Empowering Women in Agribusiness through Social and

Behaviour Change

We Focus on Women Economic Justice through Empowering Women in Agribusiness

through Social and Behaviour Change
ORGANISATIONAL INFORMATION

PPM FOUNDATION TRUST

P.O.BOX 328 SENGEREMA DISTRICT, MWANZA REGION TANZANIA EAST
AFRICA
PHONE NUMBER: +255758450780
EMAIL: [email protected]
Website: https://envaya.org/ppmfoundation123

CONTACT PERSON
NAME: PASCHAL MAKOYE JAMES
POSITION: GENERAL SECRETARY AND PROGRAM OFFICER
EMAIL: [email protected]
PHONE NUMBER: +255758450780/+255737330978

PPM FOUNDATION TRUST Focus on Women Economic Justice

through Empowering Women in Agribusiness through Social
and Behaviour Change, we have been working in women
economic justice for four months.

PPM FOUNDATION TRUST’s Administration have four Number of women working in the
organization out of six administration committee of the organization. Such that ESTHER
BERNARD WAINDI (24YEARS) is the executive director of the organization, GRACE
PHAUSTINE MALIMI (29YEARS) is the Director of Finance and Economic Empowerment,
AMINA ARUSHA (25YEARS) is the Director of community service program and MELESIANA
FRANCIS (24 YEARS) is the Volunteer Coordinator.

PPM FOUNDATION TRUST is allocated outside the central we found in rural

villages (Lubanda Village, Kahumlo Ward, and Sengerema District in
Mwanza Region).
OUR CURRENT AND PREVIOUS SOURCES OF FUNDING.
1. Collection from membership fees.

2. Annual subscription.

3. Voluntary contributions that are obtained from members and non members.

4. Fundraising exercises

THE SITUATION

For many years Sengerema district, women face difficulties to start and develop their own
agricultural businesses as their capacity for entrepreneurship is limited by a series of structural
barriers. Women working in agri-businesses often have limited access to resources and business
assets and face barriers due to gendered differences in behaviour and roles. For example, in most
agricultural communities or villages, gendered division of labour determines women’s role in and
outside the household, which subsequently affects their opportunities in and benefits from
productive activities in agricultural value chains.

The success of women in agribusiness is not only determined by the level of access to resources
and business assets, but also by gendered-specific behaviour and roles, which influences women’s
decision-making power and control around these resources and business assets. Tackling the
inequalities that exist between men and women in many rural agricultural societies in sengerema
district therefore also requires a change in the deeply entrenched gender norms that are at the root
of these inequalities.

As an entry point to reflect on and transform restrictive gender norms and power relations, the
EOWE programme will develop a contextualized Social and Behaviour Change Communication
(SBCC) strategy in order to create more equal income and business opportunities and a socially
enabling environment for women entrepreneurship in agricultural value chains.

The SBCC strategy will consists interventions at household and community level. At household
level, the programme will organizes and facilitate Household Dialogues among targeted family
and/or community members to critically reflect and discuss on norms that prevent women from
fully participating in and benefitting from economic activities.

To ensure sustainability and scale of the positive behaviour change in the communities, the
programme will organizes SBCC interventions at the community level like community festivals
and photo voice, and encourages participants of the household dialogues to share their experiences
with other members in the community.

Balancing Benefits approach, the Household Dialogues and community level SBCC
interventions, are matched with efforts to increase women’s business skills, connect women to
markets, boost capacities and opportunities for women’s leaders and build the capacity of
government and civil society actors to advocate for, developing and implementing gender
sensitive policies and plan with 4 objectives.

Supporting women entrepreneurs as drivers of inclusive development requires policy makers to

apply a gender lens in the design, monitoring and evaluation of enterprise and entrepreneurship
development policy. Gender aware women’s entrepreneurship development (WED) means taking
into account the socially and historically, constructed identities, roles, power relations and modes
of action assigned to men and women. Although we will form a small group of top performing
and growth oriented women entrepreneurs. The performance and status of a business does not
depend solely on the individual’s aspirations, characteristics or capacities, but entrepreneur. This
includes inequalities in time use, mobility, intra- also on the level of gender bias in the environment
of the household decision making and responsibility for unpaid care work between men and
women; gender biases in laws on inheritance and land ownership; inaccessibility of institutional
support for entrepreneurship development by women; lack of women’s agency in public spaces;
inequalities in enrolment in secondary education and access to vocational training; and
discriminatory practices, constraining norms and stereotypes on what is ‘appropriate’ behaviour
and what types of tasks, roles and duties women and men can perform. Enterprise and
entrepreneurship development interventions have to be attuned to the gendered risks and
circumstances under which women entrepreneurs operate their businesses.

Promotion strategies for women’s business growth, increased income and improved productivity
need to be systematically integrated with strategies that reduce women’s vulnerability to poverty,
redistribute resources, and combat inequality, violence and exclusion. Gender aware enterprise
development strives for the creation of a level playing field by ensuring access to resources and
opportunities for all entrepreneurs, regardless of their business type, gender, age, health status,
location, social class or ethnicity. Making Interventions related to business skills training, business
advice or mentoring, business incubation services, business formalization services; ICTs to
connect women entrepreneurs to business information and networks
Policies or programmes that enable women to expand markets and customers for their products
and services; ICTs are used to connect women to regional or international markets all this will be
done in this programme.

THE URGENT ACTION

ACTIVITIES TO BE COVED WITH THE PROGRAMME/ EVENT

1. To identify and solve the key gender norms affecting

women in agribusiness

To get a better understanding of the barriers that female farmers and entrepreneurs face and to
ensure that the EOWE programme, including the SBCC strategy, responds to the needs of the
women to run a successful business and to the context of the challenge(s), the programme will
conduct three activities in-depth under this activity:
a. Women's Empowerment in Agriculture issues
b. Gender Analysis
 c. Knowledge, Attitude and Practice.

These activity will help to show how women farmers and entrepreneurs in agriculture indeed lack
access to resources and business assets, but also will help to show if gender norms and intra-
household power relations influence women’s control over resources and decision-making power
in their households and the community.

The expected outcome under this activity 1 base on

1. Balancing time between productive and reproductive work for women.
In Sengerema, rural women working in agriculture especially struggle with balancing their time
between work in the household (reproductive work) and income generating activities (productive
work). Sengerema is a patriarchal society, meaning men are considered to be superior to women
and the head of the household. This also means that women are expected to take care of the
household and its members, women are supposed to take care of their family and the household,
while also substantially contributing to the income of the household
The high workload, expected responsibility of women when it comes to taking care of their
households and the lack of decision-making power around time-use hinder women from creating
viable or more profitable businesses. Hence the programme aimed to create a habit of men to
participate fully in household activities

2. Control over income

Another gender norm that is affecting women’s economic empowerment is control over income.
In sengerema, 42% of women indicate to earn less than their spouse and that the husbands are the
main breadwinners. Whereas women hold decision-making power over minor household
expenses, like groceries, it is the men that predominately decide over major household expenses.
Though women in sengerema are respected by men for their ability to effectively manage minor
household finances, most women from male-headed households are not able to make large
financial decisions in the household without consent from their husbands. For women owning
businesses, being able to at the very least co-decide over major expenses, such as those that could
benefit their business, could have a large positive effect on women’s economic empowerment and
overall management of women’s businesses.
 3. Leadership
Women are involved in different kinds of groups in their communities, with 75% of women being
members of civic groups and 26% of women being part of agriculture groups. However, only 2.5%
of women are members of trade or business associations, which could support women in creating
and developing sustainable and viable enterprises.
Women in our community have little influence in the groups that they participate in and that
women are often not perceived as leaders in their communities. When women were being asked
to rate the extent of their influence in their community, 35.5% of women indicated to have very
little or no influence. In addition, 43% of women indicated to never voice their opinion in public.
The programme aimed to end this this challenges and make them more influenced in leadership
position

2. Gender-transformative household dialogues

As an entry point to reflect on and transform the key restrictive gender norms and power relations
in Sengerema, the EOWE programme will conduct a gender-transformative Household Dialogues
among targeted family and/or community members. Through intensive facilitated dialogue
sessions, the programme aims to translate these reflections into positive behaviour change to give
women as well as men more control over their lives and agribusinesses. The behaviour change is
built up in different stages from awareness and self-analysis on gendered differences within the
household to getting commitment for specific actions. Both women and men in households are
included in the dialogues to concertedly shift attitudes and practices among various members of
the society.

This will includes

Participatory sessions with women entrepreneurs and their husbands

The primary audience of the household dialogues are women who run small-scale agribusinesses
and their husbands. The focus is on households, as households are the most important institution
and basic unit of society where values, societal norms, and gender roles are formed and practiced.
Households are also the place where power dynamics and relationships between men and women
are formed.
The households come together in groups of 10-15 households with four trained facilitators, half
female and half male. Through a variety of participatory tools and methods which will be designed
to address specific gender norms, the couples develop skills to analyze their own reality and
develop their own plan for change. In follow-up sessions the couples will reflect on progress and
discuss any challenges that they encountered in the implementation of their plan for change, which
enables the households to act, reflect and learn.

The initial impact of the household dialogues

The gender-transformative household dialogue sessions under the EOWE programme in
sengerema will helps women entrepreneurs and their husbands to initiate and implement effective
reflection and communication, especially on matters that traditional culture has created
demarcations on between spouses, like time-use / heavy workload and control over income.
To measure the initial impact of the household dialogue sessions that will be implemented, the
EOWE programme will collect most significant change stories from both male and female
participants of the household dialogues in sengerema. Men and women will be asked to reflect on
the question: what is the most significant change that you have noticed in your household around
the gender norms discussed since the start of the household dialogues?
The household dialogues facilitated positive shifts towards gender equitable attitudes, relations
and behaviour in the households that participated in the sessions. This will help the EOWE
programme on the patterns of change and selected stories of men and women from different area
in sengerema and Tanzania at all on their process of rethinking gender norms that limit women’s
economic empowerment and gender equality in their household and the community.

This will help to determine the balance time between productive and reproductive tasks
Gender-transformative household dialogue sessions mainly focused on understanding the
importance of time in starting, running and developing agribusinesses. The sessions also focused
on exploring changes in contemporary society and the technologies that have been invented to
realise time efficiency in relation to reproductive and productive work. The couples reflected on
and discussed how they use and divide their time between productive and reproductive work.
Through this exercise more than half of the participants will came to the realization that women
spend most of their time on reproductive work, while being unaware of the impact this has on
women’s businesses.
The household dialogue sessions will increase participant’s understanding that sharing household
work does not only benefit the wife, but also has substantial advantages for husbands. Men indicate
that reflection and discussion around household work will increase their understanding and
appreciation of the workload that comes with household and caretaking tasks. Moreover,
participants will became aware of the impact of unequal division of tasks on the success of
women's businesses and the overall economic situation of the household.
The most significant change stories of participants will helps us to show that the gender-
transformative household dialogues increased awareness around the economic benefit of sharing
household tasks and decision-making between men and women. We aimed that after participating
in the household dialogue sessions most of the men will feel encouraged to share the responsibility
for gender-neutral tasks, like livestock feeding, preparing meals and washing clothes and other.

In addition to sharing household tasks, we aimed that men will also support their wives to
participate in technical and social activities in the communities, such as being farmer group leaders
and to participate in farmer group meetings and commune festival events. These opportunities will
enable women to share experiences with each other, not only about their own families but also
about work and social life. The support from their husbands and the community also will increase
women’s confidence in taking on leadership roles in agribusinesses.

3. Sustainable social and behaviour change at scale

The gender-transformative household dialogue sessions will impact on rural women and men that
they are now open to reflecting on and rethinking gender norms. The household dialogue sessions
also facilitated positive shifts towards gender equitable attitudes, relations and behaviour in the
households that participated in the sessions. The changes in behaviour will led to substantial
benefits on a social and economic level for both men and women, which offers motivations to keep
implementing gender equitable behaviour. However, there is a risk that the women and men who
participated in the household dialogues fall back in old behaviour if the gender norms in their
communities, which affect the way people act, feel, and think, remain unchanged.
To reduce this risk and to facilitate sustainable behaviour change towards women’s economic
empowerment and gender equality at scale, the Social and Behaviour Change Communication
strategy under the EOWE programme also targets a wider audience in the community through
interventions like community festivals and photo voice activities and exhibitions. In addition,
couples that participated in the household dialogue sessions will encourage and support to share
their experiences to inspire neighbours and other community members.

.
The photo voice intervention will be designed to support the following objectives:

reflect on reality and

Commune festivals
In addition to the gender-transformative Household Dialogues, the EOWE programme will
organize community festivals as part of the broader Social and Behaviour Change Communication
strategy. The organisation of commune festivals will be used as one of the approaches to upscale
the gender transformation beyond the selected households in the proposed area

Household Dialogues to the wider community. Different forms of edutainment will be used during
the festivals to engage communities and promote civic dialogue within the communities around
gender norms.
The commune festival consists of different interactive sessions, including role plays, quizzes and
traditional dance performances. In one of the shows, men from the community dress up like
pregnant women while washing clothes. This helps men in understanding the struggles that women
face during pregnancy and doing household chores. The sessions will be designed to increase
understanding and reflection around gender norms and how they affect the well-being of
individuals and families.
The commune festivals will attract more than 2,300 visitors. The commune festival and photo
voice has created opportunities for dialogue about the daily challenges of women and men around
gender equality and women’s economic empowerment. It is through these dialogues that social
norms are shifted and communities move into action.

GENERAL OUTCOME OF THE PROGRAMME

1. Economic empowerment:
 Increased income and financial stability for women and men;
 increased control over household consumption by women
 Increased access to services (such as education and health) and asset building (such
as infrastructure) for women and men.
 time savings
 Improved livelihoods of men and women, including access to relevant training
 Increased skills and capacity
2. Political/leadership empowerment:
 Increased ability of women and men to participate in the political life and political
processes
 women and men become more active citizens and are able to influence local
development processes
 Increased ability of women and men to exercise voice and decision-making
regarding the project (project-level)
 Increased ability of women and men to exercise voice in relation to authority
structures such as government administrators or local leaders (local-level)
3. Social empowerment:
 Changes in gender norms, attitudes, and behaviors for men and women inside the
household and within the community
 Improved women’s role in household decision-making
 Improved attitudes regarding women’s involvement and engagement at the community
level.