Women manually pounding grain to create meal for cooking.
Women in Mali have incredible strength – in fact the response to “How are you?” in the local language, Bambara, is “my mother’s power” as in “I am here thanks to my mother”. At the same time women face enormous odds – only 19% of adult women are literate, and the average woman has 6.4 kids, usually starting in the early teenage years. They spend an estimate of 3-4 hours per day getting water and wood for the house and a large amount of the day cooking. The women are also responsible for certain household expenses – condiments for cooking, healthcare for herself and her children and for supplementing the household pantry when food the husband’s harvest has depleted.
Our program specifically targets women because of the important role they play in the household. Women who followed the myAgro method on their entire field saw their harvest increase 3 fold during our pilot. One of our goals this year was to improve our trainings to ensure that more women could plant using improved planting techniques in face of challenges like lack of farming tools o help them. For the 2013 growing period, we’ve made improvements to our training to make it easier for more women to adopt (for example planting in shallow furrows instead of deeps holes which is less physically demanding and using the broadcasting method of fertilizer which has been proven to be more effective than micro-dosing in this region for peanuts).
Koura, her children and some of their friends.
Koura Coulibaly (right), one our peanut farmers, is a 2nd year myAgro farmer –she planted ¼ hectare with myAgro last year and harvested 800 kgs (compared to 250 kgs she normally harvests from the same land). She’s a mother to 9 children, 6 of whom go to school. With her harvest, she stored most of her peanuts for her family and sold a small portion to purchase another myAgro package in 2013. She sold her remaining peanuts to pay for medicine when her 7 year-old fell ill with malaria. “Before myAgro, neither I nor my husband would have cash to pay for emergencies. We would have had to take out a loan to pay for my son’s medical care. Thanks to God, when my son fell ill I had extra peanuts to sell,” Koura explains. She plans of using part of her next harvest to buy goods to sell and to start raising small livestock.
We’re working with our “influencers” – women leaders, strong women farmers and early adopters like Koura – to share their story with others to coach women on the benefits of saving for agricultural packages with myAgro. When farmers hear Koura’s story they repeat our slogan with smiles – “Ka sènè soro yiriwa” – Grow more profit from agriculture!
