Agricultural seed networks for women's empowerment

This Université de Sherbrooke project focuses on competitive opportunities to empower rural women reduce their poverty and encourage gender equality provided there is an improvement to women’s networking in the emerging sector of seed networks. An understanding of climate-smart agricultural production techniques should complement this. The desired ultimate outcome is to improve the socio-economic well-being of vulnerable women and girls in rural communes of Mali’s Koutiala region. The direct beneficiaries are 25 000 rural women of legal working age in Mali. Two local partner NGOs the Association malienne d'éveil au développement durable (Malian association for awareness raising and sustainable development) and the Association malienne pour la sécurité et la souveraineté (AMASSA Afrique Verte) (Malian association for security and sovereignty AMASSA-green Africa) stand out for their strong climate change and poverty reduction initiatives. This project aims to develop strategies to address the issues using the organizations’ best practices. Both NGOs expect to develop effective synergies by working closely with international projects in the same sector. At the end of the project they would use a capitalization process that would guide the scaling-up of practices in a living laboratory approach. The project also promotes gender equality and considers support for governance bodies. Also the project seeks to inform key performance indicators to measure progress on implementing Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy in the relevant areas for action.

The expected outcomes of this project include: (1) an increase in rural women’s leadership (organized through the network of Centres d’agrégation et de services agricoles semenciers [centres for aggregation and agricultural seed services] in the agricultural seed networks across 20 communes in the Koutiala region; and (2) an increase in the use of climate-smart agricultural practices and precision agriculture techniques adapted to family farming for sustainable intensive seed production in Koutiala.