R. Balakrishnan
R. Balakrishnan, Ph.D. is a regional rural sociologist and a Women in Development Officer in FAO's Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (RAP); e-mail: [email protected]
In the developing world, although rural women's work determines food production,
the promoters of technology and technology transfer overlook the complex needs
and livelihood conditions of rural women. Traditional biases, which are internalized
by scientists, technocrats and technology disseminators, contribute to a gap
between needs and actions in technology development and technology transfer.
Access to technology is not neutral, and is particularly not gender-neutral.
It favours those who can buy, possess and use the technology. Most rural women
lack the ability to generate a demand for technology because of their disadvantaged
access to education and information and their weak purchasing power. A production
task segment and production technology cluster approach could increase women's
productivity and improve household food security prospects. Technology transfer
would be a supportive and integrated process of sustained training and timely
delivery of inputs.
Un fossé qui se creuse dans le développement des technologies et le transfert de technologies à l'appui des femmes rurales
Dans le monde en développement, le travail des femmes rurales est déterminant en matière de production vivrière, mais les partisans du développement technologique et du transfert de technologies négligent de prendre en compte les besoins et réalités complexes qui entourent les activités de subsistance des femmes rurales. Les préjugés traditionnels repris par les scientifiques, les technocrates et les promoteurs de la technologie contribuent à élargir l'écart entre les besoins et les pratiques en matière de développement et transfert de technologies. L'accès à la technologie n'est pas neutre, et ne tient surtout pas compte de la problématique homme-femme, favorisant ceux qui peuvent se la procurer, la posséder et en faire usage. La plupart des femmes rurales manquent des compétences nécessaires pour générer la demande de technologies, vu leur accès limité à l'éducation et à l'information, ainsi que leur faible pouvoir d'achat. Une approche de segmentation des tâches et des technologies correspondantes pourrait accroître la productivité des femmes et améliorer les perspectives de la sécurité alimentaire des ménages. Le transfert de technologies serait alors un processus intégré associant formation durable et livraison des intrants en temps voulu.
Diferencias en aumento: necesidades y medidas en el fomento de la tecnología y su transferencia en apoyo de la mujer del medio rural
En el mundo en desarrollo, aunque la producción de alimentos depende del trabajo de la mujer del medio rural, los promotores de tecnología y su transferencia pasan por alto las complejas necesidades y las realidades de subsistencia de dichas mujeres. Las desviaciones tradicionales que hacen suyas los científicos, tecnócratas y difusores de tecnología contribuyen a aumentar la diferencia entre las necesidades y las medidas en el fomento de la tecnología y su transferencia. El acceso a la tecnología no es neutral, en particular con respecto al género, favoreciendo a quienes tienen capacidad de comprarla, poseerla y utilizarla. La mayoría de las mujeres en el medio rural carecen de posibilidades para acceder a la tecnología, debido a su posición desfavorecida en el acceso a la enseñanza y la información y su escaso poder adquisitivo. Un enfoque orientado hacia las tareas de producción y hacia el conjunto de la tecnología de producción podría aumentar la productividad de las mujeres y mejorar las perspectivas de seguridad alimentaria familiar. La transferencia de tecnología sería un proceso integrado en apoyo de una capacitación sostenida y una entrega puntual de insumos.
Technology development and technology transfer processes are considered
to be primary driving forces for growth and welfare in developing countries.
The word "technology" is derived from the Greek tekhn, meaning
art (in the sense of "way of doing"). Technology is a means to material
self-improvement (Keller, 1992). In simple terms, the purpose of technology
development is to improve living conditions and, in the process, generate opportunities
for people to make a livelihood and improve their standards of living. Yet,
the processes of technology development and transfer usually overlook the complex
needs and livelihood realities of rural women.
In a society, households are both producers and consumers which, within the
context of the available technology and resources, try to find the necessary
inputs to ensure food security and achieve welfare ends. Rural women's workload
encompasses resource search and use strategies to fulfil household needs. Appropriate
resources and technology should have a considerable positive impact on easing
women's work in household production. However, the processes of technology development
and transfer often ignore women's resource management stress and the physical
hardship they endure. Several proponents would claim that technology is neutral,
but it can also be argued that it is not neutral, and particularly not gender-neutral.
The technology development process, which is driven by economic considerations,
favours those who have the ability to purchase, possess and use inventions and,
in the developing world, poor and illiterate women lack this ability. Furthermore,
the developers of technology are not always neutral in the targets they choose
for a specific technology. Pretty (1995) observes that "Central to the
process of modernization is the assumption that technologies are universal.
The belief that agricultural systems could be transformed without affecting
the social systems is not a valid one. Technologies do not exist independent
of social context." Hence, even the innovations developed with the aim
of improving the living conditions and standards of rural and agricultural communities
can bypass rural women.
In the agricultural sector, technology development has been directed towards
improving productivity in order to ensure the availability of food. It was taken
for granted that all the technologies that drive agricultural productivity would
inevitably result in improved rural livelihoods. Such an assumption has proved
to be flawed within the context of persistent poverty in the region.
The Asia region has welcomed innovations and made impressive strides in the
research and development of agricultural technologies. Emerging technologies
have followed various trends in science and technology. The green revolution
focused on new varieties of crops and technology packages that increase yields,
and the technologies developed to improve the yields and marketing qualities
of horticulture and floriculture varieties have had a positive impact. Although
controversy surrounds their dubious social and economic gains to marginal farmers,
biotechnology enterprises have found a niche in technology development.
The Asia region is also a centre for sustainable development innovations. Most
evident among these is integrated pest management (IPM), the aim of which is
to decrease dependency on chemicals through increased use of organic farming
methods. Other noteworthy areas are innovative leadership in biodiversity conservation
and joint forest management to promote sustainable natural resource management.
In many countries of the region, the development of information technology has
been phenomenal. Countries such as India and Malaysia are poised to connect
villages to the Internet as a small step towards realization of the 1960s dream
of a global village.
In the Asia region, social innovations are important elements of the development
paradigm. Collateral-free group credit for women is a social innovation that
was brought about by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Fine-tuning participatory
approaches for people's participation and networking are thriving actively in
the region. The debate on such social issues as farmers' rights and equity in
benefit sharing is well advanced, and corresponding legislative measures are
being formulated.
However, for the rural community, the gains in poverty alleviation that can
be attributed to technology development have not been impressive, particularly
in the case of women.
Three-quarters of the world's poor (1.3 billion people) live in the rural areas of the Asia and Pacific region. The South Asia subregion in particular is home to two-fifths of the poor of the developing word. Most of the poor in the region are small and landless farmers living in rural areas. The poorer people are found among women, children and youth, older persons, ethnic minorities and victims of disasters and conflicts. Poverty involving the rural sector could remain the significant issue in the first decade of this century, considering the fact that about 80 percent of the world's economically active population are engaged in agriculture in Asia
PAI/ESCAP, 1998.
Hence, as technology development takes a giant leap forward in the region, there is a widening gap between the urban and the rural sectors in terms of gains realized from advanced and emerging technologies. This gap is particularly pronounced in the case of rural women, since their workload and technology needs most often do not direct the technology development process. It has been stated that "Women have limited access to technology and tools that would ease their workload. Technological innovations have invariably been made in the activities typically performed by men, whereas human labour and traditional techniques continue to be used in most day-to-day activities performed by women, both inside and outside the house" (Commonwealth Secretariat, 1996). Rural women continue to maximize their productivity with an inadequate understanding of emerging technologies. Furthermore, effective utilization of emerging technologies requires a basic level of education that most Asian rural women lack.
It is well documented that women do not have support to improve their productivity in various enterprises. "Although rural women are often at the beginning of the food production chain, they are at the end of the distribution chain for the productive resources and social services that are essential to their critical role in the alleviation of poverty through the production of food for consumption by rural households and, by extension, surpluses to be consumed by the nation" (UN, 1997). The Asian situation reflects the global outlook, and efforts should be directed towards bridging the gap between rural women's technology needs and their access to those needs. The underlying causes of the neglect of women's technology needs originate in history, culture and social, scientific and technological traditions.
In Asia, as in other regions of the world, a commonly prevalent societal misperception is that rural women's work makes an insignificant contribution to production. Such an assessment deters efforts to develop technology that better serves the needs of women. The value women add to family welfare is taken for granted and the drudgery of women's work is considered routine. This leads to social blindness to women's technology needs. It is assumed that if women have been doing work this way for generations, then the work is not difficult. Why should women wish to change their ways of doing work and look to technology for the answers? Such a perception is common among men working the land and male scientists developing technology.
It is seldom recognized that women and men have different interests in consumption
and production and that they use resources differently. Within rural societies,
gender differences in needs and household production demands give rise to diverse
technology needs. A study on agricultural technology development by the International
Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) concluded that
"The achievement of men's and women's effective involvement in agriculture
calls for a more serious consideration of the views and perceptions of both
[male and female] members of the farming community. User-oriented perspectives
are important feedback for the design and development of technology options"
(Kolli and Bantilan, 1997).
Particularly in South Asia, rural women are not very effective at articulating
their technology and resource needs. Cultural norms dictate a sense of modesty
that forbids women to express their technology needs and impairs their effective
participation in participatory technology development (Hausler, 1997; FAO, 2000).
Many training of trainers programmes are developed on the premise that technology
transfer will trickle down effectively to women from men. Most often, a more
realistic scenario is likely to be the stagnation of technology information
at the male trainee level. Usually, the trainers are men who do not seek the
involvement of women farmers in technology transfer programmes. In addition,
technology transfer through a series of sources (trainer to husband/male relative
[trainee] to woman) can result in information distortion. Women working in relative
isolation may not be able to verify information or may modify processes because
of a lack of access to the primary source of information. Such a situation can
result in the improper use of technologies leading to poor confidence among
women regarding their own ability to understand emerging technologies The "key
contact farmer" approach to technology development most frequently identified
men as the contact farmers, with the result that women's technology needs were
not incorporated in the identified technology domain. This situation emphasizes
the need for creative measures to encourage women's participation in training
and extension programmes (Kane, 1996).
The farming systems approach placed emphasis on gender analysis of the various
aspects of agricultural production, but ignored the realities of women's work
in the domestic sphere. Women's activities in the home are very often physically
demanding, dirty, time-consuming and monotonous, and even gender-sensitive specialists
have marginalized women's value-adding roles in household production. This may
be attributed to such biases among gender scholars and development specialists
as: the ideological bias that improving women's economic retribution will lead
to the empowerment of women; a misguided perception that focusing on the household
technology needs of women is buying into the domestication of women; and Western-educated
women's perception that household technology is a branch of the maligned profession
of home economics (Sachs, 1996).
Rural women's understanding of local resources and their indigenous knowledge
of crops, seeds and forest resources were seldom respected and were ignored
in the technology development process (Thrupp, 1998; Sachs, 1996). The symbiotic
relationship that existed between rural women and their ecological resource
environment and forest resources were frequently not acknowledged in either
the technology development or the technology transfer processes.
Technology developers are generally specialists who work independently of other
disciplines, with a bias towards a single problem-solving approach and a focus
on developing technology to address discrete individual production problems.
However, rural production is an integrated system that requires a parallel multitask
approach to production and productivity. The concept of a multitasking structure
within the rural household, particularly one that is relevant to women's work,
needs to enter the technology development and transfer systems.
Rural women's work is characterized by long and strenuous days with very few
relevant technologies to ease the drudgery. The sphere of women's work is more
complex and diverse than is perceived by technology development and technology
transfer professionals. Women's work is crucial to sustaining rural economies;
the unpaid family or low-paid agricultural labour that women provide lowers
production costs. Women's family labour is poorly measured by official statistics
(UN, 1995). Within the subsistence production system of the Asia region, women's
unpaid family labour and innovative resource use strategies determine the availability
of and access to food. Such autonomous work by women is often ignored in technology
development and transfer. Unpaid and low-paid female labour on the land drives
the region's successful agricultural export industry.
Another aspect of women's labour that has economic implications is their work
in off-farm production. Linkages between rural women's off-farm production and
the world economy through the global market are well documented (Bakker, 1994).
In Asia, the labour force participation rate for women in agriculture ranges
from a minimum of 15 percent to a maximum of 97 percent. Advances made in the
area of women's education vary within the region. In East Asia, female primary
and secondary enrolment rates are 83 percent, while in South Asia they stand
at 55 percent (UNDP, 1999). The "feminization of farming" may be a
growing phenomenon as countries adopt rural employment schemes in small-scale
industries, self-help group microenterprises and town and village enterprises,
and as urban jobs spawned by economic liberalization lure away capable young
women and men from agriculture (in Bangladesh, China and India). Such internal
migration can also contribute to the "greying" of farming, an increasingly
common phenomenon where the elderly, particularly older women, become the principal
farmers, as is occurring in China. Technology client groups in Asian rural societies
are made up of poor unpaid female family workers and/or low-paid female agricultural
labourers who are disadvantaged by their lack of education.
In the Asia region, among rural households and communities, it is women who sustain food security. They do so through their multiple roles, including contribution to the family income pool by engaging in off-farm enterprises. Food production is commonly assumed to be the sole determinant of food availability, but domestic activities for which women have primary responsibility also contribute to household food security. Examples include the collection of water and fuel for cooking and the processing of grains for family meals. Almost everywhere, including in Asia, women are responsible for ensuring that all household members receive adequate nutrition. "Ensuring the nutrition security of the household, through the combination of both food and other resources, is the almost exclusive domain of women" (Quisumbing et al., 1995).
According to Douglas (1999), improved technologies should be relevant technologies.
"The term relevant signifies that improved technologies must match
or conform to the biophysical and socio-economic circumstances of those expected
to adopt them." The technology development and transfer system should recognize
the social realities of multifaceted and unpaid rural women's work, which are
associated with agriculture, natural resource management and rural production.
Technology development should complement the rural production system and take
into account all aspects of women's work within a framework of household production.
The adoption of a holistic production approach is the most logical response,
since the situation in many Asian countries indicates that rural economies are
the primary production centres for products and commodities that meet the demands
of local consumption and urban and international markets.
Currently, there is a gap, as demonstrated by the poor understanding and limited
recognition of rural women's "multitasking" production roles. An integrated
approach is needed in order to understand the different segments of household
production (e.g. farm production, home production, off-farm production and community
production) and women's tasks in these production segments, as well as to develop
appropriate technologies that support rural women in their production tasks.
When a systematic approach is taken, rural women's work can be understood as contributing to discrete segments in rural household production. On the basis of such an understanding, technology, information and services should be directed towards complementing women's specific contribution to production. The proposed production segment tasks approach seeks to gain increased awareness of women's technology requirements for achieving productivity gains (Figure 1). In this framework, rural household production includes the four segments of farm production, home production, off-farm production and community production. These are determined by rural households' asset status and choice of enterprise. Rural women's multitasking includes specific activities within each of the production segments identified in Figure 1, which shows how each production segment includes various activities that together make up rural women's workday. Rural women's multitasking work patterns require a wide range of techniques and technology to ensure a production process that is efficient in terms not only of returns, but also of reducing drudgery for women.
The focus of agricultural technology development has most frequently been on
crop production gains. Training the rural workforce in the use of technologies
was left to technology transfer specialists. However, neither of these thrusts
explicitly acknowledged women's contribution to human resources in the rural
sector. Projects and programmes that have recognized the roles of men and women
and the constraints limiting each sex's access to resources have succeeded in
creating viable options for achieving household food security.
An example of a production segment technology support cluster for a specific
enterprise is presented in Figure 2. The example relates to an FAO-executed
project that deals with degraded forest land and fodder development in Nepal.1
Livestock management is the most common rural women's activity in Nepal and
provides a source of income controlled by women. Project design responds to
the multitasking responsibilities of women in the local production system and
recognizes the constraints on their participation (Sterk, 1998). The intervention
addresses the time constraints faced by women when collecting fodder for livestock
rearing. Nepalese rural women spend long and strenuous days climbing the steep
hills to collect fodder and fuel. This task consumes much of their time, leaving
them with little for leisure or family care. The project in Nepal has created
a viable alternative way of collecting fuel and fodder closer to homesteads.
To create access to production resources, a number of initiatives have been
established. These include group mobilization for land management, credit and
savings schemes and 40-year land leases to ensure land tenure that motivates
farmers to adopt sustainable land management strategies. Gender equity considerations
are integrated into the project through the employment of women group promoters
to organize women's groups and women-integrated groups, as well as to train
rural men and women in gender role awareness at the grassroots level.
The livelihood outcome is that income from the sale of livestock provides for
family needs, and this income is most often under the control of women. The
most crucial benefit to women as individuals is the time saved by collecting
fodder and fuel close to homesteads. Since time is the basic resource over which
rural women have direct control, it can be used to increase incomes and social
options. Hence, the project directly benefits women as individuals. The project
design thus applies a technology cluster approach that includes agricultural
science-driven technologies as well as social innovations in land tenure and
group-centred access to resources.
As this article has highlighted, women's work is still largely ignored by the
technology development and technology transfer processes. An integrated approach
is recommended that will assist rural women through a technology support system
built on a sound knowledge of their multitasking responsibilities. The goal
is for technology to complement the social system. "Technology does not
take root when it is cut off from culture and tradition. The transfer of technology
requires sophistication: adaptation to region, to unique situation and to custom"
(Kurokawa, 1991).
In the Asia region, it is the custom among rural women to adopt a multitask
work culture and integrated resource use strategies in order to ensure food
security and family welfare. It is therefore crucial that rural women's unique
situation be recognized and their needs in the technology development and transfer
processes be responded to. The provision of support to women is most often viewed
simplistically as assistance to women, although such interventions can, in fact,
improve Asia's household food security prospects.
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