The mission of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is to help build a food-secure world free from hunger. One of the foundations for stable food security is a productive rural community that uses state of the art technology and resource management strategies. Yet social stratification in the rural community along gender lines determines relative access to technology and resource management knowledge, where rural women are at a disadvantage. In the Asia and Pacific region, in spite of the remarkable economic and social achievement, there is still a persisting disparity that undermines gender equality gains in access to education, health, information and technology in rural areas. Rural women in all countries in the Asia-Pacific region have less education and live in an information deprived environment that curtails their ability to realize their full potential as producers on the farm and care givers at home. Hence. FAO supports a human resource development agenda through various educational polices and programmes to explicitly address the educational, training and information needs of rural women.
A potential threat exists, however, with the exponential growth in information related to economic and social participation and in the technologies that disseminate information at high speed, the educational divide (formal and informal) could be further exaggerated among rural women. Therefore, it is important that the educational resources in the region be mobilised to eliminate the inequity suffered by rural women in their access to education and information. The Asia-Pacific region has yet to fully utilise the immense potential of the distance learning (DL) approach for developing human resources for agriculture and rural development, particularly among rural women. Hence, the consultation examined regional distance learning strategies and identified resources that can be mobilised and approaches to apply distance-learning programmes for the advancement of rural women.
The regional consultation on Rural women and distance learning: Regional strategies was held in Beijing, China. The institutional partners organizing the consultation were the FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok, Thailand and China Agricultural Broadcasting and Television School (CABTS), Beijing, China. The consultation included participants from Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The consultation concurred that there is a need for establishing constructive working partnerships between agriculture university systems and Open University systems in the Asia and Pacific region. The participants expressed a need for strengthening the network in the region, initially among the institutions that participated in the consultation but with a decentralized modality and they developed an outline for regional project for distance learning for rural women.
This report of the consultation presents summaries of the papers presented and recommendations to improve rural women’s access to education and learning through distance education. These recommendations will feed into various processes of developing distance learning programmes in Open Universities and agriculture universities in the region.
I take this opportunity to thank the institutional partner who collaborated with the FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific in organizing the consultation.
He
Changchui
Assistant Director-General and
Regional Representative
FAO
Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific
Bangkok, Thailand
October 2003
