NAIROBI, Oct 31 (IPS) – Women farmers in Kenya, excluded by inheritance and ignored by big corporations, are turning to innovative methods to become independent food producers and get the financial support to ensure their success. Creating resilience is crucial for adapting to climate change and ensuring climate justice. Although women make up more than three-quarters of the agricultural workforce and manage 40 percent of small-scale farms, they historically did not own or control the land, as land rights were passed down to male relatives. It is a historic gender injustice where women could only access land through close male relatives.
But as the vagaries of drought wreak havoc on the agricultural sector due to more and more failed rainy seasons – with signs of severe hydrological and ecological drought in 2022 alone – gender and climate experts such as Grace Gakii say decision-making powers of women are desperately needed to ensure that extreme weather patterns do not paralyze the agricultural sector.
“The agricultural sector is the backbone of the Kenyan economy. It accounts for an estimated 33 percent of the country’s GDP and employs at least 40 percent of the population and 70 percent of the rural population. Without land rights, women cannot make the necessary decisions to adapt or mitigate climate change,” she says.
“For example, with mitigation they cannot decide if and when trees are planted. When adapting, they have no say in, for example, the shift to more climate-resilient crops. We have no shortage of native seeds to help us meet the rainfall deficit we are increasingly experiencing. But historically, women have been denied the power to make these decisions, even though it is women who provide the daily agricultural labor.”
Serah Nyokabi says the revolutionary Savings and Credit Cooperative Society (SACCO) is increasingly putting land rights in the hands of women and facilitating access to the tools needed to build climate-resilient agricultural and food systems.
“I am a member of Afya SACCO. We save and borrow at a low interest rate. I use the loans to rent land in central Kenya for farming and to buy things like seeds, fertilizer and even water. We depend on rainfall, and nowadays you can’t tell when it will rain, and even when it does rain, it is often not enough. I also hire people to help me on the farm because I am a full-time teacher. SACCOs also buy large tracts of land, subdivide them and sell them to members. I bought a piece of land this way, and you can pay for it in small amounts over a period of six months,” she told IPS.
SACCOs are a cash pooling program of a group of people to save and borrow low interest loans among themselves. The Kenyan SACCO sector is popular and on the rise. Recent reports show that total savings have grown from $3.8 billion in 2021 to $4.2 billion in 2022 (Ksh564.89 billion to Ksh629.45 billion), representing an increase of 9.84 percent . In 2021, the total membership of regulated SACCOs stood at 5.99 million members, compared to 6.42 million members in 2022, marking an increase of 7.02 percent.
Gakii says regulated SACCOs represent about half of all SACCOs in Kenya, while many others are unregulated. She says there are a total of at least 22,000 SACCOs and more than 14 million members in this East African country, transacting billions between them every year. Some SACCOs, such as Afya SACCO, have thousands of members and others have less than 100 members.
Others, such as the well-known Muungano (cooperative) Women’s Group, own prime land and a fully occupied commercial high-rise building in Ongata Rongai on the outskirts of Nairobi, have an all-female membership, and many others, such as Afya SACCO have both men and women as members . Muungano Women’s Group collects approximately USD 40,000 in rent per month from the Ongata Rongai commercial building, which is fully occupied, and its members have also purchased their own land.
“SACCOs are very important for women. They were avoided by the banks because the profile of a Kenyan woman was too risky. The percentage of women in paid work was very low because many worked for their husbands or fathers in the informal settlements. Due to our customary laws that favored men over women, women did not own property or assets and therefore did not have the collateral necessary to secure bank loans. In fact, women could only open a bank account under the guidance of a male relative, preferably her husband. SACCOs have helped women overcome these challenges as they only have to save with a SACCO, appoint three guarantors within the SACCO to take out a loan or simply borrow from their own savings,” Gakii explains .
Although the percentage of women holding land title deeds is still very small, with only one percent of all land title deeds held by women alone and five percent jointly with men, Gakii emphasizes that this is progress and should be celebrated.
“We still have a large category of women renting land for commercial farming. This would not have been possible without the loans from schemes like SACCOs,” she says.
Gakii says women need access to and control over land to play a much-needed role in the five pillars of climate resilience, including threshold capacity, coping capacity, recovery capacity, adaptability and transformative capacity.
“I taught agriculture in secondary schools for many years and during that time I had access to the small farm at the school for practical lessons, but at home I could only carry out my husband’s instructions. He was an accountant and I was essentially the farmer, but he made all the decisions. Women have daily contact with the soil, but they cannot make decisions about how to best tackle the climate crisis. The result is a serious food crisis. We have large traces of fertile land, but here we are with a begging bowl,” notes Nyokabi.
“We started with floods and droughts right after each other. In 2018 we had two extremes in one season, with March, April and May being very rainy, followed by a very dry season in October, November and December. Last month we were repeatedly warned to prepare for El Niño in the October-November-December season, but now we have been told that there will be no El Niño. In fact, there is no rain at all, and yet we are in the short rainy season where we plant in October and harvest in December-January. The person who is more likely to notice these changes and see a pattern is the one carrying out the day-to-day farming activities, and so the role of women in building resilient farming systems cannot be ignored.”
With an estimated 98 percent of Kenya’s agriculture being rain-fed and climate change becoming an urgent issue due to cumulative rainfall deficits over many years, the role of women in building climate resilience cannot be overstated, nor can the need for interventions that can facilitate women’s access to land rights and much-needed agricultural inputs.
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© Inter Press Service (2023) — All rights reservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service