Building an inclusive agriculture: Strengthening gender equality in agricultural value chains

Much of the earliest work on “women in development” focused on agriculture. The baseline was set by the pioneering work of Ester Boserup in Woman’s Role in Economic Development (1970), who compiled then-current knowledge to make women’s contributions to rural economies visible. She used those data to argue for recognizing women’s work in agriculture. Research quickly followed that raised the profile of women’s work not only in production and processing for home consumption but also in growing, processing, and trading different market-oriented crops. In Africa south of the Sahara, the focus of this chapter, studies looked at women’s engagement in “agricultural commercialization” across different production and marketing pathways, among them contract farming (Carney 1994; Sørensen 1990; von Bulow and Sørensen 1993; Wilson 2000);2 formal and informal wage labor (Mbilinyi and Semakafu 1995; Dolan and Sorby 2003); women traders (Clark 1994; Morris and Saul 2000; Saul 1981); and