Women, farming and rural development

Reading Dr Sally Shortall's publication Women in Rural Areas in Northern Ireland I was somewhat surprised to be reminded that a number of the issues she highlights as challenging women's participation in rural development and farming in NI are similar to those constraining women in many of the countries in Asia and the Pacific where I worked before. Well, maybe I wasn't all that surprised. Dr Shortall has raised a number of policy recommendations to address these constraints and again these are similar and include: farming organisations actively engaging women in their approach to the farming community; improving gender representation; enhancing women's training; and sensitivity in timing and locations of meetings/events. This is for farming alone. There are others for general rural development, childcare, employment and improved data. One recommendation in particular caught my attention:

• The fact that so many documents refer to the under-representation of women in rural development suggests that full account is not being taken of the work of the Women's Networks. A very solid infrastructure exists. Tapping into and supporting this infrastructure seems an important means of ensuring the representation of women in general rural development initiatives, a stated priority for DARD and the rural development organisations.

After working extensively in international rural development I can add that I am aware of many organisations, programmes and projects that have done exactly the same i.e., worked in isolation from exisiting women's networks. So while they were all busy figuring out how to mainstream gender into their activities and programmes they failed to see the gains and opportunities that could be made by better linkages and partnerships with local women's networks. For example, until recently I worked on an EU-funded sustainable agriculture development project with 16 participating countries and multiple stakeholders. Mid-way through the project we commissioned a thematic gender evaluation of the project (largely because we felt that the EU commissioned mid-term review of the project did not take evaluation of gender seriously enough). The gender evaluation provided project management with a great deal of useful information and data, confirming what we were doing well and highlighting where we could improve. However, while full of praise for the lengths we had gone to develop linkages and networks with relevant stakeholders in each country, the review stressed that it was significant that no partnerships had been developed with already existing national women's mechanisms which could bring gender expertise and experience into the project. Not only did the project lose out in terms of accessing such expertise and inputs, the review rightly pointed out that we were missing opportunities for the project to highlight its good gender practice in a wider context to support and contribute to national policy level actions for gender equality. It is interesting (and humbling) to sit down and reflect on how such simple strategic partnerships could be so easily neglected!

Which reminds me. I can't recall much being written in NIRDP2007-2013, which I posted on earlier, that convinces me rural development actors in NI have paid much heed to the findings and recommendations on gender from Dr Shortall's publication. I hope I am wrong.