35 research outputs found
Towards equitable and inclusive climate adaptation policies and practices
The presentation discussed the importance of looking at issues through a lens of gender and social diversities and thus paying attention to differences, inequality, and power dynamics among farmers. It emphasized that women-oriented technologies and adaptation strategies can help strengthen resilience to climate change at the community level
Integrating gender and social inclusion in WP2 Workplan
The presentation tackled how to integrate gender and social inclusion in the CGIAR Initiative on Asian Mega-Deltaâs (AMD) Work Package 2: Nutrition Sensitive Deltaic Agri-food Systems. Workplan. It was presented during the AMD Work Package 2 - Nutrition Sensitive Deltaic Agri-food Systems Planning Workshop in Penang, Malaysia on 17 October 2022
Accounting for women's unpaid care and domestic work: Implications for women's employment and livelihoods
Introducing an agricultural app to urban vegetable farmers: a pilot study in Hanoi
Plantix is an agricultural app which offers diagnosis and advice for more than 30 crops. It was developed by a private company based in Germany. It has a great potential as a new form of extension service complementing a traditional face-to-face extension service. CGIARâs Plant Health Initiative seeks to introduce the app as part of a package of innovations available for integrated pest and disease management to facilitate farmersâ behavioral change. Plantix has been widely used in India, but it has not been very common yet in Vietnam.
The aim of this pilot study is to test the usability of Plantix app for urban vegetable growers in Hanoi, Vietnam. 12 farmers (6 women and 6 men) participated in the training on how to use the app and provided feedback after a two-week trial.
Results show that both women and men farmers are greatly interested in using the app. Some farmers purchased and sprayed appropriate pesticides following advice from the app. Each participant shared the app with 2-5 relatives, friends and/or neighbors. Women shared the app with their husbands as well as their female peers, while men tended to share it with their male peers.
Although this pilot study confirms the usability of the app in the urban context of Vietnam with few constraints in access to internet and digital literacy for both women and men, some adjustments are required to meet their needs and to fit with the context
Consumer willingness to pay a premium for orange-fleshed sweet potato puree products: a gender-responsive evidence from BeckerâDeGrootâMarschak experimental auction among low- and middle-income consumers in selected regions of Nairobi, Kenya
Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is a major public health problem affecting people of all ages, particularly women of reproductive age and young children in the Global South. Nutrient-enriched (biofortified) orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) has promising potential as a sustainable food vehicle to combat VAD. Part of ongoing efforts to combat VAD, particularly among the urban poor populations, include the introduction of innovative OFSP puree, which is utilized as a functional and substitute ingredient in widely consumed baked and fried products. In Kenya, the OFSP puree is used to make commercial products that are affordable by low- and middle-income households. However, there is limited knowledge of consumer awareness, willingness to pay (WTP), and/or how gender plays a role in the uptake of these products. Following a multistage sampling technique, this study employs the BeckerâDeGrootâMarschak (BDM) experimental auction method to assess if men and women consumersâfrom selected, highly populated low- and middle-income areas of Nairobi County in Kenyaâare aware and if they would be willing to pay for OFSP puree products. Integrating gender considerations, we use three of the most widely consumed OFSP puree products, bread, buns, and chapati, and three treatment categories, naive, nutritional information, and OFSP puree substitute products' references prices to deduce the WTP for OFSP puree products among men and women. Results showed limited awareness of OFSP and OFSP puree products among men and women. However, both men and women were willing to pay a premium for the OFSP puree products. The intergender comparison showed that women were more willing to pay a premium for the OFSP puree products than men. Gender, age, education, knowledge of OFSP puree products, income category, availability of nutritional information, and reference pricing stand out as significant determinants of WTP
A gender perspective on pest and disease management from the cases of roots, tubers and bananas in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa
Considering gender in research on pests and diseases is increasingly important as it facilitates development of more efficient approaches to increasing the adoption of crop protection technologies and practices by women and men farmers according to their roles, knowledge, and capacities. However, this task is often assigned to social scientists in isolation from agronomists. Meanwhile, agronomists often struggle to understand how taking a gender perspective could enrich their research. Drawing on a number of different cases from both published and unpublished field research in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, this perspective article illustrates how a gender perspective can broaden the aspects of agronomy research and thereby contribute to improving crop production and scaling up of existing technologies and practices. Its targeted audience are agronomists and development practitioners, in particular, young researchers who are central to transdisciplinary agricultural research in the future
Policy framing and crisis narratives around food safety in Vietnam
While progress has been made recently in understanding food systems per se, much less is known about policies around those food systems. In this paper, we aim at understanding the food system policy context with the specific objective to look at policy dynamicsâdefined as the way policy agendas are identified, justified, and framed by decision-makers, and how they interact. Vietnam is used as a case study. Primary data were generated through face-to-face interviews complemented by an online survey. A policy framing approach was used to structure the research. The analysis reveals how the policy agenda is considered by many actors to be only partially evidence-based and highlights the extent to which the state government remains the most powerful actor in the setting of that agenda. The research also reveals the diffusion of the food safety crisis narrative beyond its original technical domain into a larger number of policy framings related to other issues of food systems, thus making it de facto the âcenter of gravityâ of the current agenda on food systems in Vietnam. Yet, a comparison with data from other countries challenges this narrative, and reveals instead how the (legitimate) public concern about food safety is being instrumentalized by certain groups of actors to advance their own agenda. The implication of this âdistortedâ framing is the risk for the decision-makers to âoverfocusâ their attention on this short-term issue and lose sight of some other longer-term structural trends such as the emergence of obesity in Vietnamese urban population
Women bargaining with patriarchy in coastal Kenya:contradictions, creative agency and food provisioning
Gender analysts have long recognised that challenging existing patriarchal structures involves risks for women, who may lose both long-term support and protection from kin. However, understanding the specific ways in which they âbargain with patriarchyâ in particular contexts is relatively poorly understood. We focus on a Mijikenda fishing community in coastal Kenya to explore contradictions in gendered power relations and how women deploy these to reinterpret gendered practices without directly challenging local patriarchal structures. We argue that a more complex understanding of womenâs creative agency can reveal both the value to women of culturally-specific gendered roles and responsibilities and the importance of subtle changes that they are able to negotiate in these. With reference to food provisioning, the analysis contributes to more nuanced understandings of gendered household food security and womenâs creative approaches to maintaining long-term security in their lives