By Barbara Nwaiwu
Limited access to farmland is making it difficult for women farmers to adopt climate-resilient farming methods and improve their livelihoods, a climate expert, Mr. Taye Ojo, has said.
Ojo, Programme Manager, Development of Education Action Network (DEAN), made this known in an interview on Thursday in Abuja.
He said women made up a significant share of smallholder farmers but were often unable to secure or own farmland because of traditional and religious practices in some communities.
Ojo said the situation restricted women’s access to productive resources that could help them improve agricultural output, strengthen their livelihoods and cope with the effects of climate change.
“Traditional and religious systems in some communities do not favour women’s access to land, creating a major obstacle to their agricultural activities. The exclusion from those assets becomes a very big problem,” Ojo said.
He said the DEAN Initiative had considered other ways of supporting women who lacked adequate farmland, including using available spaces around their homes for cultivation.
According to him, some climate-smart farming methods did not require large areas of land and could therefore be practised on a small or medium scale by women facing land constraints.
“Even within your compound, there are certain lands for farming that you can use, at least on a small or medium scale, which can help reduce the burden of having no farmland,” he said.
Ojo, who is also Project Lead, DEAN’s Climate Democracy Accelerator Programme, said efforts to improve smallholder farmers’ resilience should also address women’s access to productive resources.
He said better support for women farmers could increase their contribution to food production while improving household livelihoods and their ability to withstand climate-related challenges.
The expert urged local governments to take farmers’ needs into account when developing budgets and deciding how resources would be used to tackle agricultural challenges linked to climate change.
He also called for wider access to climate-smart agricultural practices that could enable farmers to adjust to changing weather patterns and minimise climate-related risks.
Ojo urged governments and other stakeholders to focus on measures that would lower farmers’ production costs, make productive resources more accessible and improve their ability to adapt to climate change.
