ABSTRACT

Purpose: The need to increase women’s access to extension has been extensively discussed. This paper assesses women’s access to extension services through the Plantwise extension approach as a baseline for future comparison of women’s access through other extension approaches. It also assesses whether crops that men and women farmers seek plant health advice on are similar or not, and attempts to disperse assumptions that continue to be made about what crops women and men grow.

Approach: We analysed data from the Plantwise Online Management System for 13 countries using descriptive and inferential statistics.

Findings: We show that the Plantwise extension approach enables higher levels of women’s access than generally reported for agricultural extension, that the crops that women and men seek extension advice on is not gender dependent, and there are few clear distinctions between their crops of interest.

Practical implications: There is limited literature studying gender inclusiveness in different extension approaches. The findings add to the documentation of assessing women’s access to demand-driven extension.

Theoretical implications: Plantwise is a new extension approach which needs to be assessed from spatial and temporal perspectives to understand whether demand-driven extension enables increased women’s access over time.

Originality/value: Extension service provision is often based on assumptions about what crops are being grown. Small studies have challenged these assumptions, but this large dataset enables us to test these assumptions more thoroughly across 13 countries adding to the weight of evidence against the existence of women’s and men’s crops.

摘要

目的：已经广泛讨论了增加妇女获得推广的机会的需求。本文评估了通过植物扩展方法获得的妇女获得扩展服务的机会，以此作为将来通过其他扩展方法比较妇女获得的服务的基准。它还评估了男性和女性农民寻求植物健康建议的作物是否相似，并试图分散关于男女作物的假设。

方法：我们使用描述性和推论统计数据分析了来自13个国家的Plantwise在线管理系统的数据。

研究结果：我们发现，与一般的农业推广报告相比，植物推广方法使妇女获得更高水平的获取途径，男女寻求推广建议的农作物不依赖于性别，并且他们感兴趣的农作物之间几乎没有明显的区别。

实际意义：很少有文献以不同的扩展方式来研究性别包容性。这些发现增加了评估妇女获得需求驱动的推广服务的文献。

从理论上讲：Plantwise是一种新的推广方法，需要从时空的角度进行评估，以了解以需求为导向的推广是否能够随着时间的推移增加妇女的获取机会。

原创性/价值：推广服务的提供通常基于对正在种植哪种农作物的假设。小型研究挑战了这些假设，但是庞大的数据集使我们能够在13个国家/地区更全面地测试这些假设，从而增加了针对男女作物存在的证据。