One of the issues that has not been raised yet is the difficulty of entrepreneurship in general, and of farm entrepreneurship in particular. While this applies to both women and men, women may face additional challenges in lacking mobility to access more distant markets, being less aware of prices and standards, in being less able to interact with market intermediaries of the opposite sex, and in having less ability to re-allocate or postpone household and care work. To reduce failure rates, women’s enterprises may need additional support in terms of local availability of timely inputs, and processing/marketing support. The examples of the Indian dairy cooperative, Lijat Papad in India, or BRAC-supported agricultural enterprises in Bangladesh show how that support can be organized among women or in enterprise systems to reduce the risks and increase the benefits.
Rieky Stuart