Overcoming global hunger and poverty - smallholder women farmers are the key players

Extreme poverty, hunger and starvation is concentrated on marginalised rural areas in Gambia. Most rural people earn their income as small holder farmers.

Smallholder women farmers in Gambia have traditionally engaged in subsistence farming (which envolves around basically growing what they can eat).

The challenges and difficulties these women struggle with are many, and investing in help them solve them would be crucial to the economy of the region

Smallholder women farmer’s faces many obstacles when it comes to production:

●      They use rudimentary tools to farm, which discourages them to cultivate large hectares of land, due to the energy and time this involves.

●      They lose the crops due to lack of storage facilities.

●      Markets are out of reach and they usually have no way to get transportation. The villages where they live are normally difficult to reach.

●      They lack training on new farming practices. Due to the high illiteracy rate among rural women in the Gambia, if the training is not provided in a personalized way they won’t manage to access that kind of information on their own.

Higher prices of food commodities are a great threat on food security in Gambia and around the globe. Gambian women are the key players in guaranteeing food security in the country, by actively growing most of the food they eat. They are the backbone of most poor communities when it comes to farming in small scale.

World food security is reaching a very critical stage. Climate change is an issue not only in Gambia but globally, with fertile farm lands decreasing at an alarming rate. And more and more, agricultural land is been used for biofuels production rather than food crops.

Is there really a need for biofuels production? It sounds alarming when millions around the world are dying because of hunger and with many African governments failing to meet one of their main commitments in the Maputo declaration: assign 10% budgetary allocation to agriculture.

Supporting and investing in women smallholder farmers would not only enhance world food security, but would make a significant reduction in poverty. Leaving this out of focus will push many into greater poverty and hunger. Women smallholder farmers have a greater stake and can contribute to the world’s food supply. In order for this to happen they need to have their right to own land, access to water and loans that allow them to get tools and fertilizers. Technology is a great weapon to disseminate information and making it accessible to women farmers would mean giving them access to the latest market information on prices. They can also benefit from the support of organizations like ActionAid International, so they can have a greater voice to influence national, regional and global policies related to agriculture and land rights.