Time and energy saving for women
Farm Africa is providing women in rural Ethiopia with time and energy saving tools
Women in rural Ethiopia are usually required to undertake between 15 and 18 hours of laborious work every day. Although men are generally responsible for land clearing, women are the ones performing the more time consuming and intensive activities. These include planting, weeding and harvesting, as well as post-harvest activities like threshing, winnowing and grinding.
Weeding with short-handled hoes is the activity that consumes most time and energy, causing tiredness and backache. There are tools that relieve these burdens, but for various reasons women have not had access to them. Household decision making is generally controlled by the men, leaving women with little or no access to the government support services, or the financial services, that could provide them with access to such tools.
Labor saving tools
Farm Africa is, therefore, making available a range of labor saving tools to women farming maize and sorghum, to save them time and energy. The women have been closely involved themselves in the selection of the tools, to ensure they are culturally and socially appropriate, simple, locally produced and maintained, and affordable with minimum credit support.
The tools we are making available are:
- Manual seed drills
- Long handle weeders
- Medium-sized hand operated shellers for maize
- Sorghum threshers
Photo: A hand operated maize sheller which can output up to 1000kgs of shelled maize per hour, compared to only 30kgs per hour shelling maize by hand
A new approach
However, simply making the tools available does not in itself provide a lasting solution. Farm Africa is, therefore, also doing all it can to encourage women to start using the tools. The main features of this approach are:
- providing women's groups with training in using the tools
- helping women's groups to set up village saving and loan groups to help finance the purchase of tools
- supporting the establishment of maintenance facilities by helping small enterprises with the access to credit and the equipment necessary to maintain the tools
- raising awareness about women’s workloads amongst communities, and seeking to empower women to be more involved in household decisions about agriculture
- working in partnership with local government services to build support for the women into existing support services.
Who are we helping?
Farm Africa is supporting 300 smallholder women maize and sorghum farmers in Ethiopia.
