Innovation Lab For Small Scale Irrigation

Innovation Lab For Small Scale Irrigation

gender

Student Interview: Paving the way for young women in STEM with excellence in academia and industry

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Meet Dayan Yenesew, a 2022 graduating class student in software engineering at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia.

Meet Dayan Yenesew, a 2022 graduating class student in software engineering at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia.

Tell us about yourself, your current role and your university.

I enjoy mentoring my juniors and educating young people on how to program. I also volunteer in communities around my university, including Women Tech Maker Bahir Dar, Google Developer Group Bahir Dar, and the Developer Student Club. My ultimate goal in life is to become a strong role model for young females by excelling in both academia and industry – paving the way for more women to enter the technology field.

What has the research process been like for you in the Seifu Maker Space at Bahir Dar University under the challenge supported by the Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation?

There were many applicants for the Hack-a-Thon organized by IWMI under the ILSSI project, but only 6 teams with about 30 members passed the initial screening stage. We attended a three-day human-centered design (HCD) training and took a field trip to a farm to identify the challenges facing farmers. After the HCD course, we conducted research and selected a challenge that we felt connected to from the field trip. Following extended idea-generation, we presented our proposal along with the other six teams. My squad was one of the two winners.

I’ve been eager and passionate to work on a project that speaks to me personally. I witnessed how difficult it was for my rural cousins to purchase solar pumps and home systems because there were no trustworthy vendors. I have a relative who lost his savings after being duped by a vendor to buy a sub-par solar panel for an irrigation water pump. Even though I sleep less than five hours every night because of class work and a final year project, it has been an exciting trip for me to work on a project that I know will address a real person’s problem.

What challenges did you identify in your project and how will others benefit from your solution?

As part of our project, we are creating a digital and sales app for Rensys Engineering PLC. We identified difficulties after studying the company’s current system, and then came up with solutions that can benefit both farmers and the company.

Farmers will get direct access to the price list, which will enable them to purchase solar items at a reasonable price and not get duped by local vendors who provide false information and low quality products. Farmers will also more easily find the location and contact information of the regional agents, and information about solar products in voice format and in a native language. If needed, farmers can access toll-free call centers for assistance, which will help them easily reach Rensys for after-sales support and maintenance, which they lacked before.

Rensys as a business will benefit from our app by streamlining orders and distribution of solar pumps into a simple and easy process with local and regional sales agents, while reducing the workload with a system generates sales analytics reports. They will have more control over prices between regional and local sales agents; previously, local sales agents would increase the price beyond the official Rensys price and charge farmers extra. Rensys will also be able to manage inventory for management of regional agents and warehouses, and manage future orders and marketing with statistics on products most frequently purchased in regions, and stop selling unpopular or defective goods.

From what your experience so far, what is the most surprising or outstanding thing you have learned? How did it change your approach to learning?

The concept of human-centered design I have learned in the Seifu BiT Maker Space forever changed how I approach problems. I found it challenging at first, because I wasn’t adapted to this way of thinking. It was both a fantastic experience and difficult to put into practice. This experience taught me how flexible and adept I can be. As a team, we had to understand people’s problems through their eyes rather than our own subjectively. We did research and went on a field visit to identify challenges using human-centered design thinking. It was hard at first because our minds frequently reverted to the old way of thinking. Through perseverance and practice over the last three months, I have mastered this approach and applied it to my final year project, too.

We were also matched with a fantastic mentor by the Seifu BiT Maker Space. Being given the chance to follow their lead has significantly altered my career. I never thought having a mentor like them would allow me to advance as quickly as I did. They imparted their knowledge and experience, tracking our efforts and helping us identify our mistakes. I’m grateful that they have been so generous with their time and effort.

The last three months have been incredibly significant in my life. Seifu BiT Maker Space has opened so many doors for me. The people I met and the experiences I have had are unparalleled. The tight-knit relationships with staff and my peers are what I am going to miss most about the maker space. I regret not finding it sooner and will be forever indebted to the center. This project stands out from ordinary classes since it is applicable. By putting all the theoretical ideas I’ve learned over the previous five years to use, we tackled a real-world problem facing farmers and businesses. This project has allowed me to practice my leadership, teamwork, analytical, and problem-solving skills as well as demonstrate my capacity for multitasking and high-pressure situations. I am confident that this ability I have gained will be useful to me in my future profession.

Finally, what advice would you give other women in science, based on your experiences?

In high school, physics was one of my favorite classes, and I wanted to major in it. However, my family opposed this decision, believing it to be absurd. I also couldn’t identify a role model so I started to doubt myself, and experienced imposter syndrome. As a person, it is hard to imagine what you do not see. So I went to the software engineering department.

In university, I still struggle to find mentors and role models. Inspired by this experience, I started to develop a platform (website and mobile application) as my final year project, which aims to raise the aspiration of girls and to give girls role models that can expand their horizons. It will feature successful women in business, politics, science, engineering, mathematics – connecting girls to an interested high achieving university student through mentorship.

I strongly believe that by providing girls with environments that inspire them to be their best selves, encourage non-gender norms and expectations, and expose them to a variety of different areas such as science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), we can make a difference.

I know being a woman in STEM is not always an easy route. I advise my fellow women in STEM to battle against the system, demand what they are entitled to, and alter the system for future generations of women.

Making irrigation financing solutions work for everyone: Cultivating Equality 2021 conference contribution

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Making financing tools and solutions more inclusive can provide women farmers with equitable opportunities for accessing irrigation equipment and succeeding in agripreneurship.

At Cultivating Equality: Advancing Gender Research in Agriculture and Food Systems, a virtual conference that focused on the role gender research can play to overcome marginalization and social exclusion, Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation (ILSSI) Director Nicole Lefore presented recent research on gender biases in asset-based financing tools used in the small scale irrigation sector.

It is well established that women farmers face higher socio-cultural barriers and credit constraints than men, preventing them from investing in productive irrigation assets and realizing their entrepreneurial aspirations. ILSSI is supporting efforts to overcome such barriers by co-developing new, gender-responsive financing tools with private sector solar irrigation companies.

In general, solar irrigation pump companies in sub-Saharan Africa are attempting to fill a credit gap through asset-based financing, which can enable people ‘at the bottom of the pyramid’, including women farmers, to overcome credit barriers. However, companies’ credit risk assessment tools are not designed to be gender sensitive, and companies do not even target women farmers as potential clients.

How to reach women farmers

In recent research, combining a literature review, tool analysis and action research, Lefore and colleagues investigated whether asset-based financing tools and solutions can be made more inclusive and thereby increase women’s access to productive assets. Interim findings have revealed that even non-asset-based financing products do not necessarily overcome the main constraints limiting women’s access to credit for assets, and financial instruments using new approaches may still be unresponsive to women farmers and value chain actors.

Instead, the preliminary findings indicate that knowledge sharing through multi-stakeholder dialogues can raise awareness about women farmers as a market segment and that reaching women farmer clients requires a targeted marketing and finance approach. The research also revealed that some innovative companies are adapting their marketing and financial tools to expand their client base to include women farmers.

A pathway toward women’s empowerment

This could be good news for women farmers in that other research presented at Cultivating Equality contributed to establishing a link between small scale irrigation and women’s empowerment.

In Small-Scale Irrigation (SSI) and Women’s Empowerment (WE): Lessons from Northern Ghana, Elizabeth Bryan of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and her co-authors indicate that small scale irrigation has benefits for women, but it is not always the most desirable pathway to women’s empowerment. However, asset ownership – along with control over income and production decisions – do seem to contribute to women’s empowerment.

Still, achieving asset ownership remains a stumbling block. Despite the link between asset ownership and empowerment, as Bryan and co-authors point out, women face considerable resource constraints, such as lack of secure land use rights and access to labor, that further reduce their ability to get credit, and therefore interventions that strengthen women’s opportunities are needed to break the multiple and reinforcing boundaries to asset ownership. These insights help inform ILSSI’s continued work with the private sector to target women through gender-responsive asset-based financing tools.

The two-faced challenge of the credit constraints limiting smallholder farmers’ irrigation investments

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by Nicole Lefore, Director of Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation (ILSSI), Bedru Balana, Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and Claudia Ringler, Deputy Director of Environment and Production Technology Division at IFPRI

Many smallholder farmers, especially women and other marginalized groups, face difficulty in accessing loans and other forms of credit. Such credit constraints are often considered a key barrier to adoption of mechanized agricultural technologies, such as small scale irrigation equipment.

So how can this challenge be overcome? A new study indicates that the solution might be more complex than previously assumed.

A challenge with two equally important causes

In the past, both research papers and policy guidance documents have advocated for improving the supply of credit to smallholder farmers. The argument is that smallholders face credit constraints on the supply side, meaning that not enough loans or credit schemes are available to them. Therefore, the argument goes, expanding the supply of loans or other forms of finance would unleash investment in irrigation technologies.

Based on this premise, the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation (ILSSI) has been exploring various affordable and accessible financing options to make loans more available to small scale irrigators, to particularly address these supply-side constraints to credit.

However, a more recent ILSSI study cautions against oversimplifying the solution to credit constraints, when looking to scale irrigation technologies. It has found that demand-side factors, that is, constraints related to the farmers’ own perception and context—such as their risk aversion, bad experiences with past loans, financial illiteracy, perceived high transaction costs, and their household’s labor supply shortages—might play an equally important role, effectively shaping the amount of credit that smallholder farmers are willing to take on, even if they had access.

Complementary solutions required

Using primary data from surveys in Ethiopia and Tanzania, scientists from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) working with ILSSI analyzed both demand- and supply-side constraints to credit. The aims of the study were to identify the credit-constraint status of smallholder farmers, that is, whether farmers are unconstrained, supply-side constrained, or demand-side constrained and to assess gender-differentiated credit constraints.

Fig. 1. Supply- and demand-side credit constrained households.

The results showed that demand-side credit constraints are at least as important as supply-side factors. The message is that easing supply-side constraints alone—for example through lowering barriers to entry for credit—will be insufficient if demand-side constraints are not also addressed. Moreover, gendered credit constraints are also on the demand side – and women face additional challenges generating demand for credit as well as accessing credit.

Fig. 2. Supply- and demand-side factors to credit constraints.

These findings open a broader discussion of what it will truly take to improve farmers’ access to and use of credit and other financing mechanisms, which can support their uptake of small scale irrigation and other technologies. As men and women farmers increasingly desire to take on irrigation, credit will continue to be critical.

Scalable solutions in finance for irrigation will require closer understanding of the nature and sources of credit constraints. What is needed is both more targeted finance instruments, from loans to asset-based finance to insurance, and complementary interventions that address demand-side constraints, such as by improving financial literacy and mitigating perceived risks. Finally, gender-sensitive credit instruments and targeted activities are needed that will both increase women’s interest in and access to credit products.

Further reading

Innovating for financial inclusion: Strengthening asset-based financing for women farmers

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by Thai Thi Minh, Senior Researcher, Scaling Innovations, International Water Management Institute, and Nicole Lefore, Director, The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Innovation, Texas A & M.

Providing asset-based financing is considered an innovation that can enable people ‘at the bottom of the pyramid’, including women farmers, to overcome credit barriers. In sub-Saharan Africa, several solar irrigation pump companies are attempting to fill a widespread credit gap by offering asset-based financing, through which they essentially provide farmers with a loan to purchase a pump, for which the pump itself serves as security.

The advantage of asset-based financing is that it can give farmers access to solar pumps without the usual collateral or credit history required for a loan. This enables them to intensify production and increase their incomes. Farmers pay back the loans in installments, as the pump allows them to increase their incomes, in what is known as a pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) approach. PAYGO also sometimes includes follow-up training and regular product servicing during the period of repayment, which also fills the need for information and after-sales services.

Companies are benefitting from asset-based financing by expanding their markets, while farmers benefit from avoiding the usual credit barriers. But, while innovative, the question is whether asset-based financing is also inclusive when it comes to solar irrigation pumps?

Women in sub-Saharan Africa play a critical role in food security, providing as much as half of agricultural labor and playing significant roles in agriculture and livestock sectors. Yet, gender-based constraints to financial resources—such as loans, formal banking services, and ownership over land and other resources—negatively affect women’s ability to invest in productive assets, such as solar pumps.

Recent research by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation (ILSSI), published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), highlights that women seeking credit face more significant supply and demand constraints, such as a lack of information, than men.

A group of farmers inspect newly received solar-powered irrigation pumps. Photo: IWMI.

While many development projects focus on improving women’s access to credit through village savings and loans associations or support through micro-finance institutions, such modes are either insufficient, unprofitable, or fail to reach resource-poor women and men farmers wanting to invest in productive assets. That’s why we are exploring how well asset-based financing enables women to invest in irrigation.

Gender gaps in current credit assessment tools

Companies considering providing asset-based financing to clients typically use credit scorecards to determine whether the client is creditworthy.

Such scorecards or assessment tools are used by a company’s credit review officers to assess commercial aspects of financing and to give a potential client a risk score and a consistency rating. If a potential client is assessed as low risk, and therefore qualifies for credit, the results of the assessment can also be used to set the terms of repayment. In short, credit assessments are a critical tool that aims to reduce the risks associated with asset-based financing for both the loan providers and for clients.

Within the ILSSI project, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) has reviewed credit scorecard criteria and the credit assessment processes being applied by private solar irrigation suppliers in sub-Saharan Africa offering PAYGO or some form of asset-based financing. The initial review suggests women may still be excluded because the scorecard criteria may be inherently biased.

While credit risk assessment tools are to predict the likelihood of repayment, they are not necessarily designed to be gender sensitive. In fact, few of the irrigation equipment companies with which ILSSI has engaged target women farmers as potential clients for solar irrigation pumps.

Few irrigation equipment companies target women farmers as potential customers. This despite women’s essential roles in agriculture. Photo: IWMI.

We found that typical criteria in credit assessments include access to services and amenities, primary income-generating activity and income, household expenses, and water availability and utility, as well as the client’s farm and farming practices, existing credit access, and financial savings. In this way, use of resource ownership and income as criteria to assess the potential risk of agricultural clients marginalizes most women, as they tend to be resource poor.

At the same time, scorecard criteria exclude the factors known to influence women’s ability to achieve investment returns and repay credit, such as off-farm income, livelihood diversification, group membership and social networks, and financial management. Women farmers may not have the level of income or asset ownership to meet a threshold for low-risk financing, but women farmers may still have strong financial management capacity, awareness about availability of various financial services, and financial literacy. Women farmers generally also have diverse on- and off-farm livelihood activities, which a credit scorecard may not account for. We propose that including these income-generating activities would help better estimate the credit worthiness of women farmers.

Moreover, credit assessment criteria appear to miss the significance of group membership and social networks as well as socio-cultural aspects, such as power relations within households, women’s mobility, inheritance systems, and other socio-cultural relations that influence women’s access to resources such as finance, markets and extension, or information sources.

Creating equal opportunities for women farmers

We are now collaborating with private-sector solar irrigation equipment partners to develop gender-sensitive credit scorecard criteria. The gender-sensitive tool focuses on both the criteria components and the process. Criteria currently excluded, but that could influence women farmers’ ability to obtain and maintain PAYGO loans, will be brought into credit assessments. These additional criteria should also help to develop business models for asset-based lending to groups, which would allow women to pool their resources into a joint asset. ILSSI’s private sector partners will test the application of the new criteria in Ghana and Ethiopia.

We will be supporting continued development of the credit assessments in parallel with capacity development innovations. In Ghana, ILSSI is supporting innovation internships that are embedding young and promising researchers into company activities, including fieldwork on business and financing models to reach women farmers. ILSSI activities in Ethiopia include a ‘hack-a-thon initiative’ by IWMI and Bahir Dar University to develop an app-based digital scorecard to ease the data collection and analysis and improve the assessment algorithm.

Asset-based financing is seen as a high potential solution to credit constraints, building on the strengths of the private sector in development, but if poorly designed, this innovation could inadvertently deepen women’s lack of access to credit for productive assets. Reversely, if credit assessment tools are adapted to assess the creditworthiness of women farmers more accurately, there is potential for the approach to benefit both women and men farmers as well as private sector companies in a growing solar irrigation market.

What women want: First steps to inclusive irrigation investments

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by Elizabeth Bryan, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Small scale irrigation can increase smallholders’ income, contribute to economic growth, boost food and nutrition security, and enhance climate resilience. In the past, these immense benefits have been top priorities for decision-makers investing in small scale irrigation. Another potential outcome has been receiving growing attention: empowerment of rural women.

But, successfully designing irrigation interventions to support women’s empowerment requires concerted efforts and careful planning. Women’s level of empowerment depends on the context within which they live, resources they have access to, and their ability to make strategic life choices resulting in well-being improvements. These factors change throughout the course of women’s lives. That’s why studying what empowerment looks like and what women want—in a certain place, at a certain time—is a crucial first step to inclusive irrigation investments.

This is one conclusion my colleagues and I have reached based on recently published research on the link between small scale irrigation and women’s empowerment, conducted with support from the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation.

Understanding empowerment

In the Upper East Region of Ghana, many households live on the edge of malnutrition and poverty. They have few options to improve their well-being, but small scale irrigation offers the potential to expand production during the long dry season and boost incomes, food security, nutrition, and health.

Conducting focus groups and interviews with men and women farmers and traders in four villages in the Garu-Tempare district, we sought to understand whether introducing modern technologies for small scale irrigation could also increase women’s empowerment by changing their access to resources, decision-making authority, control over income, and time burden.

A woman carries vegetables, and her baby. Photo: Elizabeth Bryan/IFPRI.

Overall, we found women were becoming more involved in income-earning activities, and were taking on more leadership roles, contributing a larger share of household income, and participating more in decision-making. While this trend was generally viewed as positive, many women felt burdened by the additional responsibility of being expected to provide for their family:

“My father farmed a lot and had large stock of food and so looking for food to feed the family was not the job of my mothers and my father also supported his children’s education. But now everything is on me. My husband is not able to support,” said a woman irrigator in Akara village.

On the other had, women also reported increasing access to financial resources, information, and training as well as freedom to travel and to participate in trade.

The role of irrigation in empowerment

In this context, many women were engaged in irrigated production during the dry season. The women who were involved reported that they did directly benefit, gaining control over income from the irrigated plots they managed. They also listed indirect benefits, including greater income and food security for the household.

“Those who use the machine [motor pump], it helped us to get money. When our husbands gave us land and we see that it is small, we use some of the money to go and buy more land to farm. We also used some of the money to buy seeds and hire ‘by day’ labor to help us in our farming activities and buying fertilizers,” reported one woman who used a motorized pump in Mongnoori village.

Both men and women recognized welfare improvements as a result of small scale irrigation, including higher social status, greater food security and diet quality, and the ability to achieve shared goals, such as sending children to school. Gains such as these are factors that can contribute to women’s empowerment.

Barriers to women’s empowerment

However, several barriers hinder women from directly adopting and benefitting from small scale irrigation. We found that women tended to have less access to resources, such as land, water, and pumps.

“If we get [a pump], we will give it to our husbands and are helping them…. [We] can’t do [our] own [irrigated farming] because we don’t have land,” said a woman from Yidigu village.

Women also lacked access to financial resources like credit to purchase irrigation equipment, rent land near water sources, or hire labor to dig wells. Social norms contributed to these social inequalities—especially inheritance norms limiting women’s access to land and property.

A dry riverbed, from which farmers extract water via hand-dug wells during the dry season. Photo: Elizabeth Bryan/IFPRI.

However, women often benefitted indirectly from small scale irrigation, even when they themselves did not directly engage in the activity, as it freed up time previously spent farming to engage in other income-earning activities over which they had more control.

“Your husband farms [in gardens] and you water and thank God associations have come and we can now get access to machines [pumps], and the men will use them to irrigate. So, now we only observe and they irrigate,” explained a woman in Mongnoori village.

This finding suggests that women might benefit from investments in small scale irrigation in unexpected, indirect ways. In this specific context, decision-makers looking to achieve empowerment for women through small scale irrigation might consider other strategies—beyond providing access to irrigation—such as developing opportunities for women within value chains or marketing activities.

Tools to start right and stay on course

As governments and programs increasingly expand investments in irrigation infrastructure and technologies, the constraints, needs, and preferences of women should factor into the design and implementation of irrigation interventions to ensure that women benefit.

This can mean engaging gender experts and using research-based tools to help ensure that women benefit from planned interventions. For example, the Gender in Irrigation Learning and Improvement Tool (GILIT) can be used to enable gender equity in irrigation projects and schemes, and the REACH toolkit can provide guidance on how to include women in planning and evaluating irrigation projects. Later on in the lifecycle of irrigation programs, the Pro-WEAI tool can help measure women’s empowerment, enabling decision-makers to make adjustments to reach empowerment goals.

These types of gender-sensitive tools are indispensable for anyone investing in small scale irrigation with the goal to support women’s empowerment. While women can benefit from small scale irrigation, one cannot assume that providing access to irrigation is necessarily enough. Investing in understanding how to benefit women—whether directly via irrigated farming or via adjacent opportunities—is necessary to successfully add women’s empowerment to the long list of benefits that small scale irrigation delivers.

Texas A&M University System Member