Cassava Breeding Unit team building workshop

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Gender Mainstreaming in Cassava Research
CBU team building workshop 7-11 February 2017
Agbetu, Ogun State
Béla Teeken

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Outline
- Gender in relation to breeding: a confusion that however brought
back: the end users’ preferences
The need to study tacit knowledge
- A simplification of gender in relation to breeding
Sex disaggregated data
- What is gender research?
Intersectionality
- Combining field trials with gender research
- Exercise/your advice

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“We cannot work with the many and specific preferences for men and
women provided to us by social scientist, we need one or two extra
criteria from which we can work but these long lists do not mean
anything to us” (cassava breeder)
“Including gender directly into breeding is often just impossible, we are
now just becoming capable of creating a good hybrid, so how can we
bring on board such gender specific traits” (banana breeder)

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CGIAR has long time been improving varieties but still:
“In Malawi for example, the question remains why three improved
varieties of pigeon pea, which were developed with supposed
market-desired traits, have received zero levels of adoption,
whereas the local Nthawajuni variety has spread throughout the
country to dominate 80% of the planted area?”
(mentioned in the CGIAR ‘gender and breeding’ conference in
Nairobi, November 2016)

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As imposed by donors Gender research has brought back the insight
that end user preferences can be:
• Very specific
• Can often not be known on the dialectic level and can therefore
not always be identified fully trough dialectic (language) tools such
as interviews and focus group discussions.
=> Most of the desired properties are tacitly known, end users just
know what works and what does not

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(After Michael Polanyi
chemist and philosopher)

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Nonaka (1991)* emphasizes that the sharing of tacit knowledge takes
place through joint activities and requires physical proximity.
*Nonaka, I. (1991) "The knowledge creating company." Harvard Business Review, 69, (Nov-Dec), 96-104

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A misconception of Gender research in relation to breeding:
‘Gender is only comparing men and women’s variety preferences’
This statement can even be considered politically and ethically
incorrect. Why are we distinguishing between men and women
beforehand, before we even know how this sex difference is being,
articulated within society?

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Oloasbikan et al. (forthcoming) have shown that specific end users
preferences are task group dependent.
Because different task groups perform different work on cassava
cultivation and processing they have different preferences but these
preferences do not necessary contradict because the preferences are
related to the different working conditions of the task groups.
Task groups happen to be organized along gender lines:
 men and women do cultivation of cassava
 mainly women do the processing of cassava into mainly gari, but also
into fufu, lafun, tapioca.
This is something very different than initially labelling men and women
as different groups!

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So instead of narrowly focusing on sex disaggregated data we
need to look at the different task groups and their possibilities to
do their work as they would like it to do, this to strive towards
equity.
But within and between task groups there are people that have a
different status. E.g there are processing groups that have
different identity/status: Richer ones, ethnically different,
organized along guild, neighborhood etc.
So it is now to know the different possibilities of these groups to
develop themselves according to their aspirations.

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So what is Gender Research?
Gender research is to study how sex
differences are articulated (used) to create
identity, possibilities and restrictions for
individuals within a certain section within a
community (the richer or poorer, different
ethnic groups, those having a different history
or belonging to a certain guild e.g.
‘blacksmiths’, the elders or youth).
Hence the word “intersectionality”

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With regards to Gender the cassava breeding unit has already come
a long way!
We have been taken gender seriously and gender has been widely
discussed and integrated much further than within other breeding
units!
So our main focus should be to further define the different task
groups and the sections they belong to and their aspirations and
how gender is used to create possibilities and/ or restrictions within
the society that these groups live.

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Combining tacit evaluation of what farmers like and why, with gender !
• Set up field trails together with farmers/processors to evaluate the varieties they are
already using together with those commonly used within Nigeria (informed by the
Cassava Monitoring Study) as well as with some promising new lines
• In stead of verbally asking what farmer/processors prefer: evaluate with them the
varieties from planting to processing
=> Then investigate the ones they really like and see what the properties of these
varieties are (to discover new breeding criteria)
• Next to a general trial in the village that includes all varieties to be tested: give 3 or 4
varieties to a group of farmer/processors (mainly women) and see:
• Where they plant them (in which field)
• How they organize the work (who gets involved)
• Who becomes interested
• What will be the communication among group members and which
members become more dominant and why (what is their gendered
position, how do they relate to decision making power of men and other
women)

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Trials to be set up in 3 communities
Set up for each community:
10 farmers/processors each
individually evaluating 3 to 4
varieties
Community plot
Including all
varieties

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Exercise:
1. What are your ideas about how ethnic group, economic status, guild,
etc. and other sections within society will influence the way gender is
used to create difference in opportunities between men and women?
2. What would be the ideal surface of the individual plots to be evaluated
by the 10 farmers?
3. How would you best choose the 10 farmer processors so that they
represent the different groups in the village. Or should they be
randomly chosen and the outcome of the whole research will show the
different groups as we investigate how the 10 farmers deal with the
experiment and with whom the communicate and interact?