Category Gender

Empowering communities to become groundwater-wise

0 Comments read Climate Change, Environment & Development, Gender, Health & Science
From Left: Mamta, Varda Devi, Tulsi Devi Bhatt, Rukmini Devi, Hira Bai, Chanda Choubisa in Hinta Village in Udaipur District of Rajasthan (India). Photo Credit: ©Neena Bhandari

By Neena Bhandari

Hinta and Dharta Villages (Rajasthan), 24.10.2024 (Loss and Damage Research Observatory): Tulsi Devi Bhatt, draped in an embellished purple sari and a full sleeve red kurti (top), navigates her way through the wheat fields in Hinta village in the western Indian state of Rajasthan’s Udaipur district. She is on her weekly mission to measure water level in the dug wells – the quantity of water is critical for the food security and livelihood of her community.

Hinta is part of the two multi-village, hard rock aquifer watersheds – the 6400-hectare Dharta watershed in Rajasthan and 5000-hectare Meghraj watershed in Gujarat, where MARVI – Managing Aquifer Recharge and Sustaining Groundwater Use through Village-level Intervention – project has been instrumental in enhancing groundwater recharge and availability.

Spearheaded by the Western Sydney University in Australia, working in collaboration with seven other partners in India and elsewhere, the MARVI project is aimed at empowering farmers like Tulsi with the knowledge and tools necessary for sustainable and equitable groundwater management in their villages.

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“I haven’t forgotten where I came from,” says Yvonne Pinto, incoming IRRI Chief

0 Comments read Gender, Health & Science
Yvonne Pinto, incoming IRRI chief. Photo Credit: ©Supplied by Yvonne Pinto

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 28.02.2024 (IPS): Growing up on a small farming station in Holetta (Ethiopia), Yvonne Pinto would accompany her agriculturist father to the farm, where she would spend her time cross-fertilizing plants. Her tiny fingers making the task easier, as she would marvel at the end product of a prospective new and higher yielding variety. These formative years laid the foundation for her career in agricultural science.

Ethiopia in the late 1970s and 1980s was ravaged by a terrible famine, drought, civil war, and international conflict. It became clear to Pinto from the outset that such exigencies could rapidly deteriorate everyday life and the absence of food could decimate a population. These events instilled in her a deep appreciation for the role agriculture and food systems play in human survival.

“I haven’t forgotten where I came from,” says Pinto, the incoming Director General of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). A second-generation Kenyan by birth, she feels privileged to have been brought up in Ethiopia, a country that was never colonized and where she felt fortunate to grow up as an equal, a rare experience then.

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Women, youth are ‘unseen leaders’ in rural Indonesia

0 Comments read Gender, Health & Science

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 24.02.2023 (SciDev.Net): Women and young farmers can spur others to implement new sustainability and development initiatives, even though they are less likely to be seen as opinion leaders in their local communities, according to a study.

Women make up 43 per cent of the global agricultural labour force, but face significant discrimination when it comes to land ownership, access to credit and financial services, and participation in decision-making, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

For the study, published this month in the journal Agriculture and Human Values, researchers surveyed about 2,000 farmers on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia and asked them to identify leaders they would consult for advice and information in their smallholder farming communities. These leaders, largely older men, were then asked to convince other farmers to use pruning scissors to improve the health of their cocoa trees.

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