5.4.1 Gender participation in production and processing of millet

It has been reported that women make 51 percent of the agricultural labour force of the world. A study of the household division of labour in Bangladeshi villages found that women worked 12 hours a day compared to 10 hours a day worked by men in the same villages. In Africa and Asia, women work 13 hours more than men do each week. The women duties involve, among others, all the agricultural activities such as land preparation, sowing, weeding, harvesting, threshing, drying, pounding, food preparation for the family, fetching water and firewood and water, looking after animals, taking care of the children, to name but a few.

In an endeavour to relieve women of the tedious and time-consuming exercises of pounding in order to dehull and grind millet (and other cereal) grains, some machines were manufactured and introduced in rural areas of some developing countries. One such example was the introduction, in the rural areas of Arusha, Tanzania, of the TDRI Bicycle and Pedal mill (TDRI stands for Tropical Development Research Institute based in England) (UNIFEM, 1998). The TDRI mill was originally intended to be used on a bicycle, which the villager already owned. Thus, if a villager had no bicycle, he or she could not use the mill. The performance of the TDRI mill was unsatisfactory because the men in the villages considered grinding cereals to be a waste of a good bicycle, and they took off the bicycle and used it for other "meaningful" purposes. They viewed pounding as women's work, and could not see any value in using the bicycle to help women to do that job (UNIFEM, 1998). Again, women were not prepared to use bicycles for milling, because, traditionally, it is men who ride bicycles, and village women found it embarrassing to do so. Sometimes, women got down on to their knees and turned the pedals with their hands, rather than ride (UNIFEM, 1998).

Another endeavour that was undertaken in Tanzania, by the Community Development Trust Fund (CDTF) with an attempt to lessen women burden of pounding grains, was the introduction of diesel mills in rural areas. These were popular, but required a big component of initial capital investment. As such, many broke down, and only a handful remained operational. Women found themselves either spending a lot of time and energy walking to and from (and invariably waiting at) the nearest diesel mill, or continuing to use the slow and difficult methods which have not been improved upon for generations (UNIFEM, 1998).

In an endeavour to solve this problem, there was an introduction of hand-grinding mills project. A principle objective of the project was to encourage and facilitate the participation of women. The CDTF wanted to prevent the introduction of hand mills from having a negative effect on women. For example, in the vast majority of the diesel mill projects, women were reduced to passive recipients of a service, which was entirely controlled by men. However, the idea of treating the project as a "women only" activity was rejected because of the fear that this would isolate women from the mainstream of village (and national development).

Another case study involving gender participation in processing of millet and other cereals was carried out in Senegal (UNIFEM, 1998). The study reported that traditional threshing of large amounts of grains was done by a work group or "santanee". The village women respond to an invitation to help thresh one woman's grain and bring a full tub or two of their own millet to be threshed at the same time. The santanee usually takes the whole day, with some women coming and going, as their other responsibilities require. Payment to the threshers includes a day's meal, with an assurance that they will also be able to recruit help when they have a large threshing task.

With the arrival of the thresher, dehuller and mill project in the village, the threshing of the family. s grain became the financial responsibility of the men. This was probably due to the heavy work involved in bringing bundles of grain heads to be threshed, and subsequent handling of the large quantities of threshed grain. The women were the immediate beneficiaries in this case, being freed from both the manual threshing and the expense of employing the machine. It was hard to tell why the men took the threshing activity upon themselves with the advent of the machines. Yet for the they did not feel their responsibility extended as far as mechanical dehulling and milling of small amounts of millet for daily consumption as a task worth of their attention, although they would pay for millet processing destined for sale.

Users of the mechanical grinder for millet fell into two general categories: regular and irregular users. Paying for the services of the grinder was, in many households, the wife's responsibility. If she had some cash, she would have that day's millet ground by machine, and, if not, she would pound. These women were the irregular users. Those women whose husbands paid for the use of the grinder were the regular users and pounded only on days, which the mill was not in operation. Many women brought their grain to the centrally located mill on their way to perform some other tasks such as drawing water or fetching fire wood, and returned later to pick up the flour.

In case of dehulling, very few women used the dehuller because they found it expensive. Most women could afford either dehulling or milling (not both). They preferred to pay for machine milling rather than dehulling because milling by hand was much more time consuming and tiring a task than dehulling by hand. Machine dehulling and milling resulted in a product of lower quality, containing more bran, than the flour produced by hand dehulling and subsequent machine (or hand) milling.