Towards a new regional agenda: bringing visibility to rural women in South Asia

By Saba Aslam

Women picking cotton in the fields, Sindh province
Photo credit: Wasim Gazdar

Across the world, women form an integral part of the agricultural sector. In much of South Asia, women make up a majority of the agricultural workforce, but the extent of their contribution remains unacknowledged in policy and public debates. They often undertake difficult physical labour, working long hours and are paid lower wages compared to their male counterparts if they are paid at all. LANSA research identified women’s agriculture work in South Asia as a critical mediating factor between household poverty and undernutrition. The recognition of women’s agricultural work and women as agricultural workers, moreover, was identified as a key entry point for leveraging agriculture for the improvement of nutrition.

LANSA research in India and Pakistan has already made a significant contribution to national debates and policy thinking on women agricultural workers. The ANH Academy Week in Kathmandu in 2017 offered an opportunity for taking this dialogue to the regional level. The advantages were clear. Despite many differences across the region – even within large countries such as India and Pakistan – there are many common strands that cross national boundaries. LANSA had already shown the value of collaborative research across these boundaries. It was also obvious that other researchers working on these issues had adopted comparable approaches and came up with similar findings. The diverse experiences across countries of engagements with policy and political processes also promised to be huge sources of insight and inspiration.

In 2018 LANSA was able to form a partnership with an influential global and regional stakeholder – namely UNWomen – to co-host a regional roundtable Recognizing the Rights of Women Agricultural Workers in South Asia: Roundtable on Policy, Politics and Impact. This was held in Bangkok in October 2018 and brought together a diverse group of stakeholders from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, including policymakers, representatives from governments, universities and research institutions, international organizations, civil society organizations (CSOs) and grassroots activists. The roundtable provided an exciting opportunity for the sharing of research findings and policy engagement experiences, and brought forward a new regional agenda that brings visibility to rural women’s rights.

A statement of joint recommendations was adopted by consensus by the participants to bring transformative change in the lives of women agricultural workers. This joint statement encapsulates a set of action recommendations that focus on policy, legal and programmatic changes to recognize, protect and promote the rights of women agricultural workers. It mirrors the voice of rural women who are excluded from many policy dialogues and lays out a range of provisions that women should receive from governments.

Legal recognition of women agricultural workers needs to be seen as a starting point, leading to ensuring that rights to equal and living wages, and the provision of social protection in the form of pensions, housing, childcare, free and quality healthcare including sexual reproductive health, education and maternity entitlements are established and enforced. The need to mobilise women agricultural workers and provide them a platform for discussion and articulation of their needs and demands, emerged as a strong component of the joint statement, given the near-total absence of such platforms, be it unions, associations or other forms of organisation.

Women agricultural workers’ voices need to be amplified across different fora – local, national and international. Policymakers, governments of all tiers, international agencies, local and community based organisations, communities and women agricultural workers themselves have to become a part of this regional agenda for women’s rights and benefits to be realized. The regional roundtable was one step towards recognizing the contribution of women agricultural workers and it ended on a positive and optimistic note. There was plenty of energy and commitment for continuing engagement with the issue.

*This blog was originally written for LANSA with inputs from Haris Gazdar and Nitya Rao

Women agricultural workers and their rights

By Saba Aslam

Consultative discussion on Rights and Well-being of Women Agricultural Workers in Pakistan

Photo credit: Waseem Gazdar

The National Commission on the Status of Women and Collective for Social Science Research hosted a consultation on the rights and wellbeing of women agricultural workers and their children in Pakistan. It was held on 29^th August 2018 at the Beach Luxury Hotel in Karachi. The consultation acted as a platform to bring together activists, lawyers, researchers, parliamentarians, women agricultural workers, members from the National and Provincial Commissions on the Status of Women, and policy makers who discussed the issues faced by women agricultural workers in Pakistan, and debated potential ways of moving forward in recognizing and protecting rights of women agricultural workers at local, provincial and national levels.

Dr. Yasmin Zaidi, Director of Center of Gender and Policy studies (CGaPs) presented key findings of UN Women’s recent report on status of rural women in Pakistan. Citing secondary data, Dr. Zaidi provided insights on women’s extensive contribution in the agriculture sector. She said that 53 percent of women involved in agriculture do unpaid work out of which 60 percent belong to the rural areas. Their work is often considered informal, and hence they are not counted as workers. This makes them virtually absent across public policy design and discourse. They are denied basic rights such as public health services, and social security. She suggested that policies and programmes must focus on improving women’s economic empowerment, their participation in politics and their right to access justice against violence.

Mr. Haris Gazdar, Director of Collective for Social Science Research presented findings from a LANSA study on “Women’s Work and Nutrition” stressing the link between women’s work, their health and the health of their children. He discussed associations between women’s work and other exogenous factors such as household food insecurity, mother’s education and household wealth status that could be potential drivers of women’s work in agriculture. His presentation revealed that the nutritional status of women agricultural workers and health of their children was negatively linked to their status of work. For example, women who undertook strenuous work during pregnancy and after giving birth had poor nutritional outcomes.  

Extending agricultural policies to women

By Hussain Bux Mallah

Women picking cotton in Sanghar
Photo credit: Collective team

Pakistan’s employment trends show a steady feminization of the agricultural sector. Almost three-fourths of the female labour force is employed in agriculture, and the proportion of women working in agriculture has increased more than 10 percent from 2001-02 to 2012-13. However, the agriculture sector is not very friendly to women, especially to pregnant and/or lactating mothers. The health status of mothers working as agricultural labour and their children is alarming. Women who work in agriculture are far more likely to be underweight and to have children who are wasted and stunted than women who do not work in agriculture.  According to DHS 2012-13, out of all mothers who are working in the agriculture sector, 29 percent are underweight, 13 percent of their children are wasted and 52 percent are stunted.

Invisible work, visible harm

by Amna Akhtar

Panelists at Annual Conference on Rural Women Day (from left to right):
Ms. Akeela Naz, Ms. Kaukab Jehan, Dr. Huma Qureshi, Ms. Khawar Mumtaz,
Ms. Sabiha Nazeer and Ms. Benazir Jatoi

Pakistan relies heavily on agriculture and livestock for subsistence. Yet, over half of the children in rural areas do not achieve their growth potential (stunting) and every sixth child is too thin (wasted). Those responsible for most of this produce, the female agricultural workers, have some of the poorest health and nutrition outcomes. How is this possible and what can we do to remedy this situation?

Ag-nutrition policy: Where are the women?

By Saba Aslam

Panel discussion at the ANH 2017 symposium
Photo credits: Collective Team

How can nutritional outcomes of women agricultural workers and their children be improved through interventions in the agriculture sector? What has worked for countries in the South Asian region? What more should policies do in countries where agriculture sector forms the economic backbone but nutrition remains low or stagnant? These questions were discussed in a policy dialogue organised by Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) on “Recognition, Rights and Wellbeing of Women Agricultural Workers in South Asia” at the Agriculture, Nutrition and Health (ANH) Symposium held in July. The panel had activists and policy makers from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Nepal, and was moderated by Ms. Rachel Lambert, Senior Livelihoods Advisor in Department for International Development’s (DFID) UK Agriculture research team. 

Sustainable Farming Systems for Food and Nutrition Security

By Alan Dangour

Female agricultural workers picking vegetables in Mirpurkhas
Photo credit: Waseem Gazdar

The 2015 Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition call on all countries to end hunger and prevent malnutrition in all its forms by 2030. This is quite a challenge, and it is a challenge with sustainable agriculture and food systems at its very heart.

Who works and why: Detangling women’s agricultural work

by Sidra Mazhar

A woman cuts sugarcane in Mirpurkhas.
Photo credit: Collective team

Throughout the world, women play a very important role in the agricultural sector. In the last few decades, agriculture has undergone a gendered transformation termed the ‘feminization of agriculture’. National level statistics in developing countries show that there has been an increase in female involvement in agriculture accompanied by a steady decline in men’s participation. It is commonly believed that this increased participation in agriculture empowers women economically and socially. However, our LANSA survey on women’s work and nutrition in rural Sindh, where we surveyed new mothers about their work before, during, and after pregnancy, tells a different story.

What women do

by Haris Gazdar

Women and girls cut grass for fodder in Mirpurkhas
Photo credit: Collective team

We use the word ‘right’ a lot, but it is a haloed and distant term. In many languages it invokes truth – an aura of goodness and an assuring feeling of timelessness. A nation has the right to self-determination, an individual has the right to her or his conscience, and a child has the right to education. A nation can be hundreds or thousands of years old, and might have always had the right to self-determination, but it can practice self-determination once it is recognised by other nations. Ask any Palestinian. The individual’s right to conscience might have existed since before the day Socrates drank poisoned hemlock, but it can be practised when other individuals and the legal and political systems recognise that a person cannot be punished for their beliefs alone. The child always had the right to be educated but will actually be schooled when the community recognises this right and provides the necessary resources. Recognition, therefore, is the more accessible fellow-traveller of right. It is not only the way in which rights are realised, but is also a step towards making rights enforceable.

Plugging the gaps between farm and fork

by Samar Zuberi and Rashid Mehmood

Increased production does not mean improved diets for the undernourished
Photo credit: Flickr/Asian Development Bank

Nutrition has been an increasing concern in Pakistan for almost half a decade. The release of the 2011 National Nutrition Survey showed no improvement in nutrition indicators in decades, and highlighted alarming rates of undernutrition, and micronutrient deficiencies. These results alongside a strong international push to re-focus on nutrition have succeeded in placing nutrition higher on the policy agenda within Pakistan. Pakistan has recently adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were proceeded by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). SDG #2 aims to end hunger, achieve food security and improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.

My choice or not?

by Sidra Mazhar

Women returning from fields after a hard day's work
Photo credit: Flickr/Khalid Mir

Agricultural practices and interventions affects nutrition of women, children and the entire household through various pathways and it is interesting to note that women empowerment, though much neglected, has a significant role to play when it comes to improving nutrition. To understand this link, I recently attended a webinar on “Women’s nutrition through an empowerment lens” organized by Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) and Innovative Methods and Metrics for Agriculture and Nutrition Actions (IMMANA). The webinar explored the impact of women empowerment on women’s and their children’s nutrition. It detailed the effects of women empowerment in livestock-focused-agriculture followed by an investigation of women empowerment in nutrition index.

Can social protection programmes lead to greater economic agency for women in agriculture?

by Amna Akhtar

Photo credit: Magnus Wolfe-Murra/DFID/Flickr

Even though women in rural areas in Pakistan take part in a wide range of agricultural activities, the work they do, often arduous and labor-intensive, is not recognized as their individual contribution to the household economy. There exist strong gendered norms around the kinds of work that can be considered paid work for women in agriculture and except for some - such as cotton harvesting and livestock rearing-income from most kinds of work are attributed to the household as a whole. This, we found, while researching linkages between women's work in agriculture and the nutrition outcomes. This is important because we found a clear connection between the recognition or even acknowledgement of women’s economic contribution and their ability to make pro-nutrition consumption decisions. Interestingly, income from the national cash transfer programme (Benazir Income Support Programme or BISP) whose beneficiaries are women in poor households was seen across the board as the woman’s own. If the design of social protection programmes can enhance the visibility of women as autonomous economic agents they may even lead to greater recognition of women’s work in agriculture. This is one of the questions we hope to address in our research on mitigating the negative and leveraging the positive impacts of women’s agricultural work on nutrition.


This blog originally appeared on LANSA

Women’s work and wages

by Haris Gazdar

Photo Credit: Collective for Social Science Research

While researching the linkages between women’s work in agriculture and nutrition outcomes in Pakistan, for Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA), we came across an instructive puzzle. A big segment of the workforce is ruled out from participating in a particularly labour-intensive activity. The harvesting of cotton, an important cash crop, generates a great deal of seasonal employment in the rural economy but the work is almost entirely carried out by women who might remain employed on a non-stop basis for up to four months. Women and men, labourers and employers, all concur that it is women’s work, and a man stands to lose respect and status if he takes part in it.

The beginning of a dialogue: Responsive agriculture-nutrition research

by Samar Zuberi

How can agriculture and food-related policies and interventions be better designed to improve nutrition outcomes, particularly for young women and girls? Dialogue around this question was started at a workshop hosted by the Collective for Social Science Research / Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) on 15 April in Karachi. The workshop brought together diverse stakeholders in agriculture and nutrition including senior officials from provincial governments, academic researchers, representatives of international development partners, and civil society organizations and activists. 

Considering fragility: A disconnect between agriculture and nutrition

by Haris Gazdar

  by  UN Women Asia & the Pacific 

How can agriculture contribute more to improving nutrition in countries like Pakistan (as well as others in South Asia) where the sector continues to employ a large proportion of the workforce, even while its contribution to national income undergoes decline?  To find answers to this question is the main objective of the Research Programme Consortium Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA).  The latest IDS Bulletin which focuses on nutrition in Pakistan provided the perfect opportunity of showcasing emerging LANSA work on the country. The evidence paper on Pakistan which I co-authored with my colleague Mysbah Balagamwala at the Collective for Social Science Research reviews existing evidence on the pathways and disconnects between agriculture and nutrition using a framework developed for India by the research programme TANDI (Tackling the Agriculture-Nutrition Disconnect in India). A piece written on the article in the IDS Bulletin can be found here​.