ABSTRACT
Women and maize cultivation: increasing productivity through gender analysis Cheryl Doss1, Yale University, USA
1 Introduction: the importance of considering the impact of gender in maize production
2 Men and women within farming households
3 Men and women in maize production systems
4 Gender divisions in labour and access to labour for maize production
5 Post-harvest processing and storage
6 Crop and varietal choice
7 Women as urban consumers
8 Agricultural research to empower women
9 Conclusions
10 Where to look for further information
11 References
When maize production is seen as a technical process, in which breeders seek to develop varieties that produce higher yields under a range of agro-ecological conditions, it is difficult to understand why it might be important to pay attention to women farmers. However, agricultural researchers are often frustrated that seemingly promising technologies are not taken up. Moreover, even when they are adopted, they rarely deliver the expected transformational impacts. There may be many possible reasons, but at least one is that scientists are not necessarily working to alleviate the constraints that are binding. The underlying challenge is that agricultural science functions best when the research targets are narrowly defined and clearly identified. However, the systems in which farmers operate are seldom simple. Farmers are managing complex portfolios of activities amid a bewildering array of constraints. Moreover, there is such huge variation in the conditions
that farmers face that the nature of the agricultural challenges may vary even from one plot to another on the same farm.
