Female farmers in West Africa face many barriers to improving their agricultural productivity. Korotoumou Doumbia, a farmer working with myAgro for her first time, describes some of these challenges here, with some typical Malian humor thrown in. The following are excerpts from her interview:
I am 58 years old. I don’t want to get lost in numbers, but I have many sons and daughters and multiple grandchildren. I am a farmer, and I also collect shea to make a living. I plant peanuts.
We women would like to farm much larger fields than what we currently farm. But what can we do if we have no work tools? It is very annoying to always have to wait for the men to first finish their work to be able to borrow their tools. We must always wait for the men to finish planting their cotton, corn and millet before we can have access to their plows.
We have land. It’s more a lack of materials that prevents us from reaching our goals. We are missing plows and cattle. The other things we need are herbicides and fertilizer.
Korotoumou Doumbia explains the challenges that
face female farmers.
This is the first year I am working with myAgro, because it is the first year myAgro came to my village and I had the opportunity to join.
Last year we had very bad crops and earned nothing. The lack of rains had bad consequences on our harvests. That is why many of us enrolled in myAgro. I hope to see an increase in my harvests this year with them. Maybe with the farming methods they teach us our small yields from before will increase.
Before myAgro, we had difficulty getting access to inputs in the village. We hope to be able to have access to our seeds and fertilizer on time with myAgro. Normally it is the quest to find fertilizer that is the most challenging. There are few villages around here where we don’t go to look for fertilizer, sometimes even all the way to the other side of the river.
Also, before I planted my fields with my own peanut seed. Now I am looking forward to higher quality seeds from myAgro. I will still probably plant some of my land with my old seed too because I plant around 1 hectare of land, and I will be able to save for ½ of a hectare with myAgro this year.
