In the design of trials, intrahousehold dynamics and the needs of various household members must be considered; a range of farmers and of environments need to be included. In the actual trials, women as well as men have to participate as cooperators. In some trials it may be necessary to restrict the cooperators to the sex that actually is responsible for a particular commodity, e.g., groundnuts are often a woens crop in some areas. In
others, recognition of the fact that women and men do different farm operations means that both male and female household members will have to be considered as trial participants and that both will have to be instructed accordingly. The extension and research workers who will help select and monitor the trials will require strict instructions as to how to choose and to work with these farmers. Researchers should not be fearful about including a range of environments, but they need to be careful about selecting too many farmers in certain categories and in comparing farmers at different resource levels. Recommendation domains and technologies tested may or may not be gender specific.
In the dissemination of information, the male research and extension staff members will be important to the success of adopting a technology. The WIADP recognized that it was often difficult for individual extension and research workers on their own to make special attempts to deal with neglected segments (such as women) of the population. Usually the FSR/E personnel will have the clout to influence policy and sometimes to provide motivation and incentives for new directions. FSR/E personnel can therefore attempt to set the tone and to require that women as well as men be targeted. They can assist extension workers in discovering the techniques that will work in an area.
The only way to ascertain if these steps have been followed is to monitor the various phases in the practice of FSRIE and to disaggregate the data by sex. This means that the target farmers and the data generated from them will have to be specified in terms of males and females. The notion that technology is gender neutral will have to be examined in terms of who the recipients are as well as the consequences of the technology to the household and to its constituent members.
REFERENCES
Berger, Margaruite, Virginia Delancey and Amy biellencamp. 1984.
Bridging the gender gap in agricultural extension. International Center for Research on Women, Washington D.C.
Chaney, Elsa and Martha Lewis. 1980. Women, migration and the decline of smallholder agriculture. Office of Women in Development, USAID, Washington, D.C.
Clark, Barbara. 1975. The work done by rural women in Malawi. Eastern J. Rural Devel., 8:80-91.
Delancy, Virginia. 1984. Agricultural extension for women in Cameroon. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Los Angeles, California.