The potential of bundle innovation in closing gender yield gaps
CGIAR September 20 2024
Women in agriculture contribute significantly towards sustaining rural livelihoods and achieving food and nutrition security. According to FAO, women play an important role in ensuring world food security contributing to up 43% of agricultural labor force in developing countries. However, they are faced discriminatory gendered social norms which limit their access to and control over production resources (land, labor, seed, fertilizer, livestock and finance) and improved agricultural technologies. To address these challenges, women farmers in Lungo community of Upper East Region of Ghana are practicing bundle innovation of mechanized maize seed with basal NPK fertilizer at planting and leaf stripping for improved maize grain yield and quality feed for livestock production.
Lungo is a farming community and one of the intervention sites for the One CGIAR initiative on Mixed Farming Systems in Ghana. Led by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), the team conducted an on-farm experiment in Lungo community to validate a bundle innovation of mechanized maize seed with basal NPK fertilizer at planting and maize leaf stripping for livestock feed during 2023 cropping season. The objective of the study was to assess the effect of the bundle innovation on productivity of maize-small ruminant farming systems in northern Ghana.
Views: 311