PRESS BRIEFING BY PRESIDENT OF INTERNATIONAL FUND FOR AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

Press Briefing

PRESS BRIEFING BY PRESIDENT OF INTERNATIONAL FUND FOR AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

After 20 years experience of funding poverty-alleviation projects, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has learned the importance of using the gender perspective to help illustrate how development projects present different opportunities and challenges to men and women. Development practitioners need to be responsive to these differences in order for their work to be effective, the President of IFAD, Fawzi Al-Sultan told correspondents on Friday at a Headquarters press briefing to present his agency's report entitled "Gender Perspective: Focus on the rural poor".

Citing agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa as one example of this, he said that although women were the main source of agricultural labour, it was the men who decided which tools to buy. Therefore, projects geared towards expanding household food security through increasing agricultural production needed to incorporate both men and women's roles to ensure the appropriate labour- saving technologies were developed and adopted. Another example of the importance of gender perspective was in IFAD's work with women in Vietnam where the traditional sources of income for indigenous women within localised markets were deteriorating as the market economy expanded. In order to remedy the situation, IFAD used micro-credit as a tool to adapt women to the new business environment through one of its projects. In order to ensure the effective use of credit opportunities, given that those available to women entrepreneurs were constrained by cultural limitations and mobility, the project also provided training in modern business practices and local marketing.

In Uruguay, Mr. Al-Sultan said, with literacy at 96 per cent and women being better educated than men, IFAD had harnessed the capacity of the women to develop a small holder support project. By providing them with the necessary training and technical assistance needed to manage the maximized benefits from micro loans, the project addressed the needs, aspirations and constraints of rural households.

With regard to ownership of resources, he said that in some areas, existing laws and social norms were the most serious constraints that women faced. In Bangladesh, IFAD had had to convince the government to provide land-less people -- mostly women -- with long-term access to water for agriculture. Access to these water resources had discriminated against women as men controlled them and the income generated from them. The IFAD had remedied the situation by identifying alternative income-generating activities for land-less women and enabled them to obtain secure access rights to small ponds for fish cultivation.

He reiterated that while community organisations comprising men and women members worked in certain countries like Kenya and Uganda, women only groups had proved to be the best option for women to safeguard their interests in many parts of the world. Although these groups could perpetuate their marginalisation from economic, social and political processes, experience had nevertheless shown that informal, small and socially homogenous groups had proved to be the most effective channel for mobilising women.

IFAD Briefing - 2 - 5 June 2000

He warned that if such gender-based and context-based specifics were not taken into account, development projects might end up harming women by increasing their workload, undermining their ability to access and control productive resources and technologies and/or diminishing the realisation of their potential. He further added that in presenting the report on the occasion of “Beijing Plus Five”, IFAD hoped that it would contribute to more effective efforts addressing local hunger and poverty. Its implementation might help in making this possible.

In response to a correspondent's question on whether micro-credit had worked in Bangladesh, Mr. Al-Sultan said that IFAD's approach had been that it was only one component among several in working with people in poverty alleviation. The emphasis should be on working with people to provide them with the necessary training -- teaching them skills, providing them access to water and other amenities. That approach to micro-credit could work.

With regard to whether it reached the people most in need, he said there was a lot of evidence that as the number of micro-credit entrepreneurs grew, they were able to increase micro enterprise to include employment of the poorest people, therefore reaching those most in need. Another approach used by IFAD was specific targeting -- where the poorest people were identified and a project was designed to include them.

He said the way to combat criticism that it was actually men who spent the micro-loans given to women was by ensuring that the women had access to rights to resources and women's groups were set to discuss problems when credit systems are being set up. He said that IFAD's experience, however, had been that any negative influence by men was negligible because 96 per cent of the loans are repaid.

On the issue of genetically modified food and its effect on the work of IFAD, Mr. Al-Sultan said that his organisation had not really been involved in the controversy but had asked some of the companies involved in the technology to put some emphasis on crops grown by poor people and to find ways of increasing production. He said his hope was that there would be breakthroughs on increasing food production, which would benefit developing countries from scientists in China and India. He said the pressure was on to find safe ways of feeding more people.

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