Gender communication interplay approach in the development of gender friendly farm machinery in selected agricultural agencies
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Date
2019
Authors
DANIEL GILO ROSERO
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Abstract
In the midst of modernization and anticipation for fast production just to aid the needs of the people around the world, the agricultural sector is one of those sector who are pressured to integrate its ways of production to address issues about food security and insufficiency. Several practices were integrated to provide optimum measures for production, agricultural machineries are developed, several extension programs were extended to farmers, and researches were undertaken to comprehensively respond on the quest of a consuming world. Although these measures exhibit remarkable outputs in the past years, accessibility of information, farm equipment, and equitable distribution of opportunities remain uncertain causing gender disparity to be evident in the field.
This study describes the gender sensitivity principles in a form of communication be applied in the development of gender friendly farm machinery. The study includes assessment of the engineer respondents towards their exposure to gender related topics and how they associated the principles in the development. As the second type of respondents, farmers as the end users involved in this study express their ideals and longing towards fair and just accessibility of information and farm equipment in the field.
Engineer respondents in this study revealed to have seldom exposure with the identified gender related topics and agreed that the identified engineering responsibilities should be equally delegated to all engineers regardless of sex and gender preference. Thus, 33.33% of the engineer respondents said that engineer function that requires enough physical strength must be delegated to male engineers. Study shows that age, civil status, and sex of the engineers are significant in their exposure towards gender related topics were p<0.05 level of significance.
Farmers mostly gain information about integrated farming through seminars and workshops but they confirmed that they learned manipulating machineries through technology demonstration while women remain unfamiliar about old and newly developed farm machineries. Generally, men farmers have seldom exposure to the identified agricultural machineries while women farmers have never been exposed to such machineries and remains to assume subordinated responsibilities. Out of thirty respondents, 83.33% of them believed that female faces limited access to farming equipment. In terms of skills, 96.67% of the farmers expressed that women do not have enough skill or knowledge about the usage of farm machineries. The 90% of the farmers also claimed that they do not have enough information about any farming machineries and the 86.67% of the farmers believed that women farmers are given limited job in farming activities.
Majority (92%) of the farmer respondents agreed that it justifiable to develop farm machineries that can be easily manipulated by women for three reasons. These reasons are for education and experience, matriarchal responsibility, and for gender equitability. Farmers also characterized their ideal machineries as push-button, light weight, height considerate, easy to fix. Riding type and economically affordable.