As part of the Food Systems Summit Dialogue, the Future Food Institute and Mooofarm organized a virtual event on July 2nd about the role of women in farming and agriculture around the globe. GIIF attended to this event as Mooofarm is one of the winners of the July 2019 GIIF agriculture insuretech challenge, organized in India. Main speakers include participants from Future Food Institute, UN Scaling-Up Nutrition Movement, Devices Reliance Jio Infocomm, UNIDO ITPO Italy, Food Tank, and representation of the Government of Maharashtra. In this blog, you will read a summary of main points mentioned at the event and a link to the presentations for more information. The discussion in the event highlighted that approximately 70-90% of the work in the livestock sector is done by women, but they are not fully participating nor taking advantage of the benefits that technology could bring to them and to the field.

In India, there are 80+ million small scale dairy producers, the majority of the work made by women. Mooofarm at this point has over 1 million dairy farmers who have accessed and downloaded their services, but according to its Founder & CEO only less than 2% of this number is represented by women farmers.

Initiatives like this are a good opportunity to collaborative brainstorm, work together, and discuss constructive ideas that could help make a progress in this very important agenda, and to raise the question about how women’s access to technology could be enabled, especially in rural areas, and work together on finding gender balance in the industry.

“Apparently, agriculture looks like a male dominated domain, whereas if we look into the desegrated data we will find that 80% of worldwide farm operations are being done by women. But which are those operations? Mostly, manual labor which includes activities such as: rice transplantation, winnowing, and harvesting. Wherever it is non-mechanized operations those are entrusted to women; while on the contrary, all of those which require power, control of technology, and mechanization are all operated by men (e.g., the use of tractors, harvesters, and many of the agriculture implements).” 

-Shri Anoop Kumar (IAS, Principal Secretary, Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairy, & Fisheries and Agricultural Marketing, Government of Maharashtra)