The land tenure and heritance systems in the
Upper West Region are undermining women active participation in agricultural
activities, Ms Cate Bob Milliar, Regional Director of Department of Women has
observed.
She said women in the region have no title to
land and therefore rely on the goodwill of their husbands to release
barren lands to them make a living, which makes it difficult for them to
produce food to enhance their livelihoods.
She explained that until women are given the
right to own land and the right to inheritance their role in agricultural
production would forever remain insignificant.
Milliar made the observation at an advocacy
for gender equity in agriculture workshop in Wa on Saturday organised by The
Rural Organisation of Women Farmers and Agro Processing Development (ROWFAD), a
local non-governmental organisation (NGO) advocating gender equity in
agriculture organised the workshop.
It aimed at supporting women groups in
agriculture to campaign for their inclusion in the cultivation of groundnuts in
the “Block Farming Programme”.
Milliar appealed to stakeholders from
policy-formulation level and the community level to see land rights for women
as a critical and relevant issue, which needed to be addressed quickly as
possible to encourage more women to embrace agriculture.
Elizabeth A. Kutina, Regional Officer
responsible for Women in Agriculture at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture
said women participating in the Block Farming Programme in the communities had
not been encouraging.
She said government’s subsidised tractor
allocation to farmers in the region benefited only men and urged women farmers
to form cooperatives to qualify them to take advantage of the programme.
Alhaji Amidu Sulemana, Regional Minister in a
speech read on his behalf urged women to take advantage of government
agricultural interventions to increase food production.
Women should not depend on the hoe and
cutlass alone for farming activities, saying the time had come for them to
venture into large scale food and cash crops production to make the region food
sufficient.
Mr Yaana Yahaya, Executive Director of Rural
Organisation of Women Farmers and Agro-Processing Development, said the NGO had
realised that groundnut was the most important crop that brought income to
rural women in the three northern regions.
Groundnut also increases the nutritional
level of rural household and its non-inclusion among crops under the programme
was a gross disincentive to women in agriculture.
He appealed to government to include chemical
fertilisers for groundnuts as part of its fertiliser subsidy to farmers to help
increase groundnut production.
The Business Advisory Centre sponsored the
workshop on the theme: “Access to guarantee market after production and
process” and was attended by women groundnut farmers from the nine districts in
the region.
Source: GNA
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