One key aspect of empowering rural women is ensuring that they have adequate access to affordable and appropriate inputs that enable them to grow the food to feed their families but also to become successful commercial farmers. The State of Food and Agriculture 2011 demonstrated that just giving women the same access as men to agricultural resources could increase production on women's farms in developing countries by 20 to 30 percent.
The fertilizer industry is weary of the need to bridge the gender yield gap and is looking for innovative solutions to facilitate women farmers’ access to key inputs, in particular to fertilizers.. One such example comes from Turkey, where a fertilizer company adjusted its fertilizer packaging to a lower weight so that women could more easily transport the bags uphill to reach their field.
In the Black Sea region, where tea plants are grown, the majority of agricultural workers are women. Tea plants are cultivated on the steep slopes of hills, up which it is very difficult to carry heavy items such as fertilizer bags. Fertilizer bags of 50 kilos were packaged and sold in that region. In 2010, the producer acknowledged the difficulty this posed for women rural workers and designed a system for delivering CAN (calcium ammonium nitrate) and the most commonly used compound fertilizer (25.5.10) in 25 kg bags to help women farmers by lightening their load.
This change was not easy to implement. Everything from the design of the bag to the bag production line, as well as loading/unloading mechanisms, needed to be changed and required a significant invesment. However, the initiative had an immediate quantifiable positive influence on women farmers’ working conditionsand productivity.
As research indicated, women farmers are less productive only because they don’t have access to the same resources (capital, tools, products and services) as their male counterpart. Business solutions can be developed to create this access, in particular through innovative approaches tailored to address the specific needs of women farmers.
For this reason, the fertilizer industry is supportive of SDGs that have a built-in private sector contribution and that focus on facilitating smallholder agriculture, especially in the case of women who grow as much as 80 percent of the crops in developing areas.
One key aspect of empowering rural women is ensuring that they have adequate access to affordable and appropriate inputs that enable them to grow the food to feed their families but also to become successful commercial farmers. The State of Food and Agriculture 2011 demonstrated that just giving women the same access as men to agricultural resources could increase production on women's farms in developing countries by 20 to 30 percent.
The fertilizer industry is weary of the need to bridge the gender yield gap and is looking for innovative solutions to facilitate women farmers’ access to key inputs, in particular to fertilizers.. One such example comes from Turkey, where a fertilizer company adjusted its fertilizer packaging to a lower weight so that women could more easily transport the bags uphill to reach their field.
In the Black Sea region, where tea plants are grown, the majority of agricultural workers are women. Tea plants are cultivated on the steep slopes of hills, up which it is very difficult to carry heavy items such as fertilizer bags. Fertilizer bags of 50 kilos were packaged and sold in that region. In 2010, the producer acknowledged the difficulty this posed for women rural workers and designed a system for delivering CAN (calcium ammonium nitrate) and the most commonly used compound fertilizer (25.5.10) in 25 kg bags to help women farmers by lightening their load.
This change was not easy to implement. Everything from the design of the bag to the bag production line, as well as loading/unloading mechanisms, needed to be changed and required a significant invesment. However, the initiative had an immediate quantifiable positive influence on women farmers’ working conditionsand productivity.
As research indicated, women farmers are less productive only because they don’t have access to the same resources (capital, tools, products and services) as their male counterpart. Business solutions can be developed to create this access, in particular through innovative approaches tailored to address the specific needs of women farmers.
For this reason, the fertilizer industry is supportive of SDGs that have a built-in private sector contribution and that focus on facilitating smallholder agriculture, especially in the case of women who grow as much as 80 percent of the crops in developing areas.