Women in Tanzania - beasts of burden?

Women farmers also contribute substantially to both commercial and subsistence agriculture, including livestock and fishing, as casual labourers and unpaid family workers.

Women carry the major responsibility for both subsistence agriculture, especially food crop production, and domestic work. Time use studies consistently show that women spend more hours per day than men in both productive and reproductive activities.

Traditionally, women are responsible for almost all livestock activities of dairy husbandry (feeding, milking, milk processing, marketing, etc.). In addition, a 1992 labour force survey in Zanzibar showed that women comprise 74 per cent of the labour force in agro-enterprises. In Zanzibar, women also predominate in on-shore fisheries, while men perform almost all the work in off-shore fisheries except for some cleaning and processing.

In crop production, both men and women participate fairly equally in site clearance, land preparation, sowing and planting, while women carry out most of the weeding, harvesting, transportation, threshing, processing and storage activities. Women are also responsible for food preparation, fetching water and gathering firewood.

Decision-making at the household level continues to be male-dominated in all farming-related activities, even in those where women contribute the majority of the labour. However, joint decision-making is commonplace.

Last week, two important days were commemorated around the world – the International Day of the Girl and the International Day of Rural Women. Unfortunately, the commemorations were low-key across the region.

Women and girls in the region continue to be denied their basic rights. Even worse is the fact that those rights have been acquired blood, sweat and tears. But even when women fight and gain some rights, governments remain lukewarm in implementing them.

Until the time our governments acknowledge that empowering women is good for the region, our economies will remain uncompetitive. Rural women, in particular, have continued to suffer debilitating poverty occasioned by retrogressive cultural practices and the politics of marginalisation.

The only source of financial freedom for rural women is productive agricultural enterprises, which unfortunately have not been strengthened enough to erase the circle of poverty.

This is despite the fact that rural women contribute immensely to agriculture and rural enterprises, fuelling local and global economies.

They are active players in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, every day around the world, rural women and girls face insurmountable constraints from the prevailing social, economic and political order.

Owing to restrictive structures, they are prevented them from fully enjoying their human rights, and their efforts to improve their own lives and those of others around them are continuously hampered.

Land ownership, which is largely patriarchal in most African cultures, has relegated women to ploughing on land that they can never hope to own.

The high cost of agricultural inputs coupled with low returns from agriculture, moreover, have made tilling the land unattractive and compounded the woes of rural women.