Assessing Agricultural Technologies for their Impacts on Gender Roles and Nutrition

The Integrating Gender and Nutrition within Agricultural Extension Services (INGENAES) consortium partner, Cultural Practice, LLC (CP), is leading the development and application of a gender and technology assessment tool to examine the potential impact of agricultural technologies and practices on women’s time and labor and on nutrition-related behaviors and choices. The assessments analyze the relevance of the agricultural technologies to men’s and women’s current economic activities; the extent to which women would benefit from increased income through technology adoption (e.g., via increased sales value of crop or livestock products or via wage labor); and the different pathways for learning about and accessing the new technologies, including extension services. Additionally, the assessments will consider enabling environmental issues that affect men’s and women’s access to productive resources, household dynamics that facilitate or limit the capacity of women farmers to adopt selected technologies, and the potential of the technologies to improve nutrition. The goal of the assessments is to develop recommendations on how the incentives to adopt the technology might be altered to appeal more to women farmers, how to increase women’s access to benefits from the adoption of technologies, and how to design distribution models that respond to women farmers’ needs through extension agents, input suppliers, and mobile devices.