The following year, we received a grant from Women Helping Women, a Canadian charity to expand our work. TAWINA was able to expand the SALGW project to include 101 women.
The project goal is to enhance rural women’s incomes to enable them to provide education support to their children especially their girls.
The project provides up to date training for the participating women farmers in soybean cultivation and processing. This is supported by a marketing plan where the produce is aggregated and sold in bulk rather than in small individual lots. This marketing plan enables the women to gain more market power, higher prices and greater net income.
Higher household incomes can support better nutrition as well as a greater capacity to keep their girls in school.
The SALGE project has seen the collective soybean production increase from 970 kg in 2013 to 8973 kg in 2016 and the latest crop is in the order of xxx kg.
The latest crop is being stored in TAWINA supporter’s facilities in order to hold the crop until prices are optimum.
Challenges
Most of these women farmers do not own their own land and rely on a small allocation from their spouses. It is anticipated that as these women are able to make a greater financial contribution to household incomes that their status within the family will increase along with their power in decision making.
Most farming families are often under financial stress and so they are pressured to accept low market prices as individuals. Making the transition to a cooperative optimum marketing model is difficult for some families and TAWINA needs to develop mechanisms to maintain the cooperative approach.
