updated: 19 January, 2007
IFAD
Gender
International Fund for Agricultural Development

THEME: Poor women farmers in Africa usually do not have the right tools for their work.

Kenya-Nyeri Dry Areas Smallholder Community Development Project Farmers hoeing an irrigated snow pea crop in Narumoru Agothi, Kieni East Division. The project aims to increase farmers groups' self-reliance and their ability to sustain the benefits of the project's investments. IFAD Photo by Giacomo PirozziAn 1997 IFAD/FAO/Government of Japan study looked at the agricultural implements used by women farmers in five African countries: Burkina Faso, Senegal, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Women are working increasingly longer and harder in agriculture, often taking over previously male tasks as their husbands migrate to find wage labour. Therefore, the tools women use are of great importance for improving productivity and yields and reducing time and physical effort. There are health implications as well. The study found that:

  • the very large majority of African women farmers, like men farmers, basically rely on hand tools, with little direct or indirect access to animal traction, although this varies by country and within countries;
  • the traditional gender identification of tools (e.g., ploughs, cultivators and axes belong to men and hoes, sickles and other harvesting tools to women) has largely disappeared;
  • there is considerable variation among countries in terms of available tools and their quality;
  • women prefer lighter tools, but usually do not get them; and
  • many agricultural implements, and particularly animal traction implements, are not really appropriate to women’s needs or physical constraints;

The countries studied were found to exist along a range in terms of access to production technology. Zimbabwe is at the highest level of farm production technology, with more widespread use of animal traction, with oxen or even donkeys, and with better-quality agricultural implements and tools. Women in Zimbabwe use a variety of hand tools, such as hoes, forked hoes, shovels, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, slashers, sprayers and watering cans. Often local blacksmiths make these tools, but using quality scrap from old ploughshares or other, larger farm implements (as is the custom also in Zambia). In contrast to Zimbabwe, the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso, where most of the country’s population lives, is at the lowest end of the production technology scale among the countries studied. Here, both men and women have more primitive tools and of less variety. Women farmers rely almost entirely on the hand hoe. Most tools are imported from China, since village blacksmiths are rare here, compared with other African countries.

Overall, the study found considerable variation among countries in the hand tools used by men and women.

  • Hand-hoes are used everywhere, but there are some differences in their design and the types available.
  • Rakes and forks, which are used mainly for preparing vegetable plots or seedbeds for compost-making, were found in all countries except Burkina Faso. In the latter, hoes are normally used for compost-making, but they are not nearly as suitable.
  • Various types of cutting and harvesting tools were found in the countries reviewed. The most common were slashers, axes and pangas. Some, like pangas, were imported from countries such as Brazil, China, Finland and India. Women usually do not use axes.
  • Wheelbarrows were seen everywhere except in Senegal.
  • Some very useful locally developed tools were found in places such as Burkina Faso. For instance, in Manga, in the south, a very practical home-made row marker was coming into use that was found nowhere else. It resembles a large rake, with three spikes set at the desired width of the rows, and can be pulled across the field prior to planting. Burkina Faso was also the only country where the study found a special planting tool, known as the pioche (pick). It looks like a small hoe with a blade made out of a car spring.
  • Certain pruning tools, such as the Ugandan knife, which is fixed to a small branch (used for pruning plantains), are also made locally but not unique to one single area.

Tools continue to be manufactured and purchased on the assumption that men will use them.

  • Whereas women everywhere said they wanted lighter tools, the study located only one NGO producing tools with women in mind.
  • The study found little evidence of donor-supported projects considering women farmers when ordering tools.
  • Commercial manufacturers do not take into consideration that the users of many of the tools they make now tend to be women.
  • On the few occasions where lighter tools were being locally manufactured or imported (such as 1.5-2-lb hoes instead of 2.5-3-lb ones), they were often not sold in the smaller town markets.
  • Husbands do not buy the tools with their wives’ needs in mind.
  • More than men, women are often ignorant of better alternatives even when these are sold nearby.

It is often overlooked that women farmers, as well as men, need suitable tools to save time and energy and increase agricultural productivity. But the tools available to women are too few, too inefficient and almost always designed to be used by men. Development projects could pay much more attention to the manufacture, import, marketing and repair of tools, keeping women farmers in mind. There is also a need to identify good innovations – including endogenous ones – that could be shared more widely.

Adapted from:

IFAD/FAO/Government of Japan. 1998. Agricultural Implements Used by Women Farmers in Africa. Rome.