In Africa, Agricultural Technology development and Transfer should target Women
One of the greatest areas of technological advancements of our age is in the agriculture. In Africa however, despite agriculture being the mainstay of its greater economy, gardening is still carried out using rudimentary tools, with the transition from the digging stick to the hand hoe, to the animal drawn plow and scarcely to the tractor a strenuous and slow process.
A classic case scenario is in tillage, a key aspect of technological development in agricultural evolution. Land is still opened and weeding is still done using hand hoes, and at best, the animal drawn plow.
Several reasons are espoused in policy, political and academic discourses to explain this, even so, however they are each constructed; all of these are at the end of the day, simply derivatives of the latent problem of women exclusion.
It is a conclusion you should find no difficulty arriving at, if you carefully examine two aspects of the African society: cultural (with social and economic implications) and technological (with development and transfer implications).
Cultural aspect and its gender bias
Let us start with the cultural aspect. What is the status of land rights between men and women? Because land ownership and access to it, are the bed rock of agricultural production. If you can’t access it, then you can’t use it; and if you can only use it under another person’s auspices, then you can’t use it the way you deem fit.
In a nutshell, in the greater rural Africa, women don’t own land, and therefore don’t get to decide what land is used for. Their only access to it is under the benefaction of their husbands, effectively meaning farming decisions, which include the adoption of technology - just to make sure we remain under the context of this discussion -, are not theirs to make.
Women don't own land and have little access and control over its agricultural use
From an economic angle, who makes the investment decisions? Because that determines the influence, for example, on cropping intensity and the farming scale, out of which gets factored in the requirement for technology. Again as in the case of land rights, women don’t get to make economic decisions, meaning they have little say on which agricultural venture their households engage in.
Summarily, Africa’s negative culture and gender biased tradition continues to make sure that women are excluded from influencing agricultural practice, conceptually and practically. This exclusion is fundamentally detrimental to technological adoption. The question is how?
African women by virtue of the roles they play are indeed at the beginning of the agricultural production and value addition chain. What Africa’s cultural bias has made sure to do, much to the detriment of her agricultural advancement, has been to ironically put these women who are at the beginning of its production chain, at end of the distribution chain of productive resources.
Technological development and transfer aspect
This is, to quickly jump ahead, an extension to the technological aspect where from, we see the bias being internalized by technocrats, scientists, innovators, and technology disseminators, the result of which is a wide gap between needs and actions in technology development and transfer.
How this does not help Africa’s cause for technologically advancing its agriculture is that, as it is, human labor and traditional agricultural techniques still dominate, and most of these activities are performed by women rather than men. If you are going to develop and transfer technology, it must be directed and dictated largely by the requirement to address the complex workload needs of women.
Human labor and traditional farming techniques still exist, several performed by women
As it is, this is not the case, and African women remain disadvantaged and therefore excluded not just from access to, but also utility of Agricultural technologies, leaving large chunks of agricultural work dispensed by them, to lag behind while state of the art technologies developed for the lesser men needs, lie idle and underutilized.
In addition, access to technology in Africa is gender biased. It mostly favors those who can afford to buy, to maintain and use it. Now most rural African women who are the ones in agricultural production, have low purchasing power and are therefore an unable to generate demand for technology that suits them.
What developers of technology need to do is become more gender sensitive, neutral in the targets of their choice for specific technologies.
In the words of Pretty (1995): "Central to the process of modernization is the assumption that technologies are universal,” Pretty says, before decrying, the belief that agricultural systems could be transformed without affecting social systems. “Technologies do not exist independent of social context," Pretty concludes.
What this means in the context of the African situation where women dominate the production chain, is that rural women cannot be bypassed by agricultural technological innovations without the affecting the speed and extent to which Africa as a continent and as a people, can technologically advance her agriculture.
Conclusion
In conclusion, African Agriculture’s slow transition from the digging stick to the hand hoe, to the animal drawn plow and presently scarcely to the tractor, is therefore closely correlated with the slow evolution of Africa’s traditional and cultural psyche in regard to women, and their agricultural roles, a negativity and bias which has unfortunately become internalized by technology developers and disseminators.
As technology continues to progress elsewhere, developers of technology and those who disseminate it in Africa must put women and their needs at the center.
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