Give women fertile lands to farm - NYWE to traditional authorities

Network for Young Women Empowerment(NYWE), a non-governmental organization in the Upper West Region, has appealed to traditional authorities and landowners to make fertile lands available to women in the region to undertake productive agricultural activities to enhance their livelihood.

The Chairperson for the NYWE, Madam Ida Nakaar, who made the appeal indicated that women farmers played a key role in the development of the nation, and deserved to be supported to expand their farmlands to improve the living standards of their households.

Ms Nakaar was speaking at an event to mark the International Day of Rural Women at Wa over the weekend on the “Recognizing the critical rules and contribution of rural women in agriculture.”

The NYWE is an organization that seeks to create a platform for young women and girls in the region to advocate issues affecting girls and their health, and also champion other gender-related issues across the region.

She said the engagement was to afford women the opportunity to interact, discuss, deliberate and reflect on whether or not women farmers per their contribution to the food basket of the home and society at large, deserve fertile lands to cultivate.

“We are appealing to our chiefs and landowners to consider women who are into farming and really need fertile land to cultivate; they should not hand over just any available land when it is not fertile and cannot support agriculture,” she said.

She enumerated a low level of education, difficulty in acquiring land and access to credit facilities as some of the factors affecting women in the agricultural sector in the region.

She commended the government for the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) initiative and said if women were given fertile lands, they could take advantage of the programme to better their income.

An Agronomist, Madam Vivian Danuor, who participated in the engagement meeting also added that women farmers in the region faced other challenges with regards to access to fertilizer, access to extension services and modern farm inputs.

She called on chiefs and landowners in the region to support smallholder women farmers to acquire fertile lands in order to increase their productivity and income and also bridge the productivity gap between men and women in the region.