Promoting Gender Equity in Smallholder Farming

Women play an important role around the world in producing food, yet often face inequities in terms of empowerment and prosperity. 

To mark Women’s History Month, we released a report highlighting how our Market Access portfolio is working to advance women smallholder farmers. While this program serves both men and women, we have a special focus on empowering women; this report highlights how our grantees are addressing historical gender inequities and promoting women's prosperity.  

The Walmart Foundation launched our Market Access program in 2017, and since then we have awarded grants of more than $37 million to 13 grantees to benefit an estimated 175,000 smallholder farmers—35 percent of whom are women—in India, Mexico and Central America. (This effort builds on the Foundation’s earlier work between 2011 and 2016 of supporting over one million smallholder farmers, 600,000 of them women, through efforts focused on training.) 

The Market Access program supports Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs), which help smallholder farmers overcome the disadvantages they experience accessing product markets, credit, farm management inputs, and technology. As we collaborate with grantees on shaping potential grants, we consider not only the number of women who may benefit but also the extent to which the program design considers women's needs and the barriers they face. 

For example, our grantee PRADAN identified opportunities to help women form new producer groups and increase their production of higher-value vegetables, which led to a program that is focused on directly supporting 45,000 women producers in India.  

In Central America, with our support, Heifer International helped coffee producers diversify their farm income by expanding crops. For example, in Nicaragua, a farmer named Luisa began producing honey in addition to coffee. She formed a beekeeping group with four women, where she learned new agroecological processes that she also now applies to her coffee farm. These interventions enabled her to get a better price for her product. With more income, greater independence and leadership in the organization, she's now selecting another producer to help grow their farm incomes.  

Thousands of women, each with her own story.  

Reflecting on their experiences, our grantees helped identify four factors that seem to foster the prosperity and empowerment of women smallholder farmers, which we describe in more detail in our report:   

• Increasing women's membership and leadership in collective FPOs that provide relevant information, services, market access and entrepreneurship. 
• Building women's technical skills and capacity in farm production through education, helping grow crop yields and increasing sustainable practices. 
• Diversifying the number and variety of crops women produce to increase market participation.  
• Increasing access to finance to bolster incomes, savings and investment in farm production. 

These insights and case studies will help inform our program going forward as we continue to address gender equity challenges and advance solutions.  We hope our report is useful for others who are also engaged in elevating women in agricultural supply chains around the world.