Tanzanian women are all too familiar with challenges of access to land, discriminatory social norms and attitudes, and limited access to credit and agricultural inputs.
Fed up with their realities, a group of women have taken matters into their own hands to secure access to land, information and agricultural inputs.
FoodforAfrika.com reports that in 2020, women from the village of Kipumbuiko joined forces and formed agricultural groups to pool resources and cultivate large pieces of land.
That same year, as part of the UN Women and UNFPA joint programme “Realizing Gender Equality through Empowering Women and Adolescent Girls”, UN Women partnered with Farm Africa to capacitate smallholder farmers’ groups in Kipumbuiko and surrounding villages.
The programme, supported by KOICA, educated farmers on modern, climate-smart agricultural practices to improve sunflower farming productivity.
Mariam Tungu, a farmer from Singida’s Ikungi district in central Tanzania, is one of the groups’ members who were trained and given improved sunflower seeds. They were also given enhanced access to markets through Agricultural Marketing Cooperatives.
Increased women’s land ownership
According to FoodforAfrika.com, Tungu spent decades cultivating the small piece of land behind her home and had resigned herself to yielding only enough to sustain her family.
“If we got lucky, we had a little extra to sell and give our children some meat or eggs that week but sustaining this didn’t seem possible at the time,” she said.
Thanks to the programme, Tungu and other smallholder farmers alike have seen increased income in their farming enterprises.
With evidence showing that increasing women’s land ownership improves their farming productivity, UN Women partnered with the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements, and local authorities to draft village land-use plans for women to obtain certificates of customary rights of occupancy (CCROs).
This is being done under the UN Joint Programme and allows for the ownership of land under customary law.
Click here to read the rest of the article on FoodForAfrika.com
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