Lots of efforts have been made to develop the small farm technologies appropriate for women and small holder farmers, but they are not scaled up at appropriate level. What is the reason behind it, is there any recent paper from Africa and Asia on it?
Thank you
Most of these technological developments for small-scale farms are research based at universities or research institutes but are not farmer-driven. The cost, efforts and science involved in such efforts are beyond the economic viability in most cases, and even economically viable, farmers cannot bear the cost.
If we look at other way around, there are many technologies (or simple methods) in traditional farming practices that are much simple and in most of the cases no cost at all involved. However, since these are not scientific research-based, many academic and development practitioners do not want to go with them.
In the case of women, and also the vast majority of small-scale farmers in every part of the world, they have no entitlements to farmlands, so investing in technologies is beyond the discussion. First, it requires to secure fair access and entitlements to the resources, and then need to look at the technologies.
Also, farmers and women (or any other depending on their crop for livelihood) have a fear of trying new things as no one secures their daily life if they have got failure. Moreover, no one refund whatever they have invested in technology.
I felt these are among the main issues that scientists/ researchers/ policy developers should look at before promoting new technologies to whoever. Otherwise, it is simply better to go to the people, and look at how they manage local knowledge and capacities to upscale their traditional methods to address technological issues in their endowments, and find ways to promote them instead bringing heavy scientific things to their doorstep.
This is very interesting. In my understanding there are many reasons, mainly the investment for the scaling up.
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