Diagram 2 shows the "from farmer to planner, and back" model designed for the pilot activities in Nepal.
Separating "community" into men and women's groups: Looking at the diagram, the primary focus of the project was to gather information about needs at the very bottom of the planning ladder and take that information up to the district level where planners could take action on it (response). What made this model different from other needs based planning models was the attention given to assuring that women had a voice in the planning process. For this reason, the "community" was divided into separate men's and women's groups in order to create a space where women could both participate in the exercise and express themselves freely. This focus on separate groups of men and women farmers within each community was a key entry point within the framework of a bottom-up planning process.
Training planners and extensionist in two-way communication: Another entry point was at the level of the district outreach staff and planners who were trained in the gender analysis and PRA techniques and who subsequently participated in the participatory needs assessments and planning exercises. Training this group and getting them to work in a participatory manner with the communities was the key to creating a process of two-way communication with information from the farmers flowing up the planning ladder and a response from outreach staff and planners coming back down.
Strengthening the "women's" unit: Yet another entry point involved the decision to locate the project at the central level with the Women Farmer Development Division, rather than in a planning or extension division of the Ministry of Agriculture. This choice was made to strengthen the capacity of the Division in using gender-sensitive and participatory approaches. WFDD was also in a position to provide support to the project from the policy level . For this reason, the Division was keen to have "Guidelines" which would compliment the project's field work from the opposite direction - i.e. from the policy level down to the field - by providing a strong message to field staff on why participatory and gender sensitive agricultural planning was important and a guide on "how" to do it.
How to make a bottom-up, gender sensitive planning model work in a top-down, gender-blind world: This in a nutshell was the biggest difficulty for the project. The success of the experiment very much depended on whether those who hold the decision-making power were open to, and better yet, committed to the participatory process. At the community level, despite all the measures to ensure that women participated fully in the planning exercises, men in the community have the final say on decisions and thus many of the women's needs were not adequately reflected in the community action plans. (This problem is discusses more at length in the next section.)
At the district level, once staff were involved in the process they became enthusiastic practitioners. But regardless of how committed they are, they still have to deal with the top-down administration of the Ministry and the difficulties of trying to match the policy directives that come down from the top and their limited financial resources with the needs that emerge from the bottom.
At the central level, the project had strong support from many key players from within the Ministry of Agriculture. However, differences of opinion and friction arose between the project team and FAO on one side and WFDD managers on the other about how to support the participatory process, and in particular about the importance of holding the district workshops. While junior WFDD staff who actually took part in the training and PRAs learned a great deal about how to undertake and support participatory planning processes, this was not the case for some upper level decision-makers who were only overseeing events from Kathmandu. The subsequent break-down of communication over issues really hampered the success of the project.
One of the most important lessons learned from the project in Nepal is the need to establish mechanisms within the project framework for participatory decision-making, especially at the project management level. Such mechanisms are crucial in participatory projects to share information about what the project is doing with key decision-makers to both win their support and guidance and to ensure that decision-making power is divided among several key players who can convince the "unconvinced". In the case of this project, the Steering Committee could have been used more effectively to discuss differences of opinion and handle problems that arose during project implementation.
The project used a combination of gender analysis and participatory rural appraisal (GA/PRA) techniques to learn about and document gender issues in agriculture and to facilitate the participation of rural women and men in needs based agricultural planning. The specific PRA tools used and their purpose are found in the table below.
PRA tools used
S.N |
Name of tools |
Purpose |
1. |
Social and resource mapping |
· indicate spatial distribution of roads, forests, water resources, institutions, organizations · identify number of households, their ethnic composition and other socio-economic characteristics/variables. |
2. |
Seasonal calendar |
· assess workload of women and men by seasonality · learn cropping patterns, farming systems, gender division of labor, food scarcity, climatic conditions and so forth. |
3. |
Economic well being ranking |
· understand local people's criteria of wealth · identify relative wealth and the different socio-economic characteristics of households and classes |
4. |
Daily activity schedule |
· identify daily patterns of activity based on gender division of labor on an hourly basis and understanding how busy are women and men in a day, how long they work and when they have spare time for social and development activities. |
5. |
Resources analyses |
· indicate access to and control over private, community and public resources by gender |
6. |
Mobility mapping |
· understand gender equities/inequities in terms of contact of men and women with the outside world · plotting the frequency, distance, and purposes of mobility. |
7. |
Decision making matrix |
· understand decision making on farming practices by gender |
8. |
Venn diagram |
· identify key actors and establishing their relationships between the village and local people |
9. |
Pairwise ranking |
· identify and prioritize problems as experienced by men and women |
10. |
Community action plan |
· assess the extent to which women's voices are respected when men and women sit together to identify solutions for the problems prioritized by the latter · understand development alternatives and options, and give opportunity to men and women to learn from each other's experiences and knowledge |
The gender analysis and PRA methods that the project used had their strengths and weaknesses: On the positive side the GA/PRA approach helped trainees understand gender dynamics in the communities; the PRA helped the extensionists build a better relationship with the community and vice versa; and the entire exercise generated reliable and detailed information. On the negative side, despite all the measures taken to ensure women's participation, their needs were not fully reflected in the community action plans. The PRA also raised high expectations. Each of these issues are explored at greater length below.
Gender, the new subject matter. Learning about gender analysis was an important event for the field staff, most of whom were unfamiliar with the basic concepts. Many had misconceptions about gender as a variable in the development process which the training helped to clarify. What fascinated them most was the revelation that gender was connected to the concept of power. As a result of the gender training, the participants became much more aware and alert to issues of power at the household and community level. By combining the gender analysis with the PRA experience, the trainees really understood the importance and necessity of targeting extension and other development assistance according to "who does what".
Learning from each other and building relationships with local communities: One of the most important things that the trainees learned from carrying out the PRAs is that development depends on a two-way process of communication between themselves and rural people. One of the great strengths of the PRA process was that it helped to improve the relationship between the extension staff and villagers. It did this by helping each to learn about the other's difficulties and perspectives. Extension staff (JTs and JTAs) learned what the villagers expected from them and how the villagers rated their performance. Farmers learned the problems and constraints of the field staff and why they do not make more regular and frequent visits to them. As a result of the PRA, even friendships were built between the villagers - both men and women - and the village based extension staff. These latter often made a commitment to the people that they would visit them regularly and make all possible efforts to work with them in order to address their needs, problems and concerns.
Reliable and relevant information: A second strength of the GA/PRA approach is that it generated reliable information that was relevant both to the extension officers and to the community. The evidence of this was the interest the villagers displayed in the process. Every day more people from each village participated. Sometimes the groups were almost too large to handle. This excellent level of participation meant that there was good validation of the information: there was a lot of scrutiny of the information during the last sessions when the graphics were posted up on walls. From the gender perspective, the GA/PRA process provided an opportunity for both extension staff and the communities to better understand women's perspectives on farming systems and the need to involve them in household and community decision making and resource control.
The difficulty of assuring women a voice: A central concern for the project was how to ensure that women would participate fully in the needs assessments and planning exercises carried out in each community. The project team really made an effort to create a space where the women could participate by:
· including women facilitators (gender specialists) in the PRA study teams;
· convincing both men and women from each village to participate in the PRA process and getting their commitment to support and co-operate each others participation before beginning the process;
· carrying out the PRAs at convenient times for women, e.g. early in the morning and early in the evening;
· going through the tools with separate groups of women and men.
While these techniques did work to assure that women fully participated in the PRAs, a problem still arose in the final exercise when both the women's and men's groups were brought together to review each others' problem identification matrix and come to a consensus on the community action plan. Although in some communities the women did speak up for themselves, there is a strong cultural tradition for them to always acquiesce to the men's decisions.
People's high expectations: The biggest weakness of the process is that it raised people's expectations. Despite repeated attempts by the project team to explain the purpose of the study and that they could only expect to participate in the district workshops, the villagers saw the activities as a preparation for "a big project" to come in the future.
This was why it was so important to hold the District Workshops. These were designed to be the project's mechanism for responsiveness to people's problems. The responsibilities for planning and implementation of development programmes are vested in the district authorities by the Decentralization Policy of HMG of Nepal. By sharing the PRA information with these "powers that be" at the district level, the workshops had two purposes: one was to raise awareness among decision makers of the connection between women's role in farming systems and the need to integrate gender concerns in agriculture planning. The second was to provided an opportunity for rural people, men and women, to speak with these decision-makers about their problems. It was hoped that as a result of the workshops the District authorities would make a commitment to provide some specific assistance to address the problems raised in the community action plans such as more regular extension visits or training. Cancelling the workshops created a great deal of frustration for the participants and the project team. It also limited the PRA to an extractive exercise rather than using PRA within the context of a bottom-up planning cycle as had been originally envisioned.
Summary of lessons learned about tools and methods
· The most important factor to encouraging women to participate in the PRA exercises was to conduct the PRA when the women were relatively free during the day.
· Separating the participants into male and female groups also created a "free space" where the women could talk and participate unhindered by the presence of men.
· Facilitators of the PRA process may need to intervene more strongly to assure that women's voice is not completely overridden by men's when it comes time to reach a consensus on community priorities. Facilitators need to learn to listen to women's voices, handle male dominance in discussions and generally create a protected space where women can both participate and speak out.
· One short PRA in a village is not sufficient to bring about a fundamental change in how society views women's roles and status in the community. A longer term process of working in each community is needed to sensitise men to women's situation and to empower women so that they can demand their fair share of development benefits.
· It is very important that the PRA process includes some sort of follow-up to respond to the problems highlighted in the PRA findings. The district workshops were the most important step in the PRA process carried out in Nepal because they provided an important opportunity to initiate action and influence the planning cycle. Cancelling them meant breaking a promise to the participants who had a right to expect something to come out of the process given the time and effort they put into it.
The main objective of the project was to strengthen institutional capacity of the Ministry of Agriculture to more effectively address the needs of rural women in development planning. This was to be accomplished by training select district level staff in the three pilot districts in gender analysis and PRA and then walking them through the bottom-up planning exercises. Three groups of Ministry of Agriculture personnel, who would be key actors in the participatory planning process, were to benefit from the vertical capacity building component of the project. These were:
· select WFDD central level staff who needed to be trained so that they could effectively promote and backstop the gender sensitive, participatory planning exercises;
· field staff, mainly grass-roots level agricultural extension officers, who would carry out the planning exercises with the project team; and
· select district level planners who would play a key role in incorporating a response to the community action plans presented at the district workshops in subsequent district agricultural plans.
Lack of time for training: One problem encountered in the capacity building component of the project was lack of time to do the training properly. Given that the project was already behind schedule due to long delays in hiring the project consultants, there was only time to provide a short orientation training (conducted by the PRA specialist, the Lead Gender Consultant and the Gender Consultant) with selected district level field staff before the PRAs were carried out in the communities in each district. This meant that the training was rushed, only 4 days to go over gender analysis concepts and learn the PRA tools. Given that the subject matter and the participatory tools were new to most of the trainees, they needed more time to fully grasp the concepts and more than anything more practice in using the tools. The problem was further compounded by wide differences in educational levels, experience, job responsibilities and positions among the trainees.
Much of the learning therefore had to take place in the field, during the PRAs. This turned out to be good from a pedagogical point of view (the trainees probably learned more readily by doing). But it meant that the PRA specialist, the Team Leader and the Gender Consultants had to take a stronger lead in facilitating the PRAs to assure that the information would be of good quality and fully reflect gender-based differences in activities, access to resources and perceptions of needs.
The easiest part of the GA/PRA training was teaching the tools and methods. The more difficult aspect was imparting to the trainees the idea that they had to adjust their own attitudes and behaviour to support a truly participatory process with farmers. Acquiring all these skills takes time, lots of practice and feedback from others.
The importance of who receives the training: Altogether, 53 district level staff participated in the gender analysis-PRA (GA-PRA) training. This included 23 field officials in Nawalparasi district and 15 each in Sindhuli and Rasuwa districts. Unfortunately, WFDD staff from the Central level were very occupied in preparing inputs for the 9th Development Plan at the same time that the training was taking place in the three districts. Only a few WFDD Subject Matter Specialists were therefore able to attend the training courses and take part in the subsequent PRAs2.
Although it was planned that the District Officers of the MOA would take lead roles in facilitating PRA in the field, with backstopping from the PRA Consultants, this did not happen. Due to their heavy workload and conflicts with other regular tasks, the district officers sent junior field staff in their stead to participate in the training and PRA field activities. Although these grass-roots level staff are now enthusiastic about using the approaches, it is unlikely that these junior staff will be able to apply what they have learned to facilitate gender sensitive planning without firm backing from their supervisors. This really points to the need for more sensitisation and training at various levels (intermediate and policy) in order to gain support from decision-makers to make bottom-up, participatory and gender-sensitive processes work.
Despite these drawbacks, it was obvious that the trainees learned a great deal from the experience as was discussed in the previous section.
The PRA was a learning process for all: Two other groups benefited from the learning process supported by the project. These were (a) the main project consultants - the Lead Gender Consultant and the PRA specialist - and (b) the farmers who participated in the PRA. Neither of the two main project consultants (both men) were gender experts per se although they brought good management and PRA skills. They dedicated themselves to a self-learning process to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to effectively meet their terms of reference. Needless to say, this self-learning experience was very enriching. Moreover, the PRA specialist, who will soon go back to a key position in the Ministry of Agriculture in the Monitoring and Evaluation Division, is committed to applying what he has learned in his new position.
More than 500 women and men farmers participated in the GA-PRA needs identification and planning exercises. The PRA revealed to the villagers what resources they have to work with, both natural and human resources, and brought to light in a constructive way their own problems. Most important, they learned that it was up to them to make or break the development process in their village. Although there was no formal evaluation of the experience, several of the farmers expressed to the PRA teams that they very much appreciated having learned skills during the PRA for conflict resolution to solve problems among themselves. They said that they would continue to use the problem identification matrix and the prioritisation exercises to come to a consensus over community problems.
Learning from the women in the village
Women made beautiful social resource maps by using colourful food items and household products (e.g. maize kernels, different coloured grains and flours, vegetables, forest products, grasses, etc.) to represent resources in the villages. During several of the PRAs, at the point when the villagers came together to compare the resource maps, the men in the village asked the women to supply them with some of these colourful items to liven up their duller compositions. Seeing this desire to imitate their efforts, the women felt proud of their accomplishments. The men also realised that the women have access to all of those varied products due to the complexity of their food production and processing activities.
The PRA teams also observed a growing sense of self-confidence among the women participants as the PRAs progressed over the week they spent with each village. Even those shy women who could hardly utter their names in a group on the first day began to speak and put their views and opinions boldly and effectively on the following days. Their ability to express their views and needs was greatly facilitated by simply giving them an equal voice in the process and equal opportunity to use the PRA tools. They were also able to demonstrate that they were just as good at using the tools as the men in the village (or even better as the story in the box describes).
Summary of lessons learned about capacity building:
· One short training course and one-round of practice in the field were not enough for the trainees to acquire well grounded skills in gender analysis, PRA and participatory planning. They needed more time to learn by doing, especially since the hardest thing for a trainee new to participatory methods to learn is how to adjust his or her own attitudes and behaviour to support a truly participatory process with farmers.
· Staff in key decision-making positions needed to be involved in the training (or in other project activities) so that they could gain familiarity with the approaches and be willing to support their grass-roots level staff to apply what they have learned. Although projects may have a very bottom-up and grass-roots orientation, they should recognise the need to involve stakeholders and decision-makers at all relevant levels to create a more conducive environment for the project to work at the grass-roots level.
The PRAs generated a wealth of detailed information on men and women's different activities, access to resources, mobility, perception of institutions, and priorities. In many ways, the findings from the eight PRAs verify much of the prior research on gender based differences in agriculture. The research certainly validated the generally accepted notion that women contribute significantly to agricultural production and the fact that in upland areas they tend to be the primary farmers. In all the study areas, rural women work longer hours in a day and have a higher workload than men due to their double responsibility for reproductive and productive tasks. However, there were enough surprises and deviations from generally accepted patterns to bring home the point that there is enough site specific variation in gender roles and priorities to make assumptions hazardous. A summary of the key PRA findings and some select graphics are attached in Annex 3.
There are two findings that deserve special mention: One is the glaring discrepancy found in all study areas between women's role in agriculture and their access to extension services. The household surveys revealed that women are not even aware of when an extension technician has visited the village. Apparently, the arrival of an agricultural extension agent is not an event that the women themselves, the men or the extension agent think concerns them.
Another important finding concerned women's priorities: In all the study areas, women consistently gave very high priority to having access to education and training which they see as the first stepping stone to improve their lives. It was apparent to the researchers that women were hesitant to participate in decision-making processes primarily due to their lack of education. They understand that they lag behind men in terms of access to and control over resources due to their poor educational levels.
Thus one implication of the PRA findings was obvious: more extension and training should reach women. Given women's poor mobility, few can go to service and training centres for training and advice. Therefore local solutions must be identified. Agricultural skills training should also include functional literacy programmes which would enable women farmers to simultaneously develop reading, writing, math, speaking, listening, interpersonal, and problem-solving skills while acquiring knowledge about agricultural matters.
Prioritization of Problems by Men and Women in Ranichuri village
Women's priorities |
Problems |
Men's priorities |
First |
Lack of skills oriented training |
- |
Second |
Lack of treatment and health facilities |
- |
Third |
Lack of sufficient classes in the school |
Second |
Fourth |
No bridge over Kamala river |
Sixth |
Fifth |
Lack of drinking water |
First |
Sixth |
Lack of electricity facility |
Fourth |
Seventh |
Lack of irrigation facility |
Third |
Eighth |
Poor condition of village roads and trails |
Ninth |
Ninth |
Food insufficiency |
- |
Tenth |
Lack of market for the agricultural produce |
- |
- |
Lack of improved breeds of goat and breeding bulls |
Fifth |
- |
Improved fruit cultivation |
Seventh |
- |
No availability of improved varieties of seeds |
Eighth |
The most important question concerning the information generated during the PRAs was how it was used. Diagram 3 shows the actual information flow of the project3. It shows how WFDD proposed to use the PRA information and the project experience to prepare "Guidelines for Gender Sensitive District Level Agricultural Planning" which are intended to help district staff understand how they can incorporate gender. Needless to say, cancelling the district workshops significantly changed the course of the project by eliminating the mechanism for systematically bringing information from the communities up the planning ladder to the district level. The actual information flow of the project differed significantly from the bottom up, participatory "from farmer to planner and back" model proposed in the project design (refer back to Diagram 1).
This was perhaps the weakest aspect of the project. It would have made a great deal of sense to try to link the project activities with other on-going participatory planning processes. Although this did occur to some extent, the tight project time frame (approximately one year) really limited the opportunities for exploring how the project could create mutually re-enforcing and complementary activities. Another reason for poor linkages could be related to the location of the project within the Women Farmer Development Division rather than the more operationally oriented Divisions of Planning and Extension within the Ministry of Agriculture.
Linkages with the FAO projects in each of the three districts that were also supporting participatory approaches to planning were made at the district level. Some field based staff from these projects participated in the training and the PRAs. The strongest linkages in this regard were made with the FAO project "Enhancing the Agricultural Productivity of Rural Women" which was also operating in Sinduli district. Staff from this project were fully involved in the 051 activities. It is hoped that the lessons learned from the 051 project in how to support gender-sensitive and participatory planning will be applied to the next phase of this "sister" project which will put a greater focus on using participatory processes.
The Central Steering Committee was useful to improve coordination among line agencies involved in the project and to build support for activities (many members sent instructions to field level staff following the first meeting which resulted in good cooperation with project team). But as we have already mentioned, the Committee was not used very effectively either for information sharing, as a mechanism for participatory decision making or for dealing with problems that arose.
Better to build on existing coordination structures
The District Steering Committees (DSC) turned out to be counter-productive because they made district level staff perceive the project as something outside their regular programme of work. With hindsight, it would have been more effective to build on existing coordination structures and planning mechanisms at the district level to promote a sense of ownership among district staff and assure greater integration of the project approaches into normal, pre-existing planning procedures.
WFDD has played a lead role in guiding the formulation of a more favourable policy environment in Nepal and raising awareness about the need to change mechanisms, procedures, and attitudes in order to build a more enabling environment for gender sensitive agricultural planning. However, for long-term institutionalization, the approaches tested under the 051 project need to be adopted by the technical divisions of the Ministry of Agriculture which are responsible for planning, outreach and training. Thus any future activities to introduce gender-sensitive and participatory approaches within MOA should perhaps be lead by these technical units, as was suggested at one of the first sensitization meetings held with Ministry of Agriculture staff. This would create a greater sense of ownership at the operational level where actions and decisions take place.
One other logical move would be to make training in gender analysis and participatory methods an integral part of pre- and in-service training programmes at MOA training institutes and at the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science (IAAS) at Tribhuvan University.
On the basis of their experience with this project, the PRA specialist and the Lead Gender Consultant recomment the following additional actions:
· Establish a Gender Information System to serve the needs of policy analysts, planners and field staff. This would require strengthening WFDD's documentation section where staff and other development workers could find gender disaggregated information.
· Recruit and utilize more female facilitators/extension and outreach staff.. MOA should make a provision to post qualified female extension agents into district field sites. Female extension agents are more effective in dealing with women farmers concerns. Quotas should be allocated for women in the recruitment of females for SMS and JT/JTA posts.
· Assign women subject matter specialists to each of MOA's regional offices to guide the integration of gender into project/programme activities. Treat these officials as the protagonists for gender equity in agriculture development and include them in the Regional Technical Working Groups (RTWG) as core members.
· Establish an organizational linkage between regional based Women in Agriculture (WIA) Specialists, Regional Agricultural Research Services (RARS) and WFDD. This could strengthen technical back-stopping to district level staff and guide their efforts to formulate and provide services to women farmer groups, conduct outreach research in collaboration with NARC staff and help conduct on-farm activities. It could also be used to help Regional Technical Working Groups (RTWGs) to enforce various field programme activities related to women and men farmers.
2 To make up for this missed opportunity, FAO proposed to extend the project to hold a week long gender analysis training course for WFDD staff.
3 This now depends on whether the Guidelines are finalized and distributed as planned. The Guidelines were still in draft at the time of the writing of this case study.
