that many projects, while improving men's situation, have actually made women worse off. Other factors have gradually shifted attitudes at both international and national levels, among them pressure on donors and governments to respond to women's needs as farmers and the momentum created by the major international conferences on population, the environment and women. The rapid growth in women's organizations throughout the world and their growing links with one another have added a political thrust.
A far less positive factor in the current environment is the often extreme pressure on governments to reduce their budgets in order to meet structural adjustment and stabilization targets. This factor has an impact at many levels, from cutting into planning funds and personnel, to prioritizing "men's" export crops and restricting funds for government services such as extension, marketing and credit for women farmers. The implication for gender-sensitive participatory planning methods is that much more attention must be paid to cost-effectiveness in generating and using information that can promote gender-responsive policy, programme and project development.
While the new voices in this complex planning environment have, in many places, evoked a positive political response, the question for planners is still, what exactly should be done? That there are no easy answers is obvious. There are, however, promising new approaches for involving different groups of farmers, including women and the poor, in agricultural planning. The projects represented at the workshop demonstrated the relevance and usefulness of several gender- and difference-sensitive participatory approaches. They are reviewed in the next section.
Before reviewing the projects, however, we need to be clear about what we mean by different terms. Most importantly we need to clarify what we mean by "gender- and difference-responsive participatory agricultural planning". We will begin by looking at each component.
Participation is a term that is notoriously broadly interpreted. It may even be interpreted differently by different stakeholders in the same agricultural planning process. An FAO study of multilevel planning for agricultural development in Asia and the Pacific (FAO, 1985: 89-90, quoted in the box) reviews the various ways participation is practised in planning processes.
The FAO study points out that as of 1985, "experience in the various countries shows that the modes of participation in 4) and 5) have not effectively materialized" (ibid. p. 90). While this may no longer be strictly true, participation even at level 3) is still quite rare. In planning projects to promote participatory agricultural planning, we need to analyse current levels of participation to understand better the changes that will be required to reach higher levels. We also need to be clear about what we mean by participation.
Levels of people's participation in agricultural planning 1) participation limited to elites only (mostly elected representatives); 2) participation in which people are asked to legitimize or ratify projects identified and formulated by government, but do not participate in the detailed planning and management of the project; 3) participation in which people are consulted from the very start and also actively participate in the planning and management of projects; 4) participation in which representatives from different strata of society/occupation groups find their places in all planning/coordination/evaluation mechanisms devised at the various levels including the highest policy-making level; 5) participation in which the representatives in 4) actually control the decisions at all levels. |
Projects to improve the responsiveness of agricultural planning to the priorities of men and women farmers from different socio-economic groups need to foster participation among as wide a range of stakeholders as possible. The ideal would be to have the active involvement in planning of representatives from all groups with a stake in the policy, programme or policy. Some of the projects at the workshop experimented with the analysis of difference, an important method for identifying and involving different stakeholders at the community level.
The analysis of difference The analysis of difference is a method to identify different stakeholder groups at the local level. Gender, age, wealth/income, ethnic or religious affiliation, caste, occupation and education are indicators of difference. One tool for an analysis of difference is participatory socio-economic ranking, in which community representatives divide the households of an area into different categories and then define the criteria on which their categories were based. Thus, the community itself identifies the important parameters of socio-economic difference in the area. This tool allows a planning team to form small homogeneous focus groups representing the most important differences in socio-economic status. When each focus group uses the tools of participatory planning separately, the chances that each group's particular constraints, resources, needs and priorities will be appropriately analysed and represented are greatly improved. |
Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) is a set of tools to facilitate a research and action process managed by the local community. It is an exceptionally relevant and powerful method for involving communities in the information generating, analysis and priority setting phases of agricultural planning. Specific tools such as village resource maps, problem trend lines and institutional profiles assist in the analysis of community issues. Other tools such as farming systems diagrams, seasonal calendars, daily activity profiles and household resource maps can be combined with gender analysis to facilitate the analysis of the livelihood systems of different socio-economic groups. A third set of tools help communities and different socio-economic/gender-based focus groups to identify and prioritize their problems and resource needs and to develop group or community action plans. This method is described in more detail in the next section. PRA is very similar to the French méthode accélérée de recherche participative (MARP). They are used interchangeably in this paper.
The current policy environment advocates "involving women", but does not necessarily promote an analysis of gender issues in policy, programme and project planning and implementation. Gender analysis studies the different roles and responsibilities of women and men, the differences between men's and women's access to and control over resources, and the consequent variations in constraints, needs and priorities. Incorporating gender analysis into the tools of participatory agricultural planning helps planners to understand how the structure of policies and programmes needs to be modified if women are to be involved equally with men. It can demonstrate why some projects and policies have negative consequences for women.
Gender analysis identifies established patterns of gender-based inequality in economic life. This can be threatening to more advantaged stakeholders in the agricultural planning process. In many cases, senior staff or planners have been found to be more resistant to gender analysis than farmers and government field staff. In some cases, however, the use of gender analysis tools at the community level may foster a level of conflict that can be inimical to women's interests. To avoid such negative outcomes, local women should decide whether or not specific gender analysis tools are best used in mixed sex settings or by women alone. Where gender relations are hierarchical (the vast majority of cases), participatory methods such as PRA should always include a separate women's problem analysis and probably a women's community action plan as well.
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What is gender- and difference-responsive, participatory agricultural planning? It is agricultural development planning that responds to the different priorities of different groups of farmers where these differences are based on gender, age, ethnicity, race and other socio-economic factors. Planners are aware of these differences and of how best to respond to them because these different groups of men and women farmers have taken an active part in planning agricultural development activities. |
We do not really know. A review of books and reports available at FAO and in major library collections conducted for this paper found very little attention to gender issues in the mainstream agricultural planning literature. Two textbooks on agricultural planning and on agricultural policies published in the early 1990s (Mollett, 1990; Ellis, 1992) have chapters on women, but only Ellis has integrated gender issues into each topic. A review of ten recent volumes in FAO's Training Materials for Agricultural Planning series found that some volumes treat gender issues explicitly while others subsume gender issues under the broader category of socio-economics. The Guide for training in the formulation of agricultural and rural investment projects, published in 1986, stresses the need to engage different socio-economic groups in participatory methods of information generation, but neglects gender issues.
In contrast to the neglect of gender issues in the mainstream agricultural planning literature, there is a rapidly growing literature specifically focused on gender and agricultural planning from what I will call, for want of a better name, the "women's movement". Beginning with the 1970s' critiques of the negative effects of development projects on women (Palmer, 1979) through the pioneering text outlining the so-called Harvard framework for gender analysis (Overholt et al., 1985), we have seen an explosion of literature on gender issues in agriculture, much of it with practical guidelines and tools for gender analysis and project planning.2 This, of course, is the literature from which the projects represented at this workshop have taken their inspiration, as well as many of their methods.
The major issue raised by the very existence of this extensive literature is: why has it not had more of an impact on the mainstream agricultural planning literature? Much of the answer involves timing. The great bulk of the gender and planning literature has been produced in the late 1980s and the 1990s.3 Another part of the answer may reside in the isolation of women's issues in technical and academic discourse, a fate that has been shared by gender. However, the rapidly growing literature on gender, agricultural and planning has had a significant impact in helping to build the policy environment in which many governments are now mandating planners to increase participation and to involve women.
Six of the ten projects represented at this workshop were designed with the goal of influencing the responsiveness of some level of agricultural planning to the priorities of women and men farmers (Namibia, Nepal, Ethiopia, India, Tunisia, Costa Rica).4 The Honduras case also had important policy impacts in its later phases. The remaining projects (Pakistan, Senegal, Afghanistan), although they did not focus on influencing planning, used participatory and gender-sensitive methods that contribute to our analysis of what works, how and why.
This section analyses the factors that affected project outcomes, both successes and problems. It uses the analytical categories (entry point, tools, capacity building, gender information, linkages and institutionalization) that all case writers incorporated in their studies.
The goal of most projects was to increase the responsiveness of agricultural planning to the priorities of men and women farmers, focusing on those with few resources. In most cases the goal reflected national policy directives to increase the participation of farmers and to make sure that women's interests were reflected in plans and policies. Thus the projects were attempting to facilitate the realization of a goal shared by national planners.
The approach chosen was to demonstrate the relevance and usefulness (to agricultural planning) of participatory, gender-sensitive and socio-economic difference-sensitive participatory methods. Some projects also tried to strengthen the constituency for gender-responsive planning by working to strengthen women's groups. Most trained local staff in the methods and tools used.
Methods varied by project, but most included gender analysis (GA) and PRA or MARP. Some projects formed socio-economically similar and gender-specific focus groups so that PRA tools could be used separately - not only by men and women, but by poor men, young women and so forth.
Tools associated with these methods were: chosen from those already described in the literature; combined (gender analysis tools, for example, were incorporated into PRA tools); or adapted to reflect local situations and focus group differences. In some cases, new tools were invented, reflecting the fact that PRA and GA tools are evolving rapidly. Examples of specific tools used are described below.
In Namibia, the Improving Information on Women's Contribution to Agricultural Production for Gender-Sensitive Planning project (1995 to 1997) focused on influencing the responsiveness of national agricultural planning. The project's hypothesis was that information gathered using participatory research could make the gender and socio-economic relationships that structure farming systems more visible to planners. The project collaborated closely with another FAO project that was training agricultural extension staff in participatory extension training techniques in an effort to foster a client-responsive extension approach. "Client" was understood to include women farmers, women heads of households and rural youth. Trained extension workers conducted PRAs in four agro-ecological zones. University researchers incorporated the PRA-generated information into region-specific case studies, and regional and national workshops brought it to the attention of agricultural planners.
The policy and planning context in Namibia was highly favourable; there was a good fit between the gender-sensitive, participatory orientation of the National Agricultural Policy (NAP - which was passed in the project's first year) and project efforts to train agricultural officers in gender-sensitive, participatory methods. Passage of the NAP facilitated the project's efforts to interest planners and senior agricultural staff in gender-sensitive participatory tools for agricultural planning.
The Nepal project (1996 to 1997) focused on increasing the gender-responsiveness of district-level planning. Although FAO was assisting the government in formulating district agricultural plans during the project's implementation period, it was not associated with that effort. The project was located in the Women Farmers' Development Division (WFDD) of the Ministry of Agriculture. Project staff trained district officers from a wide variety of agencies (agriculture, livestock, extension, irrigation, cooperatives and the agricultural development bank) in PRA and gender analysis. Trainees then conducted seven village-level PRAs in Nepal's three agro-ecological zones. District workshops had been planned to bring farmers together with district planners to discuss the community action plans resulting from the PRAs, but they were cancelled under the pressure of time. Top planners who attended a project-sponsored national workshop suggested that although there is a will to make planning gender- and needs-responsive, planners do not yet know how to change agricultural planning procedures. The project only had time to show how information could be generated, not how planning might be changed in response.
The India Development of Small-scale Livestock Activities project (Sikkim, 1995 to 1996) also combined GA with PRA, and added the rapid appraisal of tenure and participatory monitoring. When the project was initiated, Sikkim, one of India's most isolated Himalayan states, had a policy environment in which agricultural policies and programmes paid no attention to gender roles and responsibilities. No information was available in the Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Services Department (AHVS) about gender- or age-specific roles in farming or livestock rearing systems. The project trained a small group of mid-level field staff as trainers, using practical, field-based tools for looking at differences in access to livestock production resources by gender and by age. These trainers trained local field staff, and together they conducted PRAs aimed at understanding farmers' constraints, priorities and training needs for goat and chicken husbandry. Planners in the Forestry and the Rural Development Departments as well as the AHVS all became interested in the effectiveness of participatory methods for generating gender information that is relevant to line agency programming and regional planning.
In Tunisia the on-going Policy and Strategy in Favour of Rural Women project (1996 to 1997) was mandated by government to assist in integrating rural women's issues in the Ninth Five-Year Plan. In the early 1990s, the government had decentralized decision-making and management to the regional level and encouraged local experimentation with participatory rural development planning. Government's request for a project focused on rural women reflected its growing interest in gender-sensitive participatory approaches to agricultural planning. The project developed a participatory survey methodology, using PRA-like MARP tools to generate information on women's activities in three subsectors: agroforestry (the subject of the case study); irrigated agriculture; and fisheries. The tools focused primarily on women rather than on gender differences. Participatory analysis of the data was conducted with men as well as women. In the future, the project plans to formulate credit, training, technological support and group organization programmes in the subsectors where women are most active.
The Government of Costa Rica explicitly requested the Support for Women in Rural Areas in a Gender-Focused Framework project (1996 to 97) to analyse gender issues in order to reduce the gender inequalities experienced by rural women. The agricultural sector was undergoing a series of reforms aimed at increasing its competitiveness in the global economy. Policies were initiated to develop participatory extension methods, to encourage negotiation with farmers and to strengthen rural credit, all aimed at increasing economic efficiency. Government was aiming at a high level of participation, calling for "the active participation of male and female producers and their organizations in the definition of policies, and in the identification, implementation, monitoring and control of activities". The project, implemented in the Atlantic region, focused on three major areas of concern: training of technical staff, planners and extensionists to create the national capacity and ability to transform the government's concern with gender into effective policies; strengthening of both rural women's organizations and public institutions to increase the demand for gender-sensitive policies as well as the capacity to develop them; and working at the policy level to identify problems related to the differences in impact of policies and programmes on men and women and to develop policies to overcome gender-based inequalities.
The Honduras case study covers a series of related "women's projects" (1983 to 1997) geared to increasing the recognition of rural women as agricultural producers and strengthening producer groups in the agrarian reform sector. The projects worked with the National Agrarian Institute (INA), which is the land reform and land registration agency, and with the Secretariat of Natural Resources (SNR), the government's main vehicle for extension and other agricultural services. In the 1980s there was little or no institutional recognition of women's productive roles in the rural sector, especially in agriculture. The projects thus began with a focus on income-generating activities, gradually expanding to include literacy and management training. By the 1990s the effort began to gain institutional recognition of women's need for land and other productive resources. Ironically this change coincided with the advent of structural adjustment which stripped the INA of its powers to reallocate land and severely reduced the capacity of the SNR to provide technical services such as extension. The project reacted by developing a methodology to train rural women volunteers as paratechnicians (promotoras campesinas) capable of helping women plan their own projects, including the organization and management of savings and credit groups. This methodology was institutionalized over time. The long-term capacity building effort has been directly responsible for the increasing involvement of women in farmer's organizations and of women's NGOs in the planning process.
In Afghanistan, the Animal Health and Livestock Production Programme (1994 to 1997) began to confront gender issues when FAO amalgamated it (in 1995) with a new project entitled Promotion of Farmers' Participation through the Implementation of Animal Health and Production Improvement Modules (PIHAM). PIHAM introduced participatory methods that revealed women's extensive knowledge and role in livestock and poultry rearing and convinced the veterinary staff from the animal health project that, without including both women's and men's knowledge about animals, project interventions were unlikely to be effective. PIHAM trained female veterinary staff in participatory methods for livestock extension. They, in turn, modified the training material to make it more practical for women. The context in which this work has been carried out, however, has been extremely unfavourable. The long period of civil war has wiped out nearly all vestiges of government services in rural areas. As the Taliban forces have taken over, women's rights to engage in almost any productive activities outside the home have been increasingly abrogated. The project has faced tremendous obstacles in training its female staff, but the women veterinarians have persevered in involving village women in participatory training and livestock monitoring.
From its outset in 1986, the PREVINOBA project in Senegal opted for a strategy of popular involvement to deal with deforestation and erosion in the groundnut basin. But the participatory dynamic of dialogue and exchange highlighted the fact that people's concerns went beyond the simple framework of rural forestry. As a result, the second phase of PREVINOBA had a broader mandate to draw up local land development and management plans that aim to reconcile people's interests with policy orientations in the sector, restoration and conservation of the environment and improved production within a concept of sustainable development. The current phase (1995 to 1999) puts emphasis on consolidating the lessons learned for expansion. It aims for eventual control by farmers' organizations and NGOs, in addition to government structures. PREVINOBA did not set out to focus on women's participation, but the context forced gender issues to be taken into account. The absence of rural men for the greater part of the year meant that women became indispensable actors in the design and set-up of land management plans. The project also responded to the needs identified by women, including improved ovens, millet mills, oil presses and access to credit and literacy classes.
In Pakistan the Inter-Regional Project for Participatory Upland Conservation (1993 to 1997) had separate men's and women's programmes to comply with cultural norms. The women's programme encountered significant resistance from senior management in the Forest and Wildlife Department to the incorporation of gender analysis into its participatory methods. In the end, it was obliged to restrict its use of PRA tools to the assessment of women's problems and priorities. Despite severe ecological problems, conservation was a low priority for women, so the project made the organization of women's associations the final step in each PRA exercise. It provided training in income-generating activities and helped women to organize village savings and credit organizations. The project's concern with natural resource management was developed through a series of slide shows to stimulate discussion. Although the women eventually developed the discussion topics and slide shows themselves, it is unlikely that they will have a significant impact on the area's serious environmental problems, primarily because the owners of lucrative orchards are engaging in heavy-duty pump irrigation, an activity that has already severely lowered the water table and threatens, if continued, to force the population to abandon the area altogether.
|
Summary: the planning and policy environment The policy and planning environments encountered by the projects varied considerably, from those that were highly favourable to the introduction of gender-sensitive methods for participatory planning (Namibia, Ethiopia, Costa Rica) to the extreme case of Afghanistan, where women's involvement in productive activities has been drastically curtailed. In the early phases of the Senegal and Honduras projects (the mid-1980s), there was relatively little interest in gender roles per se and little concern with supporting women's production or organization at the government level. This changed in the 1990s, when the policy environment became more favourable to women's issues and to the concept of people's participation. Gender analysis, however, is still not acceptable in certain policy environments, e.g. Pakistan. In some countries, information about gender roles, constraints and priorities is still very scarce. Furthermore, in many cases, planners and decision-makers do not necessarily think that participatory planning requires the participation of both men and women farmers, much less representatives from resource-limited and minority population groups. This means that projects advocating gender-sensitive participatory methods must demonstrate their relevance and applicability to planning. |
Planning takes place at many levels:
· the national level for policy-making, national project planning and resource allocation to subsector programmes;
· the subnational and institutional levels for line agency planning and programming and for the planning of regional or district projects;
· the field or local area level for community planned projects and for farmers' individual planning.
The projects being reviewed had to decide where and how to enter this planning system. This subsection reviews their experiences.
The diagram on the next page illustrates how the Nepal project attempted to facilitate a process of gender-responsive participatory planning at the district level. The project entered by training a wide range of district officers and field staff in PRA and gender analysis. PRAs were conducted with separate groups of men and women farmers, both to provide gender-specific information for district planning and to develop community action plans (CAPs) as potential inputs for district planning. By using separate men's and women's focus groups, the project attempted to assure that women's needs and priorities would be represented equally with men's. However, when men and women farmers were brought together to produce a single CAP, in most cases women's priorities were overshadowed by men's. As noted in the diagram, the project had planned to organize district-level workshops where farmers would discuss their CAPs with district planners. This would have provided a direct link to district planning and, if implemented, would have been a best practice. Nepal was one of the few projects that attempted to forge as direct a link with planning processes. (As mentioned earlier, however, the district workshops were cancelled.)
The entry point for the Tunisia TCP, Policy and Strategy in Favour of Rural Women, was the project's request to the Department of Planning to define its needs for data on women. The project then trained the field workers who made up the research team, conducted a statistical survey to provide data on rural women's productive activities and engaged in participatory research using PRA methods to elicit information about women's and men's separate priorities for women's economic activities. The Tunisia project seems to be the only one that began by consulting the national planning agency on its needs. It will be interesting to discuss the project implementers' evaluation of the effect of this entry point on the planning and subsequent execution of the project.
The Costa Rica project, which was explicitly mandated to use gender analysis to understand and correct women farmers' underrepresentation in agricultural services, promoted an extensive and participatory process for the detailed review of agricultural policies, including orientations and methods, mechanisms, instruments and institutional regulations. The process was developed with the participation of planners, agricultural specialists, NGOs and representatives of rural organizations. One of the main characteristics of this project was the modality of undertaking simultaneous action at three levels: community level, working with grassroots organizations and rural workers; regional level, in connection with decentralized agencies from the agricultural sector and local government; and national level, with planners, national NGOs and representatives from the major farmers' organizations. In analysing its entry point, the case study stresses the fact that these activities took place simultaneously since each was seen to have critical feedback for the others. This project is, however, one of the few that conducted a detailed study of planning before it entered the planning system.
In Honduras, at project inception in 1983, there were no institutional mechanisms for working with rural women as productive agents. This prompted the project to begin by working directly with rural women, organizing small groups to encourage income-generating projects for crop and animal production and providing credit for their implementation.
In Pakistan, the staff of the women's programme of the natural resource management project conducted PRA exercises with village women as its entry point for each area in which it worked. Since the PRAs demonstrated that women had little interest in environmental conservation activities, they culminated in the formation of women's associations which planned their own activities, largely income-generating projects.
The entry point of Afghanistan's PIHAM project was the training of veterinarians from the staff of the pre-existing Animal Health and Livestock Production Programme in gender-sensitive participatory rapid appraisal and project monitoring. The participatory work with farmers that followed this training had a major impact on changing veterinarians' attitudes towards farmers in a positive manner.
Summary: entry pointsThe entry points for five of the projects were very similar - the training of field-level extension agents to conduct PRA/GA to gather information useful for gender-responsive planning. The levels of planning for which the gender-specific information was gathered varied from the national (Namibia, Tunisia), to the district or regional (Nepal, Costa Rica), to subsectoral (Ethiopia, India, Honduras), to the project itself (Afghanistan, Senegal, Pakistan). The Tunisia project was the only one that began with an explicit attempt to involve a planning agency in defining its needs. The Costa Rica project began with a detailed study of planning processes. The highly successful Ethiopia project began with a participatory process of planning of the project itself. |
Most of the projects at the workshop used some form of PRA and/or GA. Projects that used PRA combined with gender analysis and the analysis of difference were particularly successful in demonstrating their relevance and practicality for gender-responsive participatory planning.
PRA, when combined with GA and the analysis of difference, is both powerful and relatively cost-effective5 because it serves three functions simultaneously:
· It is an efficient method of collecting the information on gender and other differences among farmers that is needed for gender-responsive planning.
· It is an easily learned method that helps field workers to understand rapidly the gender, socio-economic and technical issues in local farming systems.
· It is an effective means of involving different groups of farmers in problem analysis and planning.
Some of the most important PRA/GA tools used in the projects are described in the following table from the Nepal case study. The information gathered by means of these tools was illustrated on large posters and analysed by different focus groups or by the community as a whole. Both focus groups and communities prioritized problems (using tools such as pair-wise ranking) and analysed the feasibility of potential solutions. PRA exercises often concluded with the development of a CAP or with separate action plans that reflected the specific priorities of different focus groups.
The action plans and other information generated by PRA tools can be used as inputs for bottom-up planning. When compiled and analysed at district or higher levels, focus group priorities and action plans provide information that can make programme, area and policy planning more responsive to gender and socio-economic differences.
The GA/PRA framework: example from Namibia
Step of the GA framework |
Answers the question |
Related PRA tools |
|
1. Context |
What is getting better? What is getting worse? In terms of the environmental, economic, social and political patterns that support or constrain development. |
Village maps Wealth ranking Problem trend diagrams Institutional (Venn) diagrams |
|
2. Activities |
Who does what? In terms of the division of labour for productive and reproductive activities. |
Daily activity profiles Seasonal calendars Mobility maps |
|
3. Resources |
Who has what? In terms of access to and control over resources and benefits |
Gender resource mapping Decision-making matrices Income and expenditure matrices |
|
4. Work plan for success |
What should be done? In terms of providing government services that will be sustainable, effective and equitable, and in terms of community-implemented projects |
Identifying problems Identifying potential solutions Preliminary feasibility analysis Ranking problems and opportunities Community action plan |
The following pages provide examples of the PRA/GA tools used in the projects represented at this workshop.
Different types of seasonal calendars (one of the most important tools) are taken from the Nepal and Tunisia case studies. The two calendars from Nepal show the sexual division of labour over the year on specific crops. The Tunisian calendar (in French) shows the seasonality and sources of women's, then men's, incomes. The third section of the Tunisian calendar indicates the periods in which women's agricultural and forest-based work is heaviest.
The pair-wise ranking matrices from Tunisia show how gender-based priorities can be revealed by choosing repeatedly between alternatives.
Participatory tools will not automatically reflect gender or other differences among community groups when they are used in community-wide meetings. PRA tools, in fact, have often been used in a manner that is insensitive to critical differences within communities, including gender. If this result is to be avoided, it is essential to combine PRA, gender analysis and the analysis of difference.
(The vertical axis indicates hours worked per day)
Pair-wise ranking for determining priorities: Tunisia
Women's ranking of productive activities they prefer for themselves
Rank |
Score |
Activities ranked (row by column) |
Vegetable production |
Livestock and small livestock rearing |
Fruit tree cultivation and fruit gathering |
Food processing/ distilling |
Strawberry production |
Bee-keeping |
3 |
3 |
Beekeeping |
Vegetable production |
Livestock and small livestock rearing |
Beekeeping |
Beekeeping |
Bee- keeping |
|
6 |
0 |
Strawberry production |
Vegetable production |
Livestock and small livestock rearing |
Fruit tree cultivation and forest gathering |
Food processing/distilling |
||
5 |
1 |
Food processing/distilling |
Vegetable production |
Livestock and small livestock rearing |
Fruit tree cultivation and forest gathering |
|||
4 |
2 |
Fruit tree cultivation and fruit gathering |
Vegetable production |
Livestock and small livestock rearing |
||||
1 |
5 |
Livestock and small livestock rearing |
Livestock and small livestock rearing |
|||||
2 |
4 |
Vegetable production |
Men's ranking of productive activities they prefer for women
Rank |
Score |
Activities ranked (row by column) |
Cactus production |
Fruit tree cultivation and fruit gathering |
Vegetable production |
Bee-keeping |
Food processing/distilling |
Goat and small livestock rearing |
2 |
3 |
Goat and small livestock rearing |
Goat and small livestock rearing |
Goat and small livestock rearing |
Vegetable production |
Bee-keeping |
Goat and small livestock rearing |
|
4 |
0 |
Food processing/distilling |
Cactus production |
Fruit tree cultivation and fruit gathering |
Vegetable production |
Bee-keeping |
||
3 |
2 |
Beekeeping |
Cactus production |
Fruit tree cultivation and fruit gathering |
Vegetable production |
|||
1 |
5 |
Vegetable production |
Vegetable production |
Vegetable production |
||||
3 |
2 |
Fruit tree cultivation and fruit gathering |
Cactus production |
|||||
2 |
3 |
Cactus production |
Use of focus groups. In Namibia, Ethiopia, India, and Nepal the creation of focus groups with similar socio-economic statuses gave disadvantaged groups a voice in the PRA process and facilitated the identification and analysis of the specific constraints and priorities of male and female youth, the elderly, the poor, etc.
Use of local cases for PRA training- The projects that based their PRA/GA training on local cases were able to be especially sensitive to the types of gender, socio-economic, ethnic and age differences that are relevant to gender- and difference-responsive agricultural planning in the areas in which the training was taking place. These projects had particularly successful training programmes, in part because the relevance of the tools to the analysis of local situations was immediately apparent.
Use of interdisciplinary PRA facilitation teams. The India project developed an important methodological approach to conducting PRAs with newly trained facilitators. Interdisciplinary two-person PRA implementation teams were formed with staff from different government departments. Whenever possible the teams were made up of a male and a female member. These teams were rotated each day so that technical officers and field agents would be exposed to a variety of professional skills and gender attitudes. The team leader floated among the teams working in each village. This approach worked well to convince sceptical team members of the value of gender analysis. It also facilitated farmers' access to staff from several government departments.
Methods to adapt PRA/GA tools to local circumstances. The PRA facilitators in Nepal found that it takes special efforts to assure that women speak in PRA sessions, even when PRA is conducted in gender-separate groupings. When mixed sessions are held, facilitators need to learn to handle male dominance in discussions. In Ethiopia it was essential to work with single-sex groups when learning about labour activities and gender differences in access to and control over resources because, cultural barriers prevent women from speaking out on sensitive issues in the presence of men. In Afghanistan the situation of civil strife and the Taliban-imposed restrictions on women required that many PRA tools had to be modified. The project, nonetheless, used a wide variety of participatory tools. In Pakistan project management's resistance to gender analysis and to using the information generated by PRA to modify project implementation prompted the women's programme to use PRA as a method to establish a partnership with women's groups rather than a tool for obtaining information relevant to future project planning.
Use of statistical surveys to supplement PRA-generated information. Namibia found that PRA/GA alone could not provide adequate data on the statistical frequency of the information it generated on gender and other group differences. Hence researchers from the university, who were familiar with PRA and other participatory methods, were engaged to supplement the PRA-generated information on certain topics with survey data and information from secondary sources. Tunisia also used a method of combining participatory generated data with more standard surveys in helping the government to define a strategy and plan of action for integrating women into the Ninth Five-Year Plan.
Use of participatory impact monitoring. India used a method of participatory impact monitoring that involved frequent informal visits to project participants by staff and consultants. The emphasis in these visits was on the emerging issues that village women and men viewed as significant, with a focus on who was benefiting and how. Participatory monitoring identified both positive and negative outcomes, many of which were unexpected.
Methods to strengthen grassroots organizations. The Costa Rica, Pakistan, Senegal and Honduras projects stressed the importance of strengthening grassroots organizations, especially women's groups, so that they could make better use of existing government services and improve their negotiating skills in demanding better services. Honduras worked to strengthen women's groups, first by training women volunteers as agricultural extension "linkage agents" and then by training volunteers as "paratechnicians" capable of supporting women's micro-enterprise and local savings and credit associations. The Costa Rica project taught organizational management and project formulation and management skills. Its grassroots women's organization workshops identified common gender problems in each local area, and helped to create a regional rural women's association that could analyse regional problems and bring them to the attention of planners. The Nepal case study suggests that when PRA tools are used farmers learn valuable skills such as problem analysis and priority ranking that they can use when lobbying for support from government and other agencies.
Methods to involve senior staff and decision-makers in gender-responsive participatory planning activities. India's Sikkim livestock project had little difficulty in forging supportive relations with the newer generation of managers appointed in the Animal Health and Veterinary Science (AHVS) Department during the latter period of the project. Initially, however, many AHVS staff were reluctant to accept such unconventional approaches as PRA/GA. Some, including the national project director, never fully accepted the project's methods, but the majority gradually came to recognize the relevance of gender-responsive approaches for livestock programme planning. The project accomplished this by constantly raising the problem of appropriate targeting, insisting on asking who does what? and how should that affect who gets extension services? Interdepartmental workshops facilitated dialogue among Forest Department, Rural Development Department and AHVS staff, enabling people who were interested in gender-sensitive participatory methods to encourage their more reluctant colleagues to try them.
Ethiopia also used a wide variety of methods to involve senior staff in project activities: inception workshops in each project area; invitations to open or close training sessions; invitations to attend PRA sessions; and workshops to discuss the results of PRA activities. Namibia conducted a special workshop for planners on the analysis of difference and the implications of PRA results for policy-planning. Costa Rica to a large extent used the SEAGA approach, considering three interrelated levels of analysis/work - macrolevel, intermediate level (both subsectoral and institutional) and local level (regional and local) - using participatory methods/tools. The project mainly used a workshop format and interdisciplinary working groups to involve various levels of government personnel in gender analysis and to promote gender analysis of existing agricultural policies among planners. The methodology developed by the Honduras projects facilitated the use of gender analysis at all levels, with the aim of permeating public and private agencies with an understanding of women's productive roles.
The need to establish a mechanism to respond to community planning efforts. The Nepal, Ethiopia and Tunisia case studies all emphasized that PRA and MARP should not be used in the absence of a mechanism for response and follow-up. Farmers who engage in a full PRA process, including the development of a community or group action plan, are anxious to have some institutional support for their plans. This is a critical issue for projects of this sort. It may also be a reason for planners' hesitation to use PRA or other methods that encourage full-scale bottom-up planning.
The need for direct training in client-responsive agricultural programming. The client-oriented extension training project in Ethiopia found that, after training extension agents in the use of PRA/GA to generate information for planning, field agents and officers were still not sure how to use the information in planning their own programmes and work plans. It was therefore important to develop training modules that dealt directly with methods for incorporating that information into extension programming. This experience suggests that projects to promote gender- and difference-responsive agricultural planning should consider adding specific training modules to help planners to apply the information generated by PRA and gender analysis into actual planning processes.
Summary: tools and methodsProject experiences with participatory methods, such as PRA and MARP, demonstrate the potential of participatory tools to generate information relevant to planning in a variety of agricultural subsectors. They also demonstrate the importance of using participatory methods in conjunction with gender analysis and the analysis of difference in order to incorporate less powerful segments of the population into the participatory process.Among the PRA tools used, several projects found seasonal calendars and daily activity profiles to be the most useful for demonstrating the significant contribution of women's labour and knowledge to agricultural production processes. Problem- and opportunity-ranking when used separately by men and women revealed important gender differences in constraints and priorities.Nepal's experience of losing women's voice when men's and women's separate analyses were brought together to develop a community action plan suggests that, if action plans are used, they should be developed separately by all focus groups, thereby allowing the priorities of non-dominant groups to be communicated to planners. Several projects remarked that, since PRA requires a great deal of community involvement and effort, it is important to plan for follow-up support, such as the opportunity to discuss action plans with planners or to have a project or service (such as extension) actually assist in meeting the priority needs identified by the PRA.The Ethiopia and Namibia projects demonstrated the importance of training extension officers and agents in how to use PRA/GA-generated information to plan extension programmes that are customized to meet the needs and priorities of different client groups. The issue of exactly how planners can respond to farmer-generated information needs to be addressed more directly. |
In the great majority of cases, capacity building consisted primarily of training for government line agency officers and field workers in participatory methods and/or gender analysis. Projects using PRA/GA methods conducted short introductory training sessions and subsequently trained field officers "on the job" during actual PRA/GA village exercises lasting five to ten days each. Project staff conducted the initial training. In the three cases where a training of trainers (TOT) approach was used (Namibia, India and Ethiopia), project staff trained the trainers who then trained other local-area staff.
In Namibia formal TOT was conducted in three separate sessions spread over the course of the project life. The first TOT focused on the analysis of difference and PRA training, after which trainees conducted PRAs. The implementation of PRA/GA exercises helped trainees to gain a clearer understanding of such concepts as gender roles, farming systems and client-responsive extension approaches. During the second TOT, the initial PRA findings were reviewed, case studies were prepared for the training of other extension agents and trainees were taught basic principles of adult education. The third, initially unforeseen, TOT training was on preparing the trainees to conduct the regional-level workshops in which the PRA results were to be shared with planners. The use of multiple training sessions interspersed with practical application of the PRAs was key to the success of the project's capacity building efforts.
The Ethiopia case study pointed out that the fact that the project's own internal planning processes had been participatory was a major factor in the success of its capacity building programme. The training objectives, content, location and length were all planned jointly by the zonal and regional coordinators, the international extension adviser and the national project coordinator.
The India Sikkim livestock project also focused heavily on training. It conducted TOT for agriculture and community development staff covering problem analysis (factors affecting livestock production), goat and poultry production, livestock marketing, PRA, GA, rapid appraisal of tenure and interviewing techniques. The trained trainers then trained other staff and farmers in PRA and livestock issues. The project also sent staff for training in other countries, i.e. to a course in natural resource management and participatory methods conducted by a Kenyan NGO and to a course in PRA in Ethiopia. At project termination, two key staff members had become fully qualified trainers.
The Nepal project trained a wide variety of district development officers from agriculture, livestock, irrigation and extension departments. It also trained women's development officers, agricultural development bank officers and a few of the staff from the MOA's Women Farmer Development Division. The 15 to 20 people trained in each of three districts then carried out PRAs in two to three villages. Lack of time was a major constraint to the effectiveness of the training. Only four days were used to present all the PRA and GA concepts and tools used in the PRA exercises. Given the team's lack of previous experience with these tools, project staff had to take a stronger lead than they wished in facilitating the PRAs in order to assure the production of good-quality data. The Nepal case supports the finding in the Namibia, India and Ethiopia projects that a comprehensive training strategy based on several training events is needed if line agencies are to be able to use participatory approaches in their normal work. In Nepal, lack of time to train trainers meant that, except for the project trainer himself, there are no MOA staff who can teach PRA/GA methods for agricultural planning or provide follow-up training for the first group of trainees.
Projects focused on specific subsectors, such as livestock, extension or women's microenterprise, usually conducted technical training for farmers as well as training in participatory methods. In some cases, projects also focused on training farmers in participatory monitoring (Afghanistan and India) and in methods for strengthening group organizations (Honduras and Costa Rica). Some case study analysts suggested that experience with PRA tools provided farmers with ways of gathering evidence that could help them negotiate with government agencies.
Training in gender analysis for all levels of planners, from policy-makers, to technicians, to women's organizations, was a major focus of the Costa Rica project. By giving people at all levels a common language for the analysis of gender issues, the project attempted to maximize joint learning and positive feedback both horizontally and vertically within the planning hierarchy. The case study emphasizes the importance of conducting TOT workshops in order to create national capacity and generate the basis for expansion and replication. At the end of the project, the WID units and the planning divisions in the various institutions of the agricultural sector started a similar process in order to expand the experience and contribute to the deepening of previous learning.
A key capacity building focus in the Honduras projects was the technical training of village women volunteers as intermediaries between women's groups and extension agents. A specific methodology was developed which, when the extension service was privatized, made it possible to train large numbers of rural women volunteers as paratechnicians who could support women's groups to conduct social and financial feasibility analysis of income-generating projects. These volunteers were also trained in the financial and managerial aspects of forming and administering rural savings and credit banks. The training method was made up of modules that permitted the trainees to apply what they had learned and compare problems and experiences.
The Honduras projects also trained government agency staff in gender analysis. This effort culminated in gender analysis workshops for national and regional agricultural agency directors and for all rural project directors in the country. This is one of the few projects at the workshops that actually conducted training workshops at the agency and project director level.
Given the absence of government institutions in Afghanistan, the PIHAM project training concentrated on its own staff and that of the associated Animal Health and Livestock Production Programme as well as on farmers. Experiences were also shared with NGOs and United Nations agencies. The following table from the Afghanistan case study summarizes the effects of the project's capacity building activities.
Capacities built at each level after the introduction of PIHAM: Afghanistan
Actor |
Capacities built |
Village women |
Exchange of experience between women farmers; women realized responsibility of keeping livestock, e.g. mating time; increased ability to record/monitor changes (reporting forms); could record disease patterns and see vaccination time (seasonal calendars); learned importance of talking to experienced women, also that they had a bigger role in livestock management than they thought (labour analysis); were able to identify many causes of problems; solutions based on resources at hand; easier, cheaper, more effective (input/output charts). |
Village men |
Learned how much women are involved in livestock (labour analysis, seasonal calendars, etc.) and the importance of discussing with them the problems, finding diagnosis, etc. (discuss with wife); relationship between villagers and staff improved; (see also above under village women for similar capacities gained). |
PIHAM initiators1 |
Attitude, behaviours changed towards farmer ("no longer proud"); learned how to talk with people and listen; learned how to give others a chance to talk; worked now from the bottom-up rather than top-down; learned that farmers have important knowledge (all through adult learning methods and PRA methods - listening exercises, role plays, etc.) |
Veterinary field units |
Improved overall capacity to understand importance of participatory approaches; learned from initiators (through staff discussions, sharing). |
Project management staff2 |
Participatory training skills for key project management (participation in initial training modules); use participatory methods for monitoring and project design (transfer of skills from PIHAM training, e.g. Women's Programme revisions); learned from mistakes and can work with trainers to correct; planning capacity improved overall (through improved understanding of community needs, direct contact and continuous monitoring of PIHAM pilot and replication phases); recognize that, without the involvement of women, key livestock information is incomplete (through participating in early PIHAM training and analysis). |
NGOs |
Through exchange related to PIHAM processes, became more aware of the farming systems in their area as well as elsewhere; could provide modifications to training (manuals). |
UN agencies in Afghanistan |
Through sharing of PIHAM experiences with other UN agencies, awareness raised of importance of community participation in planning; future potential for sharing of methods with other projects/programmes. |
Many of the projects were implemented in areas where government staff had little information on gender roles in different agricultural activities, gender-specific constraints on labour time and gender differences in access to and control over resources. Generally there was no knowledge of gender differences in farmer priorities for government support or training. This section briefly highlights information that the case analysts felt was most relevant for planning.
In Nepal, the PRAs revealed that women play crucial roles in household decision-making over the use of land. This information was critical to planning for extension, natural resource management, crops, livestock and forestry. The men's and women's mobility maps developed during the PRAs (reproduced on the next page) showed that women did not travel to the Agricultural Subservice Centre located outside the village (where agricultural training normally took place), and did not attend the Village Development Committee meetings, go to school or even travel to the health clinic. Discussions of these maps revealed the reasons that women had rarely, if ever, had the opportunity to participate in extension training courses. Women's priority rankings, however, showed that extension and other forms of skills training was their highest priority. This, of course, was vital information for extension programme planners. It convinced them that extension training for women must be carried out in the village itself.
In Namibia the PRAs reconfirmed well-known aspects of the gender division of responsibilities -women for crop production, men for livestock. They also revealed that, as men emigrate in search of urban work, women are increasingly involved in large livestock management and in other tasks in the "male domain" such as ploughing. Senior managers and planners had not been aware of these changes in the gender division of labour. The new knowledge made it clear that women as well as men need better access to veterinary services, training in range management and improved livestock and crop production, and assistance for ploughing, cattle marketing and fodder subsidies.
In India the PRAs revealed strong socio-economic differences among villages. The sexual division of labour also differed. These intervillage differences underlined the importance of engaging in participatory, locally based extension planning for both livestock and cropping activities. The PRAs showed that even though all household members are involved in goat rearing, young girls are the ones pulled out of school when herd sizes increase. This fact convinced project planners that poultry, which is under female control and requires less work than goats, should be prioritized. Participatory monitoring showed the advantage of this choice. Women's small earnings from the sale of eggs and chickens allowed them to improve nutrition levels in the household and even to amass enough savings to face most financial emergencies without borrowing from money-lenders.
In Afghanistan, the PIHAM project highlighted gender-differentiated roles and responsibilities in livestock management, showing the magnitude of women's involvement and knowledge in livestock rearing. Project staff came to realize that without including both women's and men's knowledge about animals, effective responses to livestock production constraints could not be developed.
In Tunisia the PRAs reaffirmed women's important roles in agriculture and natural resource management. The seasonal calendars showed that women tend to diversify the sources of their income just as men do. Men's and women's priorities for women's income-generating activities differed somewhat, with men favouring activities that would keep women closer to home, while women gave their highest priority to livestock rearing (including large livestock), which currently takes up much of their time and for which they have mastered the skills.
In Honduras, a joint project/INA study provided information about women's land rights and land tenure situation. This prompted the land reform and registration agency to modify definitions of a "producer" and a "farm" in order to incorporate the name of the woman when couples register land and to give female-headed households the right to register land in their own names.
The Costa Rica project revealed the previous underestimation of women's roles in agricultural production on small farms, commercial farms and non-farm enterprises in the informal sector.
Namibia provides a series of lessons regarding linkages, some of which demonstrate the positive effect of placing the project within the planning apparatus rather than in a "women's unit". The project was especially well placed to develop links throughout Namibia's centralized planning system because the National Project Coordinator (NPC) was the Deputy Director of the Division of Rural Development Planning. The NPC played a pivotal role in integrating gender issues into the National Agricultural Policy (NAP) and was clearly supportive. On the other hand, a lack of support from middle management, especially the supervisors of the extension field staff participating in the PRA/GA training and exercises, during the early phase of the project created problems for effective implemen