The Problem

 

There are 1.1 billion smallholder farmers worldwide facing climate change and female labour drudgery. These farmers live in remote regions. The problem is that many interventions are not based on farmer needs, are expensive, environmentally unsustainable or require female labour (e.g. mulching). A further challenge is that farming is inherently site specific, and thus no single tool or practice is a panacea; this requires farmers to be exposed to a toolkit of options with the hope that at least one technology will be beneficial. Fortunately there are some commercial technologies available locally or in distant nations. However, these products are often inaccessible to poor farmers, sometimes because NGOs and poor governments attempt to create their own distribution networks rather than using effective, pre-existing networks (e.g. snack foods, snackfood). Interventions also fail because of a lack of understanding of the entire farm and household system, with poor understanding of indigenous knowledge, causing interventions to be unintentionally disruptive and/or not wanted.

 

For instance, surveys have demonstrated that women in Nepal undertake sowing, transplanting, weeding, harvesting and grain threshing. Similar to East Africa, hillside Nepalese women face the additional drudgery of walking up and down slopes with heavy tools, then undertaking activities (e.g. weeding) on narrow terraces or steep slopes. Migration of men to cities has further increased demands on women and children. (Chaudhary, Rana and Raizada)