Recently our campaign Climate Project Connectors started a new voluntary initiative “We Ecopreneurs” to empower local village women in the sub division Balakot (Pakistan) by exploiting opportunities for income generation through organic farming. There are reasons that we started this initiative. The first thing is the conservative rural society that always obstructs women to access income-generating opportunities as compared to men. This makes them dependent and excluded from decision making. Women usually work in fields to help their male family members, but their work is often unrewarded.
Another reason is that inorganic methods of farming and other interrelated factors have negative impact on local environment and natural resources.
The solution we opted for was a competition among three selected village women. Ms. Rashda, one of our female volunteers (we call them connectors in our campaign) selected three potential village women through a women’s organization (WO). The connector voluntarily trained these women in preparation of plot, selection of indigenous vegetable seeds, use of organic fertilizer and organic pest management. In the next step the selected women also received orientation on sale and marketing of produce to earn income as well as to make them aware of food insecurity due to the impacts of climate change. Introducing these village women as ecopreneurs through regular mentorship is also one of the objectives of this initiative.
This is a pilot initiative of the Climate Project Connectors to link the environment and income generation in sustainable manner. The competition in this initiative is also an innovation for local women. The woman who will get more profit from the sale of produce will get the first cash prize and so the 2nd and 3rd position as well. This will be an encouragement for these ecopreneurs to increase the culture of organic kitchen gardening in the future and to be self-sustained.
It is a noteworthy observation that due to the heavy monsoon rains and massive flooding in Pakistan, the families of those three women also shifted to surrounding areas and Mansehra city along with other affected households, however after the flood water went down and families returned to their village in Balakot, the plots fortunately remained safe from the landslide and the turnip seeds have also started germination.
Our voluntary campaign is very optimistic for the success of this pilot initiative of organic competition that will start giving results in the coming three to four weeks. We look forward to engagong more women to seek environmently friendly income-generating opportunities for their livelihoods by promoting the “We Ecopreneurs” idea.
Visit our blog on climate change campaign in Pakistan: http://asifoghi.blogspot.com
Photo Credit: Ms. Rashda, one of the Climate Project Connectors in Pakistan
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Ecopreneurship: The Best Option To Rehabilitate Flood Affectees in Pakistan
Where to start…. First, thank you for your commitment to working with women in rural agriculture communities. I would like to see more women designing and implementing these programs but everything good comes in time.
Second, It is simply naive to say that in-organic farming methods are automatically detrimental to the environment. Very few studies have been able to prove that purely organic production can sustain the globe’s population with the amount of arable land available for farming. Yes, I am thrilled to see you not using DAP/CAN fertilizers (a petro-chemical biproduct) but organic is not always the best model depending on soil fertility. Anyone working in rural agro development needs to advocate what is in the best interest of the community, not just hype!
Finally, I am discouraged by the design of your program. It is simply impossible to dramatically improve the economic standing of rural women by supporting kitchen farming. These models may have some superficial rewards but at minimum women need to be producing at a semi-commercial rate of production (organic or not) to enter a wholesale market to quantify and sustain improved income generation. If not, they continue to propogate fields for distribution in local markets only while continuing to lose a large percentage of their crops in the field unless they can dry the crop (pulses) for storage for food security. That is a simple economic reality of farming.
Why not grow crops that have a higher economic return and give women the choice if they want to grow their own food or buy it ? Supporting subsistence farming models is not an answer to MDG #1 and ending poverty or food insecurity by 2015.
Thanks Rachel for your comments.
The area where we are working have number of issues interrelated with such interventions. Hard topography, where modern facilities in agriculture are rare, women are not encouraged to initiate small scale businesses independently and land available for farming is not large in hilly area. Farmers have usually small landholding here, specially in our northern parts of the country.
This initiative is just a start and still encouraging for us that it is all voluntary and women are allowed to take initiatives. We can not expect every thing perfect in the start but committed to improve the programme. Organic food production, kitchen gardening is good to start in this area and later on we will go for crops production as well and marketing. Organic production is environmentally good and cost effective and not dependent on DAP fertilizers and then dependency on chemicals for pest control. Although it gives more production but affect land utilization in longer run and making them totally dependent on such chemicals, which poor farmers hardly afford and also unaware of side effects.
We are open to hear and learn and committed to upscale the initiatives. Thanks