African women, key to achieving Green Revolution/La femme africaine, la cle a la realisation de la Revolution Verte.

• Author: Wambugu, Florence

African women are the glue that binds the society's fabric. Even in today's African urbanized societies, women are the backbone of family and national stability. African women contribute about 70% to food security despite this, women continue to bear the brunt of an ever worsening food security situation.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, women have less access to education, labour, fertilizers and other inputs that are available to their male counter parts. Despite the enormous contribution women make to agriculture, they are often forgotten and rarely consulted when new technologies are being developed. Researchers maintain that even though women are the pillars of Africa's agricultural sector, they lack technological skills to boost productivity. Empowering farmers especially women is therefore important for uptake of technologies that enhance agricultural productivity on the continent. Technology can help women farmers by reducing their workload and increasing their productivity and income.

As such, Africa Harvest believes that women have a very big role to play in Africa's Green Revolution. In our successfully focus on the use of technology to improving crops, we have witnessed the importance of women. For example, the technology transfer of high-yielding, disease-free tissue culture banana has been successful, partly because banana was previously viewed as a 'woman's crop'. The objective of this project was to increase the banana yields and incomes to growers by providing institutional framework as a support to the production programme.

Africa Harvest has used a Whole Value Chain (WVC) approach and tied this with entrepreneurial training designed to view the farm as a business unit. The strategic activities were baseline studies to understand the problems farmers face, awareness creation to let farmers understand that they have "to do it for themselves", organization of farmers groups, technology transfer, establishment of plantlet nurseries and input distribution system. Africa Harvest also facilitated the establishment of revolving fund to help subsidize seedlings to poor farmers; this ensured that no farmer interested in planting bananas was left out.

The TC banana project has given an opportunity to Kenyan women to generate income at family level. Increased banana production has improved food security and reduced malnutrition among members of household owing to the additional income leading to dietary diversity. Consequently, the adoption of...