Why the Gates Foundation Believes Transforming Agriculture Starts with Greater Investment in Gender Equality

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced its first ever foundation-wide strategy devoted exclusively to transforming the way women participate in economies and how they exercise power over their lives. Much of this work will occur in the agriculture sector in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where up to 40 to 60 percent of poor farmers and livestock keepers are women. And while both men and women farmers in these regions are in need of basic services and resources, women often face a more challenging path to prosperity.

In the eastern Indian State of Bihar, Nasima Khatun, a single mother with two children, was struggling to achieve financial stability from the earnings generated by her small herd of goats. Now Nasima can be seen strolling confidently through the village, being greeted warmly and respectfully by neighbors, some of whom call her “Doctor.”

Nasima is not a physician. But she was trained through a program called Project Mesha to be a “pashu sakhi,” or a friend of the animals, which is helping to significantly increase her earnings — along with those of many other women in her village. Nasima essentially functions as a “goat nurse.” She provides a range of basic, low-cost preventive health services for livestock — from deworming to vaccination, feed supplements and breeding advice — to help women like herself gain financial independence by improving the health and productivity of their goats.

Nasima now serves about 160 households. She is part of a growing cadre of pashu sakhis trained through Project Mesha that currently support over 23,000 households in Bihar. Work is now underway to train enough women to serve 50,000 households in Bihar, where rearing goats and other small livestock is often the best income opportunity currently available to women.

Project Mesha works with the platform of self-help groups for women launched by the Bihar State Rural Livelihoods Mission (known locally as JEEViKA). Project Mesha also receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s one of several initiatives we support that are taking advantage of the economic potential of crop and livestock production to help address gender inequalities that have existed for generations.

Gender equality always has been an important part of our agriculture work, as it has been with the foundation’s investments in areas like nutrition, health and family planning. Now the foundation is intensifying these efforts with a new overarching strategy that will work across multiple sectors to address the way women participate in economies and how they exercise power over their lives.

We have come to see that a critical aspect of every problem we’re trying to solve is the often-undervalued lives of women and girls.

This is especially true for our agriculture work, in which we aim for broad-based and equitable economic growth by investing in smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. While most poor farmers in these regions are challenged to obtain basic things like improved seeds, land, fertilizers, animal health products and financial services, data tells us that often, women can face disproportionate constraints in accessing these crucial inputs.

We invest in agriculture because we view it as a pathway out of poverty for the world’s poorest — many of whom rely on farming for their livelihoods. We aim to create economic opportunities for millions of poor families so that they can put money in their pockets, nutritious food on their tables, send their children to school, and transform their communities.

And if you’re committed, like we are, to making agriculture a profitable pursuit, on a scale that can raise the living standards of entire countries, then you need to focus on gender equality, because 40 to 60 percent of smallholder farmers are women.

In addition to initiatives like Project Mesha, we invest in other programs in India that build on self-help groups, like the Professional Assistance for Development Action or PRADAN and the Women’s Advancement in Rural Development and Agriculture (WARDA) program. WARDA aggregates women’s self-help groups into women-run producer organizations that are connected to market opportunities, engaging private sector players including institutional buyers, logistics players, digital platforms, and research institutions across different nodes in the vegetable, litchi, mango, maize, and potato value chains.

We also support programs that encourage women to think more broadly about agriculture opportunities and prioritize research. They include GREAT, which stands for Gender-responsive Researchers Equipped for Agricultural Transformation, and AWARD, the African Women in Agricultural Research and Development program.

GREAT is training researchers in Africa to ensure that crop breeding work — whether it involves cassava, wheat, bananas or other important crops — is equally addressing the needs of women and men farmers. Meanwhile, AWARD has helped train more than 1,000 African women agriculture scientists in 28 African countries. These women are working on innovations that have the potential to transform the lives of smallholders across the continent, many of whom are also women.

AWARD fellowships have been so successful at fostering collaboration that they are our key partners, along with the BNP Paribas Foundation and the Agropolis Foundation, for the new One Planet Fellowship. This $15 million 5-year program will support 600 African and European researchers — women and men — who are working to help African farmers adapt to climate change.

As Melinda Gates said in announcing our foundation-wide focus on gender equality “by empowering (women) to help themselves, we aim to help tear down the barriers that keep half the world from leading a full life.” In many countries, that work will be heavily focused on tearing down barriers that prevent women from harvesting all of the economic opportunities available in agriculture.

Dr. Nick Austin is the director of Agricultural Development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Get more updates on the Foundation’s agricultural work by following along on Twitter at @GatesPoverty.