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China-Africa Trade Information Service
info.afrindex.com
China-Africa Trade Information Service
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Through women's cooperatives, a joint UN programme provides training in agricultural techniques, improved seeds and time-saving machinery, while also granting loans and encouraging saving.
In most parts of the Dodola district, 300 km south of Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, slow-moving oxen plowing opens stretches of farmland. But in one field, a red tractor is speedily tilling women's cooperative owned farmland ahead of the rainy season.
For Kamso Bame, a widowed mother of 12 and owner of 2.5 acres of land, the tractor has shaved off days of grueling labour.
Bame is among more than 2,000 smallholder women farmers involved in a joint UN programme to boost sustainable agricultural production and rural women's economic empowerment, through training and cooperatives.
After Bame joined the women's cooperative in her village of Wabi Burkitu, she received a 7,000 Birr (259 USD) loan, which she used to start a cart-transport service. Bame uses her daily average income of 400 Birr (15 USD) to support her children, four of whom live independently. Her membership also enables her to cultivate the land using a tractor owned by the cooperative.
"Before the death of my husband, whenever the rainy season came, I remember him spending three to four days ploughing the family's land with the pair of oxen we owned. Each day, he and the oxen used to come back home exhausted," she recalls. "Today, it is different, as I am privileged to farm the same land with a tractor and it takes a maximum of three hours."
The tractor is used to farm the land owned by the cooperative as a team, as well as each member's own land. The cooperative also rents it out to other farmers in 26 villages across the district, whose population is more than 240,000. Charging up to 1,500 Birr (56 USD) per hectare, the cooperative currently earns over 6,000 Birr (222 USD) per day, on average.
For Tulule Knife, a 38-year-old member of a cooperative in the Adamitulu district of the Oromia region, the training sessions she received have improved her yields and provided a livelihood for her family of nine.
"My village is known for growing maize in traditional ways, which involves scattering seeds by hand all over the prepared land," she explains. Last year, equipped with new sustainable farming techniques, Knife sowed wheat seeds, a rarity since it doesn't yield enough grains using traditional planting methods.
