Women participation in urban agriculture and its influence on family economy - Sri Lankan experience

Abstract

Urban Agriculture has an incredible ability to address various burning issues in the urban community such as poverty, malnutrition, unhygienic food stuff and food insecurity which have arisen due to the continuous increase in global urban population. Women can play a key role in urban agriculture due to their role in food management at household level. Nevertheless, at present women participation in urban agriculture is significantly unsatisfactory. In this research, primary data were collected from a sample of 82 respondents in the capital of Sri Lanka, Sri Jayawardanepura Kotte. The results of the study confirm a significant difference in the perceptions on urban agriculture among urban women farmers and urban women non-farmers. The most influential socioeconomic factors affecting the women participation in urban agriculture are; age, education level, number of members in the family and total cultivable area. The time constraints for farming, poor quality of planting inputs and lack of knowledge are the mainly identified constraints that hinder women's contribution in urban agriculture. The results of the study further reveal that the best strategy practiced by the urban women farmers to uplifting the family economy is reinvesting the income or savings of household expenditure due to urban agriculture activities on same agricultural activities. Further, the fitted model on can be used to determine the level of women participation in urban agriculture.

Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture

“…A second school of thought contends that women have always been the main cultivators of urban spaces (Mbiba, 1994;Mudimu, 1996;Sanyal, 1987).These scholars argue that urban agriculture production is not experiencing feminization; rather, women have always represented the majority of primary operators in urban spaces. Over the past decade, scholars have documented the high prevalence of female urban growers in many countries, including Kenya, Mozambique, the Philippines, Senegal, Syria, Thailand, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe (Abdelali-Martini and de Pryck, 2014; Adebisi and Monisola, 2012;Danso et al, 2003;Gamhewage et al, 2015;Hovorka et al, 2009;Lu, 2011;Ngome and Foeken, 2012;Simiyu, 2012).…”

“…Globally, women's participation in UA has been shown to boost household nutrition and community food security (Doss et al, 2011;Lu, 2011), generate income (Danso et al, 2003;Gamhewage et al, 2015;Sebata et al, 2014), improve women's psychological wellbeing (Oliver and Heinecken, 2017), and build social inclusion with their local community (Adebisi and Monisola, 2012). Some scholars have attributed urban agriculture's popularity among women due to its compatibility with traditional gender roles (Hovorka, 2006;Oliver and Heinecken, 2017;Tembo and Louw, 2013).…”

“…Cultural traditions have also been identified as one of the main barriers preventing women from inheriting and controlling land, crops, and animals on an equal basis with men (Adebisi and Monisola, 2012;Doss et al, 2011;Gamhewage et al, 2015;Hovorka et al, 2009;Maxwell et al, 1998).This challenge has been observed with both rural and urban women farm operators (Agarwal, 1988;FAO, 2012;. Wilbers (2003) describes how traditions of patrilineal property inheritance frequently limit urban women's access to a secure place to live, their ability to produce subsistence, and to generate income.…”

“…A study by Thebo et al (2014) estimates that global city dwellers are farming and gardening an area the size of the European Union. 2 Though limited statistics and the lack of a consistent definition for urban agriculture make it difficult to obtain an accurate profile of global operators, regional studies by Adebisi and Monisola (2012) in Nigeria, Danso et al (2003) in Ghana, Gamhewage et al (2015) in Sri Lanka, Hovorka (2006) in Botswana, and Ngome and Foeken (2012) in Cameroon show that the majority of urban agriculturalists are women. A growing body of research strives to recognize how social identities, such as socioeconomic status, race, location, and gender, complicate barriers and opportunities for urban farmers, especially as contemporary scholarship calls for a focus on the intersectional issues that lie at the core of social justice in agriculture (Bowens, 2015;Penniman, 2018;.…”

Women Participation in Rural Tourism: A Case of Ella, Sri Lanka

“…What factors lead to these differences in Gender disparity. From agriculture, it has been found that women's contribution to the family is noticeable (Gamhewage, Sivashankar, Mahaliyanaarachchi, Wijeratne, & Hettiarachchi, 2015;Walpole & Goodwin, 2000). Thus, in rural areas, women can considerably contribute to the family through tourism activities.…”