From 20 to 22 May, the West and Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations co-organised a regional training workshop in Accra, Ghana, as part of the Food System Resilience Programme (FSRP). The event brought together key players in agricultural extension from eight West African countries to discuss a central but often underestimated issue: integrating gender into rural advisory services. This is an essential lever for building more inclusive, equitable and resilient food systems in the face of climatic and socio-economic challenges. The FSRP is a flagship regional investment programme that aims to strengthen the resilience of the West African food system through a strategic regional approach. CORAF is leading Component 2 on the sustainability and adaptability of the productive base of the food system, with a focus on agro-ecological practices and sustainable land and watershed management. Gender-focused interventions are integrated into this framework to help bridge persistent gender gaps that hamper food security and rural development. Since 2023, FAO has been working with CORAF to provide technical support, including methodologies, tools and capacity building training on gender mainstreaming. This current training on gender-sensitive rural advisory services is the latest in a series of collaborations between CORAF and the FAO under the FSRP.
Women make up around 50 per cent of farmers in West and Central Africa and 60 per cent of those working in the non-agricultural sectors of agri-food systems, but few women farmers than men are reached by rural advisory services designed to support farmers. Most agricultural extension systems continue to cater primarily for men due to a number of systemic issues. Extension service providers do not consider women as clients of rural advisory services, and farmers in their own right, seeing them instead as farm helpers. The services they offer do not take into account the challenges that rural women often face, including the burden of unpaid care and domestic work, limited mobility, low levels of literacy and restrictive social norms.
The training, delivered by Bethel Terefe Gebremedhin, Senior Gender Expert at the FAO Regional Office for Africa in Ghana, focused on identifying structural barriers to women's access to agricultural advisory services and exploring strategies to overcome them. Using tools such as seasonal calendars and daily activity profiles, participants from Benin, Mali, Niger, Togo, Ghana, Chad, Nigeria and Senegal analysed the situation in their countries. A common trend emerged: extension services often target men as household heads and landowners, excluding women from training despite the fact that a significant number of agricultural production activities are carried out by women. The exercises also showed that women worked longer hours on unpaid productive care activities with limited time for rest and leisure than men. The exercise showed participants the lack of time available to women, the importance of tackling the burden of unpaid care work by introducing time- and labour-saving technologies and the need to encourage the redistribution of care work within the household. Above all, it has shown the need to organise extension advisory services that consider the responsibilities of women's unpaid care work.
The workshop focused on the design of gender-sensitive advisory services throughout the agricultural value chain, from inputs to production, processing and marketing. Participants compared traditional value chain analysis with gender-sensitive approaches that take into account women's access to credit, market information, training and decision-making power.
Participants developed action plans to strengthen gender mainstreaming in agricultural extension services in their respective countries and created indicators to monitor progress.
