Programme Summary

This programme aims to develop and test innovations for increasing women’s participation in value chain initiatives in Tanzanian horticulture by building on Farm Concern International’s (FCI) Commercial Villages model. 

The planned interventions to FCIs Commercial Villages model will: 

• Test the effectiveness of training and work share approaches to increasing Tanzanian women’s likelihood of participating in both downstream and upstream components of the horticulture value chain. 
• Monitor household, climate, health, and other shocks that temporarily interrupt or permanently impair the ability of women to engage in remunerated work along the value chain, and assess whether work banking approaches are able to mitigate labor supply shocks. 
• Promote the sustainability of women’s networks by leveraging the resources of local women’s collective giving groups. 

The programme proposal seeks to builds on recent research on women farmer’s labor supply constraints, women’s attitudes towards competition and risk, and intra-household decision-making: Three factors that potentially affect the success of engaging women in commercial activities along the agricultural value chain. Our aim is also to jointly test interventions that support women’s participation, retention, and progress along the horticultural value chain by re-structuring labor demands in ways that allow women to jointly supply and insure labor, and to engage commercially with other women. Our overall goal is to determine whether gender adjustments to the current FCI model can increase the likelihood of a woman participating through increasing the flexibility and divisibility of labor hours to work around her time constraints, increase the likelihood she is able to remain engaged through co-insuring labor supply to respond to household shocks, and increasing the likelihood she engages throughout the value chain by ensuring opportunities for women-to-women exchange.