Women and Youth are the Unsung Heros of Rural Indonesia

Women in the APAC are extremely well-connected, frequently through the church and local farmers' markets, where they exchange agricultural information such as products, yields, and prices.

FREMONT, CA: While women and young farmers are less likely to be noticed as opinion leaders in rural communities, they can motivate others to pursue modern environmental and development concepts.

Women make up forty-three per cent of the worldwide workforce, yet they face severe barriers in land ownership, access to credit and financial services, and decision-making.

Researchers surveyed about 2,000 farmers on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi for the study, which was published this month in the journal Agriculture and Human Values. They asked them to identify leaders in their smallholder farming groups whom they would approach for guidance and information. These leaders, generally older men, were then tasked with getting other farmers to use pruning tools to improve the health of their cocoa trees.

Suitable pruning of cocoa trees can reduce unwanted shade, aid in disease and pest control, and limit the flow of nutrients to unproductive portions of the plant, a successful example of cocoa tree production by improving their growth patterns. In contrast to common belief, the randomly selected second group, mainly consisting of young farmers and women, was successful in convincing twice as many of their friends to try the new cutters.

While women and young people do not typically hold formal leadership positions in their communities and are not typically central to information and resource networks that result from roles such as leading a farmer group, the results show that they may have access to alternative informal networks and capacity that are not noted by the broader community.

Platforms for online communication also played a role. When provided with this opportunity, many women and young farmers were able to use virtual social networks in ways that senior farmers did not, or not to the same level. Women make up around forty-five per cent of the workforce in developing countries, ranging from twenty per cent in Latin America to sixty per cent in Africa and Asia. Social norms, traditions, cultural stereotypes, and biases influence who is regarded as a valuable source of counsel or an opinion leader in a farming community.

Men may be more loud and visible in their positions, whereas women's critical contributions to smallholder agricultural output may be less valued, rewarded, and visible. Swisscontact Indonesia, a non-profit organisation, has been teaching cocoa farmers in polyculture and agroforestry to grow crops and profit while reducing carbon emissions and solving climate change problems. Women play an important role in household farm management and finances, and they have more say or control over how family funds are spent on purchasing seeds or developing their farms.