HERVEST
Female small holder farmers in Nigeria experience constraints which limit their access to extension services. In most cases, cultural restrictions prevent male extension officers from meeting with women farmers. Secondly domestic responsibilities sometimes limit women's mobility making it harder for them to attend courses away from home. Thirdly, Nigerian women are less likely than men to speak the national official language and extension services are often not offered in the local language.
HerVest aggregates and digitizes language based data and real-time information about climate change, soil testing of specific crops, complimentary crop information and linkage of female farmers to nearest clusters. HerVest also works with key stakeholders to obtain updated database of female farmers. HerVest sends language-based bi-weekly messages to the female farmers across 36 states in Nigeria.
Globally, female farmers have been marginalized due to lack of information about farming best practices. This e-extension service can be scaled to other African countries with predominant numbers of marginalized women farmers and subsequently to other parts of the world.
One line solution summary
Digitization of language-based extension services to female small-scale farmers in Nigeria on best farm practices.
Women small scale farmers constitute about 75% of the entire 12 Million agricultural labour force in Nigeria. They are involved in all aspects of Agriculture from planting to marketing.
Societal constructs hold them back in accessing resources such as financing and knowledge capacity in Agricultural best-practices. (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations -FAO)
Cultural restrictions, domestic responsibilities and illiteracy are limiting factors for female farmer's inactive participation in Agricultural extension services.
When compared to their male counterparts, these have hindered female farmers excelling at the same pace as the male farmers.
HerVest is working directly with almost 9 Million female small-scale farmers in Nigeria providing digitized extension services on best farming practices complementary with low interest financing.
HerVest leverage partnerships with major stakeholders in agricultural ecosystem such as the Small Scale Women Farmers Organisation of Nigeria (SWOFON), All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN) to understand grass-root information and challenges that women farmers experience particularly in the rural areas.
HerVest extension services provides language based, real-time, specific and research-based information to these women farmers via suitable, personalized channels extracted from their database.
With the extension services at their fingertips, they can make healthy decisions for their enterprises and personal growth. Connection to the nearest women clusters will also enable them to have better access to cooperative funding as well as wider routes to market off-takers.
This will ultimately improve their living standards making them contribute effectively to the economic GDP in Nigeria and therefore reducing their vulnerability to gender-based violence.
- Deploying features that encourage contributions regardless of literacy and numeracy levels — including in contexts with limited internet coverage
In alignment with World Bank's Mission Billion Challenge for innovative solutions to how countries can increase their efforts to support vulnerable groups such as women and girls, poor, informal workers; HerVest is working directly with about 9 Million female small-scale farmers in Nigeria providing digitized extension services on best farming practices complementary with low interest financing.
Female small scale farmers make up 70% of the entire Agricultural force in Nigeria yet they are marginalised with no specific budgetary allocation or subsidized extension services. This challenge greatly ties into HerVest's offering of improving the capacity of these small scale women farmers.
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