To improve Africa’s soil health and plant nutrition, empower women farmers

Healthy soils play a critical role in supporting agricultural productivity, climate change mitigation and resilience, and a range of ecosystem services. Up to 65% of Africa’s productive land is estimated to be degraded, and far too many smallholder farmers must eke out a living on degraded and nutrient depleted soils. While many technical options for soil improvement or restoration exist, a large number of them remain “on the shelf” or do not see widespread use due to sociocultural, institutional, economic, and policy barriers that stand in the way of their uptake at scale.

Gender inequality is deeply embedded in soil health and plant nutrient management; It reinforces these barriers and represents a “wicked problem” requiring a fuller understanding of context and culture-specific approaches. Persistent inequalities such as women’s lower access to both agricultural resources and knowledge are a significant contributor to the 24% gap in land productivity between women and men farmers on farms of equal size, as well as to major differences in labor productivity.

Addressing gender inequalities is now more urgent than ever, as fertilizer subsidies and other programs to support soil health—which remain largely gender-blind—are expanding in Africa and elsewhere amid the continuing series of global food price crises following in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. We need to bring gender sensitivity to these programs—developing context- and culture-specific understandings and approaches to empowering women farmers now to support soil health, improve plant nutrition and increase Africa’s agricultural productivity.

This week’s launch of the African Union’s African Fertilizer and Soil Health Action Plan: 2023-2033 at a Nairobi summit May 7-9 is a timely response to these challenges. A May 8 side event, sponsored by the CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform, the CGIAR NEXUS Gains Initiative, GROOTS Kenya, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and IFPRI will focus on empowering women farmers. In this post, we outline the issues women farmers face and make recommendations to build on the Action Plan—bringing greater gender equity and inter-linked agricultural productivity to programs supporting soil health,

Women’s contributions to soil health

Evidence shows that increasing women’s control over agricultural management decisions can enhance soil quality and increase land productivity. For example, if given adequate decision space, women are more likely to implement intercropping in Africa; this improves soil health and reduces erosion. Women’s leadership roles in soil health management are directly tied to their land holdings, tenure security, and knowledge of land rights, all of which are associated with women farmers’ long-term investment in soil and water conservation. And agricultural performance is improved and climate change impacts reduced when extension and advisory services target both women and men.

Unfortunately, most investments in agricultural intensification continue to be gender-blind, including fertilizer subsidies and other programs focused on soil health and plant nutrient management. This approach further widens existing gaps between women and men farmers in resources, agency, and achievements. This state of affairs is particularly surprising given the outsized role of women in Africa’s agrifood systems: In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 66% of working women are engaged in the sector (and close to 50% in agricultural production systems) compared to 60% of men.

Even many agricultural investments that do target women farmers fail to consider the full set of structural challenges that they face, such as gaps in access to education and finance, land, tenure security, and mobility. For instance, seemingly simple measures such as “reserving” credit for women farmers or employing women as agro-dealers to sell fertilizers may fall well short of achieving the transformative change needed. It does not help that such measures are often designed without consulting women farmers, reducing the likelihood of success.

Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health Action Plan recommendations

While the Action Plan matrix currently awaits specific measures to strengthen women’s engagement in soil health and plant nutrient management, it promises the development of a “specialized gender and youth integration program” that aims to ensure “equitable benefits for women and youth.” The plan’s Action 1.2.9 indicates that gender will be considered in programming of soil health interventions: “Promote Gender-sensitive finance, technical support and information to enable women to implement sustainable soil health practices.”

To further strengthen the Action Plan’s gender focus, and to monitor progress of interventions to strengthen women’s agency over and empowerment through soil health and plant nutrition measures, we propose the following steps: 

• Ensure accountability for women farmers by developing gendered progress indicators and dedicating at least 1% of funding for collecting gender-disaggregated data and monitoring gendered progress. Integrating gender into the design of policies and programs alone is not enough. To ensure plans are implemented and lead to better welfare outcomes for women farmers and their families, the Action Plan should include gendered outcome targets and invest in sex-disaggregated data collection. Timely, accessible, and localized gender-disaggregated data are needed to ensure that soil health and fertilizer investments don’t simply default to gender-blind approaches. This funding should also cover ex post analyses, as many well-intentioned policies and investments—as noted above—have failed with possibly undocumented adverse impacts for women in addition to increased gaps in resources, agency and achievements.
• Consult representatives of women farmers in all national soil health and plant nutrient management strategies, including fertilizer subsidy programs, and include them in implementation oversight to improve soil health and agricultural productivity. This requires a quota system to guarantee women seats at the table. It also requires enhancing women’s access to capacity sharing and strengthening opportunities for effective leadership in soil health and ensuring adequate budgeting to deliver on gender equality outcomes. This will also help advance progress toward 50/50 gender equality goals in food systems.
• Integrate women’s practical knowledge into soil health management plans. Research shows that women farmers have developed important conservation agriculture, manure management, and minimum tillage and intercropping strategies. These strategies offer important insights on managing soil health under extremely difficult conditions—thus sharing them should be a key goal. Yet this unique knowledge is seldom considered in national agricultural soil health strategies. This can be done through participatory video-based extension services or other channels.
• Actively support closing gender divides in extension, digital tools, and finance and provide targeted resources in these areas for women farmers. Soil health and plant nutrient management information must be designed with women’s needs and preferences in mind and disseminated through channels that women access. The gender gap in mobile internet use is 37% in sub-Saharan Africa—reflecting the region’s large gender digital divide. This limits women’s access to information on soil health interventions, programs, trainings and subsidies, all increasingly delivered through digital platforms. Increasing women’s access to mobile phones and the internet and helping them learn how to use these tools reduces information asymmetries, and inequities when digital tools are used. Similarly, efforts to reduce gender disparities in financial services can make a difference; for instance, the expansion of mobile banking services in regions such as East Africa provides women with an opportunity to save, access credit, and develop resources to finance fertilizers and other soil health strategies. Both the public and private sectors should work together to increase women’s financial literacy, provide financial products tailored to their needs, and accept nontraditional forms of collateral.
• Consider broader structural measures to support soil health and agricultural productivity, including support for primary and secondary education of girls; land tenure policies that guarantee women’s property rights; and working to change norms and traditions that increase women’s drudgery and reduce their decision-making options and space.

The African Fertilizer and Soil Health Action Plan holds great promise for improving agricultural productivity, food security, and environmental sustainability—Africa needs many more and better investments in soil health strategies and increased efficiency and strengthened capacity for soil health management. All of these areas can only flourish, however, if the Action Plan embraces interventions co-designed by women farmers that have both men’s and women’s needs in mind. Let’s transform Africa’s soil health systems through engaging with and empowering all soil health actors.

Claudia Ringler is Director of IFPRI's Natural Resources and Resilience Unit and co-lead of the CGIAR NEXUS Gains Initiative; Cargele Masso is Director, Environmental Health & Biodiversity Impact Area Platform, with the CGIAR Systems Organization. Opinions are the authors'.