Gender and rural development policy

What have Latin American governments done to address the needs of rural women and to enhance their contributions to rural economic development? Until quite recently, gender concerns were largely absent from most national rural development policy documents and more relevantly from the programming and financing of major policy initiatives in the areas of rural education, agricultural research and technology transfer, employment creation, credit provision and agrarian reform.^[19] Since the mid-1990s, some countries - Colombia, Brazil and Costa Rica in particular - have made significant advances in “mainstreaming” rural gender issues into their national Equal Opportunity Plans and agricultural sector policies, but implementation remains incipient and uneven (FAO/RLC, 2002). Case studies suggest that serious programmatic attention to rural women as equal beneficiaries of traditional rural development projects such as in the provision of extension services can be remarkably successful, both in terms of meeting the productive needs of rural women and in terms of improving the overall quality of technical assistance (World Bank, n.d. and 2001; Ruiz and Strochlic, 2002). Innovative rural poverty alleviation programmes such as PROGRESA in Mexico target women as direct beneficiaries of cash payments, and rural girls’ education is given explicit priority (see the Davis chapter in this volume). And we have seen in the earlier discussion of agrarian issues that most Latin American countries are making an attempt to include better rural women in the allocation and clarification of property rights in land. However, a great deal remains to be done to provide systematic support for rural women and their changing roles in the rural economies of Latin America.

There are at least three possible avenues for gender policy in rural development in Latin America, some of which share overlapping features. A detailed diagnostic analysis of the primary economic activities of rural women could suggest which approach would be most appropriate in a specific country or region. The first model would be to target support for women as independent farmers; this would pertain in circumstances where there are large numbers of female-headed households with some access to land, or in regions where women play particularly large roles in family farming (such as parts of the Andes, as described by Hamilton, 1998). Such a policy would give priority to facilitating women’s access to key productive resources such as land and credit, as well as training and technical assistance tailored to the crops and activities undertaken by women. A second type of rural gender policy could focus on supporting women’s participation in the off-farm labour market: on the supply side by investing in targeted literacy and education programmes for women, infrastructure and transportation linking women’s residence to their worksites^[20] and community- or workplace-based childcare facilities;^[21] and on the demand side by promoting rural employment and by legislating and enforcing gender equality in the labour market. Some advocates place particular emphasis on enhancing women’s non-agricultural wage labour opportunities, since the available evidence suggests that this is where the greatest relative income gains for rural women are found (Berdegué et al., 2001; Reardon, Berdegué and Escobar, 2001). Finally, given the importance of self-employment for rural women, attention could be focused on “upgrading” women’s low-productivity, low-remuneration activities with infusions of training and capital and infrastructure improvements, as well as programmes to ease the double burden of domestic labour and income generation.