Supporting Womens Agro-Enterprises in Africa with ICT

A new generation of information and
communication technologies (ICTs) is finding a small
foothold among poor, small-scale farmers in developing
countries. Even so, many barriers still prevent poor rural
people from accessing, using, and benefiting from new ICT
tools and platforms, and those barriers are arguably higher
for rural women. The relationship between gender and
agriculture has been studied intensively over the years, and
many agricultural interventions now include gender as a
crosscutting issue or mainstream gender throughout their
operations. Studies of the relationship between gender and
the use of ICTs in agriculture have started to appear only
quite recently, however. The Africa Region of the World Bank
views ICTs as potentially transformative technology for
rural development and seeks to incorporate the use of ICTs
throughout its portfolio of projects. The present study was
designed to examine the feasibility of integrating ICTs into
two large investment programs: the Irrigation Development
and Support Project (IDSP) in Zambia and the Kenya
Agricultural Productivity and Agribusiness Project (KAPAP).
The specifi c goal was to examine how ICT-based
interventions might be designed to strengthen women s
participation in commodity value chains under the two projects.