Based on qualitative research conducted in Chikwawa and Phalombe in Malawi, this article discusses how gender relations shape men and women's access to and participation in agricultural training. It also examines how men and women justify or challenge gender inequalities in relation to access to agricultural information and knowledge. Data on gender and recruitment to and participation in training, barriers to training and access to information as well as farmer to farmer extension models were collected and analysed. A gender relations approach, focusing on power and inequality, was used to analyse the data. The data shows that the perception of men as household heads and women as carers or helpers who are also illiterate and ignorant often has implications on women's ability to access training and information. Negative stereotypical perceptions about women by their husbands and extension workers militate against women's access to training and information. Institutional biases within extension systems reproduce gender inequality by reinforcing stereotypical gender norms. Extension officers should be targeted with training on gender responsive adult learning methodologies and gender awareness to help them be more inclusive and sensitive to women's needs.
The ways in which rural women living with and/or affected by HIV are portrayed in films can potentially influence how social transformation is imagined, including the extent to which the women can be involved in problem-solving processes. This is because, in addition to conceptualising the problem, such representations often place women in a certain position in relation to, or within, the problematic situation, which in turn influences how solutions are framed. This paper uses a discursive approach to explore the portrayal of South African rural women living with and/or affected by HIV in Darrell Roodt's film, Yesterday (2004), which is set in rural KwaZulu-Natal. It considers how the film deals with the tension between structural violence and rural women's agency in grappling with HIV. Structural violence has a significant impact on the experiences of rural women and, hence, their health outcomes. However, when representing rural women, too heavy an emphasis on structural violence runs the risk of portraying them as passive or helpless victims, thus severely limiting their agency.
Using qualitative data collected in Gulu and Omoro districts, Northern Uganda, this paper discusses factors influencing youth engagement in sweetpotato production and agribusiness in a post-conflict environment. The purpose is to understand the factors in order to promote young people's participation in sweetpotato and other agricultural value chains. Thirteen young women and eleven young men were interviewed in individual in-depth interviews. Additionally, 74 young women and 85 young men participated in 16 sex-disaggregated focus group discussions. Our study identifies that rural youth's participation in sweetpotato production and agribusiness is a product of the intersection of broader community/national context, individual circumstances (age, gender, marital status, education and social class), and individual and collective agency. Our proposed strategies to encourage youth participation in the agricultural value chain consider young people's intersectional identities and address national-and community-level issues such as access to knowledge and information, land, markets and gendered power hierarchies.
This research was undertaken as part of, and funded by, the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB), supported by CGIAR Fund Donors http://www.cgiar.org/about-us/our-funders, and by the Policies Institutions and Markets-led CGIAR Gender Platform. We thank Marlène Elias and Nozomi Kawarazuka for the useful review comments which helped us to improve the tool. We also would like to thank Jim Sumberg for taking us through a process of reflecting on how best to incorporate youth issues into research on roots, tubers and banana crops.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.