Agricultural decision making: need to empower rural women stressed

It is the need of the hour to establish government-NGO partnership to empower rural women in agricultural decision making and to ensure their participation in extension work, suggested a research. The research titled "women empowerment in agricultural decision making and their participation in extension work" was conducted by PhD scholar Anila Afzal from the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, and supervised by Dr Tanveer Ali, Education and Extension Director.
There is a little extension service for rural women working with agricultural sector, owing to traditional biases, low literacy ratio and tough condition for female extension workers, the research said adding that some NGOs are playing their role for some extent.
It said the rural women comprise one third of the total population, and are an integral and viral force in the development process, which is the main factor to socio-economic progress. Women perform 30 percent of the agricultural work in industrialised countries.
Women help produce 100 percent of basic household food in Africa, 60 percent of food in Asia and participate 50 percent of the labour involved in intensive rich cultivation on two percent of the land, yet receive only one percent of all agricultural credit and can avail only five percent of all agricultural extension resources. In Pakistan, Cyprus, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, at least one third of the labour required to sustain agricultural work, is provided by women.
Rural women cover about half of the total population in our homeland and enormous proportion of the agricultural labour force in the rural part. About 70 percent of the women labour force are engaged in agricultural sector. Their role is being the toughest of all womenfolk of all cultures, yet their contribution goes disregarded and undocumented.
Women participate in 25 to 45 percent of labour input in rural economy in Pakistan. The research emphasised that women need to be recognised and treated as workers as they have a lack of access to control their resources, increasing a demand of gender-sensitive policies in the agricultural field.
Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal's reports show lack of the policy response to rural women's needs and concerns, so the situation requires affirmative action on the part of policymaking from international agencies and NGOs, it stressed. The policymakers should strengthen the role of private sector and NGOs to provide rural extension to rural women. It is recommended in the research to kick off skill-oriented training for women in agriculture.