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IPM Integrated Pest Management Collaborative Research Support Program The IPM CRSP works to:
All of these activities involve women in some way. For one thing, women are farmers too, even though this is an image that does not come to mind for people in the developed world. For another, the tedious work of sorting, grading and packing agricultural produce is usually left to women. For poor rural women, this is an important source of cash income. During the first year of the IPM CRSP extension program in Mali, our partners introduced the Farmer Field Schools approach to disseminating pest management technologies—the best in adult experiential learning. During this training, Keith Moore asked the woman project leader why only men were participating. The project leader said that the women didn’t want to. Moore then asked if they had been asked if they would like to have a FFS for just women in the village. They had not, but when Colette Harris (then-WID director) came on later that year, she created a program in which both men and women began participating in equal numbers. Following are some of the program highlights.
In evaluation of the FFS, program managers learned that those FFS with women had a more wide-ranging effect than those with just the men. Women just seemed to share more of what they had learned with other women—and with the men in their villages, too. This reinforces, at least for West Africa, that working with women and women’s associations is the most effective way to get messages out about new and improved technologies. more info on Gender and the IPM CRSP
CBNRM | IPM CRSP | Peanut CRSP | Partnership | BolFor Project | SANREM | AMAREW |