More women must shift from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture in order to gain more income and add more value to the country’s economic chain.This was one of the resolutions arrived at during a gender promotion conference in Kigali, on Monday.Implementation of the second phase of the gender sensitive Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS) financed by GIZ-Rwanda and UN Women was the point of discussion.“Agriculture is Rwanda’s most important sector providing over 37 per cent of the GDP and 80 per cent of employment, mostly to women,” Jean Claude Ngendandumwe, the Executive Secretary of Conseil de Concertation des Organisations d’Appui aux Initiatives de Base (CCOAIB), said.He said although the sector employs 86 per cent of Rwandan women, production remains predominantly at a subsistence level and does not play any role in uplifting their lives.“Our key goal is to increase the incomes of the rural population through improved agricultural productivity, where more women no longer use spades and hoes but adopt modern methods of farming like irrigation and use of machinery,” Ngendandumwe stated.Christine Tuyisenge, the Executive Secretary of the National Women’s Council (NWC), said many women still do not easily access modern technology to improve their output.“Together with the Ministry of Agriculture, NWC urged women through the sensitisation seminars in all districts to join cooperatives and many did. This way, they were able to access machinery and training services,” Tuyisenge said.The Technical Advisor of the German Development Cooperation (GIZ), Radostina Alexandrova, said her organisation sought to support budget allocation in the agricultural sector to improve a gender sensitive delivery survey.Through this, she said, women’s immense contribution to the agriculture value chain in terms of labour provided would be reflected in the sector’s growth and subsequent uplifting of life.
