IPM Innovation Lab
The IPM Innovation Lab works to:
- Reduce agricultural losses due to pests
- Reduce environmental contamination
- Increase food security
- Promote economic development
All of these activities involve women in some way. For one thing, women are farmers too, even though this is an image that does not come to mind for people in the developed world. For another, the tedious work of sorting, grading and packing agricultural produce is usually left to women. For poor rural women, this is an important source of cash income.
During the first year of the IPM Innovation Lab extension program in Mali, our partners introduced the Farmer Field Schools (FFS) approach to disseminating pest management technologies—the best in adult experiential learning. During this training, Keith Moore asked the woman project leader why only men were participating. The project leader said that the women didn’t want to. Moore then asked if they had been asked if they would like to have a FFS for just women in the village. They had not, but when Colette Harris (then-WGD director) came on later that year, she created a program in which both men and women began participating in equal numbers.
Following are some of the program highlights.
- Separate Farmer Field Schools for women and men allow women:
- the space to ask their own questions
- to learn at their own pace
- A guide to safe pesticide usage:
- was created in the local language (Bamanan)
- was used in alphabetization (literacy) classes as reading material
- has women now saying, “Now we do not have to wait for our husbands.”
In evaluation of the FFS, program managers learned that those FFS with women had a more wide-ranging effect than those with just the men. Women just seemed to share more of what they had learned with other women—and with the men in their villages, too. This reinforces, at least for West Africa, that working with women and women’s associations is the most effective way to get messages out about new and improved technologies.
