Gendered Farming Systems for Sub-Saharan Africa

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) are undertaking a gender mapping of agriculture in Africa in order to better understand how to best target water management strategies to farmers.

The gender mapping aims to
• identify local patterns in the gendered organization of farm enterprises in an area
• make a gender classification of the overall farming system of a specific area into a male, female, or dual (both systems are present) farming system
• incorporate this information into a geo-referenced gender map.

This gender map will be used to develop recommendations for how to target different agriculture water management technologies to the farm’s main decision-makers.

We are inviting people who know the gender patterns of farming in particular areas to provide this information for the map. This knowledge may come from being an inhabitant, extension worker, Ph.D. student, researcher, gender specialist, etc.

We are asking for some basic geographic information, but the focus is on decision-making and control of produce in agriculture.

We are interested in general patterns that apply at the community or higher level. (We recognize that there will be differences between households in a community, but what is the general pattern?) The unit can be any rural or peri-urban area where agriculture is the mainstay, such as one or more communities, an irrigation scheme or an irrigated area, a district, or a watershed.

The following definitions may be useful:
Farm enterprises: the lowest-level unit of semi-autonomous agricultural economic activity, managed by one or more adults.

Farming systems: the total of all farm enterprises in an area.

Female-managed (farming systems or enterprises): women are the main decision-makers about production and the use of the output. Female-managed enterprises generally include the farm enterprises of de jure and facto female-headed households. Women in male-headed households can also have their own enterprises such as own field or homestead garden or small livestock.

Male-managed (farming systems or enterprises): men are the decision-makers about production and the use of output, although both men and women may be involved in the farm enterprise.

Separately-managed (farming systems or enterprises): both men and women control production sub-units and are farm decision-makers in their own domains. For example, men may have certain types of fields, crops, or animals, and women have others (including homestead gardens). Although they may provide labor to each other’s fields or animals, the men and women each have separate decision-making authority and control of the output.

Jointly-managed (farming systems or enterprises): men and women share labor and decision-making over the enterprise and the use of the produce. They are co-entrepreneurs, and often have joint land titling and joint accounts. Men and women may provide different types of labor and manage and have control over different areas in the farm system; for example women may have exclusive rights to milk/eggs while men have rights over meat.

We will be asking for your assessment of which of these patterns best applies for the farming system as a whole and for each type of production system (e.g. field crops, home-gardens, wood lots, livestock production).

Thank you for taking the time to share this information!