Thank you for the interesting question and answers. I work on the empowerment of women farmers in Syria through participatory research in agriculture. One of the reasons men give when justifying women's absence from participatory programmes or decision-making opportunities is 'women do not have access to information, they do not know input prices, they do not know. So..how can we trust their decision? why should we collaborate with them?' This causes women's exclusion from agricultural technology development and decision-making opportunities and has strong impacts on women's empowerment and on their livelihoods and that of their households. We tried to facilitate women's access to information (also) through ICTs but we found that women had little and indirect access to ICTs. Generally, decisions about intra household expenditures are taken by the men, and technology is associated with men and not women. Therefore, technology is purchased for and owned by the men. In one case we bought a (pink!) mobile for a woman farmer but after a few weeks she did not own it any longer... 'some husbands think that mobiles or computers allow women to get easily in touch with strangers'..she said However, what I have seen in many families is that computers are becoming important for children's education - and boys' education, in particular. Fathers are willing to spend money to buy a computer even if expensive. Since women are in charge of helping children with their homeworks ...one way of getting women access to computers can be teaching them to use their computers so that they can help their children. Does anybody have similar experiences? alessandra

Hello, I am Alessandra. I work on gender issues in participatory plant breeding focusing on empowerment and governance. I look at knowledge sharing approaches and tools to facilitate the participation of women farmers in agricultural development programmes. In 2008 we organised an International Farmers' Conference at ICARDA with a gender-sensitive approach to knowledge sharing. www.icarda.org/farmersconference