* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Ray Jordan is chief executive of Self Help Africa. The opinions expressed are his own.
African women do up to 80 percent of the manual work on farms in many African countries, yet in some instances they receive as little as 5 percent of the available support.
Self Help Africa targets resources specifically to ensure that resource-poor African women benefit equally from the support that is provided, including access to better quality seed, technical support and advice, as well as to markets for their produce.
Self Help Africa also has a range of programmes that support rural African women with training and micro-loans to enable them to establish their own income generating activities.
In Ethiopia alone more than 35,000 mainly women cooperative members have accessed loans from member led Savings and Credit (SACCO) institutions. The loans have allowed borrowers to set up small on- and off-farm businesses such as beekeeping, textile production, animal rearing, backyard gardening and small-scale trading.
Self Help Africa’s ‘Change Her Life’ campaign aims to highlight the inequality faced by millions of smallholder women farmers in Africa. It calls on governments and major aid funders to discriminate positively in favour of women farmers, especially small-scale farmers, in a bid to redress the inequality that they face in sub-Saharan Africa.
The campaign is designed to both highlight that issue, and also press institutional funders to put into place measures that would ensure that women farmers get a fairer share of support.
Statistics show that while women do most of the weeding, tilling, planting, harvesting, irrigating, and transporting goods on the small-farm, they receive less than 10 percent of the farm extension support, are often denied membership to farmer co-operatives, and have difficulty accessing input and output markets effectively.
In several countries in sub-Saharan Africa women are denied access to land ownership, while in others they are only allocated inferior plots of land on which to grow their crops.
Yet when African women receive an equal share of this support, the household yields and incomes increase by up to 20 percent, and the evidence suggests that this money is more likely to be invested in the health, education and general welfare of the family.
More than 75,000 people have viewed the campaign video and more than 6,000 people have backed the campaign online.
Copies of the ‘Change Her Life’ petition have been sent to the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the UK Minister for Overseas Development Andrew Mitchell, the African Union Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture Rhoda Peace Tumusiime, the Irish Minister for Trade and Development Joe Costello, and the European Commissioner for Overseas Development Andris Piebalgs.
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