Finding Culturally Appropriate Models for Women’s Access to Postharvest Mechanization in Bangladesh
by Elena Cleary, Anna Snider
Due to lack of work in Bangladesh, men have been leaving their homes and moving to cities in search of employment. This has left Bangladeshi women to pick up where they left off in their agricultural sector. The number of women working as grain dryers today has grown exponentially. Women are also given priority for applying for loans to purchase farming machinery. However, this priority doesn’t make work easy for women. These female grain dryers face economic and socio-cultural constraints that make it unrealistic for them to take advantage of these credit programs without the help of a male.
Thanks to funding from ADM Cares, three female affiliates of the ADM Institute for the Prevention of Postharvest Loss at the University of Illinois, Dr. Samantha Lindgren, Ghaida Alrawashdeh, and Maria Jones, traveled to Bangladesh. They visited the Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU) in Mymensingh where the BAU-STR dryer was developed and adapted from a previous design. This machine serves as an economical hot air circulating dryer made for rapid and efficient drying of crops. The dried crops can then be stored and last much longer than grain that has not been properly dried. This allows the dried crops to be transported to markets and sold when prices are high, allowing farmers to make a profit off his or her efforts.
The BAU-STR dryer has become a successful solution to mitigating postharvest loss in Bangladesh. With our colleagues at BAU, Dr. Monjurul Alam, Dr. Chayan Kumer Saha, and Dr. Lavlu Mozumder, our ADMI affiliates conducted interviews and focus groups with 28 women from different farming collectives to better understand the gendered dynamics of agricultural machinery access and use in Bangladesh.
The project began with an investigation of the BAU-STR dryer and the smallholder farmers who use it. The researchers found two instances of the dryer in use: a large farmers’ collective that was led by a woman, and a family that runs a service provision business with several different agricultural machines and equipment. The female grain dryers who had experience with the BAU-STR machine reported that they reduced postharvest losses compared to previous, traditional methods of drying. Within this group of women, they aggregate their yields, dry and sell together. In this specific group, their female leader seemed to be an exception when it came to agricultural practices and socio-cultural norms and gender roles. She was willing to own a dryer and operate it without a service provider. ADMI sees this group as a potential model for other farmer collectives in and around Bangladesh. Though it is not a widespread practice, Dr. Lindgren says she hopes that more female groups will adopt their practices and find ways to make drying even more economically sustainable.
Though some of these women held leadership roles within their collectives, the majority of women surveyed had no interest in being an owner and operator of a BAU-STR dryer. Their ideal would be to have access to machinery through a service provider, who would most likely be male. Due to their female status, communication constraints are common when contacting non-family, male service providers.
This leads gender-based questions to be asked and social norms to be challenged. The women interviewed stated that equal education, regardless of gender, was becoming predominantly more available in their country. Female leaders are empowering other females and extending their group’s operations beyond just agriculture. They’re providing more services to those in public health, digital education and creating linkages with local markets. Many female interviewees emphasized the need for additional entrepreneurial training, financial planning and access to ongoing support from agricultural extension services.
After taking in this information, our affiliates pivoted their project to focus on the expressed needs of the growing female grain dryer population. These being that they wanted access to machinery via a service provider and additional training/education about getting their crops to market. As well as how to increase the value of their crops. The project implemented two rounds of two-day training courses around agri-entrepreneurship, which concentrated on the importance of reducing postharvest loss and having access to the BAU-STR dryer and other necessary machinery.
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